Data Center Apocalypse: What Are They Hiding?

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Data Center Apocalypse, episode two.

[00:00:02]What are they hiding? What do they, the data center industrial complex, want to hide from us? Why have they built such an elaborate architecture of deception?

[00:00:15]Here's one thing. Cassandra Lena's, or I'm not sure how to pronounce her name, lives in northern New Jersey. She's always watched her electricity bill carefully. In July, she got one that caught her attention. Her usage had gone down, her bill had gone up. When she looked at the supply charge section, the part of the bill most people never read, she found a $29 increase from the same month last year. She sat down with a neighbor, pulled out the neighbor's bill, same thing. Supply charges up, usage flat. The neighbor hadn't even noticed. If you live in any of 13 states from Illinois to Virginia or in the District of Columbia, your electric bill went up this year.

[00:01:04]It went up for a reason that has nothing to do with your air conditioning, your space heater, or how many lights you left on. You still didn't answer my question.

[00:01:13]What's that got to do with the data center industrial complex?

[00:01:17]And what are they hiding? Please stand by. There's a power market called PJM.

[00:01:24]Most people have never heard of it. It's the largest wholesale electricity market in America. It covers 67 million people across 13 states and Washington D.C. It runs capacity auctions where power generators bid to provide electricity for future years. These auctions determine what it costs to keep the lights on for 1/5 of the American population. Between one auction and the next, the clearing price went from $28.92 per megawatt day to $269.92.

[00:01:58]That's roughly an 830% increase. In one cycle, it went up again the next auction to $329.17.

[00:02:07]A federal price cap held it from going higher. That cap has since expired. The PJM independent market monitor, the people whose actual job it is to evaluate whether this market is functioning properly, attributed the increase to one cause. Their language, "Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions." And then, a sentence worth reading twice. "The current conditions are not the result of organic load growth." The current conditions are not the result of organic load growth.

[00:02:45]Not organic. It's kind of like you.

[00:02:48]You're AI-generated. You're not organic.

[00:02:51]The demand is coming from somewhere specific, and the costs are being distributed across the entire customer base of 13 states. It's coming from somewhere specific.

[00:03:05]Where is that somewhere specific? 21 billion. We're getting there. I'm surprised you haven't connected the dots.

[00:03:15]Before I connect them for you, here's something else you ought to be asking.

[00:03:20]That 830% increase in the auction clearing price, what does it look like in actual dollars?

[00:03:28]Okay, I'm listening. Across three consecutive capacity auctions, costs attributable to data center demand forecasts totaled 21.3 billion. That's 45% of the 47.2 billion in total cleared capacity costs. Nearly half. Thanks for the AI slop graphics. It really helps me visualize the And 6.2 billion of that 21.3 billion was for data centers that haven't even been built. Not operating facilities drawing power. Facilities that are forecasted, projected, planned. The grid is charging ratepayers for buildings that don't exist. That's why Cassandra's bill increased even though her usage decreased. No, not just Cassandra's bill. In Washington D.C., Pepco residential customers saw their bills increase an average of $21 a month starting June 2025. In Virginia, Dominion Energy projects residential bills will more than double to $315 a month over the next 15 years, primarily due to data centers. Shouldn't you be paying graphic designers to create your infographics instead of using all of that AI slop? If you're watching this video and you believe that, here's how you can put your money where your mouth is and help to pay for real live graphic artists.

[00:05:00]Sign up for a channel membership here on YouTube, where you'll get early access to my latest content and I will actually respond to your comments without using AI.

[00:05:14]Or even better, become a premium tier subscriber to my Signal Report newsletter at julianwatley.com.

[00:05:22]Okay. Okay, point taken. Now, where were we? I was talking about how Dominion Energy projects residential bills will more than double to $315 a month over the next 15 years, primarily due to data centers. Dominion runs an ad. At Dominion Energy, we know power is personal. It's personal, all right. It's personally going to cost you an extra two grand a year. Maybe you'd like to know who decided that Cassandra in New Jersey should be subsidizing a trillion-dollar industry's electricity?

[00:05:58]Okay. Who decided? The 100-year-old machine. It's a trick question, actually. The simple answer is that no one decided. As Ricky Ricardo used to say, "You've got some 'splaining to do."

[00:06:12]The American electric utility business model was designed at the beginning of the 20th century to spread electricity service. The basic idea, a utility builds infrastructure, socializes the cost to all the ratepayers who have no choice but to take that utility's service, and earns a regulated profit, usually around 10% on every dollar it spends building.

[00:06:38]This AI script's pretty good. The more infrastructure a utility builds, the larger its rate base, the more profit it's authorized to earn. Data center demand is the largest surge in electricity demand in American history.

[00:06:53]For utilities, it's Christmas. Maybe it's Christmas for the utilities, but it's more like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas for the customers.

[00:07:03]And the utilities are like Ebenezer Scrooge.

[00:07:07]Yes, and you won't hear any utilities executives complaining about data center demand as a problem they're managing.

[00:07:15]It's a growth opportunity they're celebrating. Dominion's contracted data center capacity tripled in under 3 years. They increased their capital spending plan by 30% to $64.7 billion.

[00:07:30]Their earnings beat analyst expectations. They described data center demand as accelerating and durable.

[00:07:37]Their stock went up.

[00:07:40]Meanwhile, poor Cassandra is shivering in the cold like Tiny Tim. It gets worse. It gets worse. The utilities are cutting deals with Big Tech, special contracts reviewed through opaque processes with minimal public input.

[00:07:59]These deals give data centers a discount on electricity.

[00:08:04]And the shortfall gets picked up by guess who? The Cratchit family. In Louisiana, a utility proposed spending 3 to 4 billion dollars on a new power plant to serve a Meta data center. Meta signed a 15-year deal. Meta pays about half. The full terms are under a non-disclosure agreement. NDAs again, hiding the terms of the deal.

[00:08:34]I think I'm beginning to connect the dots. This is only a test. Now, the numbers aren't all one-sided and I'd be a hypocrite if I pretended they were.

[00:08:45]Yeah, but you're an AI persona who lacks agency, so can you really be a hypocrite? I suppose not, but here's the point I'd like to make. Virginia's own legislative commission, JLARC, a non-partisan auditing body, found that data centers currently pay their fair share for existing service. The industry contributes an estimated 74,000 jobs in Virginia, 5.5 billion dollars in labor income, 9.1 billion in GDP annually.

[00:09:20]Most of that is construction phase, but it's real.

[00:09:24]JLARC also found that the current rate structure appropriately allocates costs to data center customers for existing infrastructure. You're putting a lot of emphasis on the word current. That's because the word J Lark kept using was current.

[00:09:44]Currently, the rates are fair, but growing energy demand will increase system costs for all customers. Massive new infrastructure has to be built, creating fixed costs. Energy prices are likely to increase for everyone as supply struggles to keep pace. That's J Lark's own finding. I knew there'd be a catch. The Data Center Coalition, the industry's own lobby group, cited the J Lark finding that data centers pay their cost of service. The citation is accurate, but it stops right before the part where J Lark says the problem is coming. So, the question was never whether data centers create some value.

[00:10:29]The question is who's keeping the books and whether you're allowed to see them.

[00:10:34]In episode one, we asked what is the architecture of opacity hiding? Now, we know one answer.

[00:10:41]>> It's hiding the mechanism that moves money from your electric bill to their balance sheet. Your usage goes down, your bill goes up, and the supply charge section doesn't explain why. But, the electric bill is only one of the things behind the veil.

[00:11:00]What about the physical world, our world, that these data centers are built on?

[00:11:06]What about the water they drink?

[00:11:08]What happens when you ask questions like that? Keep watching the Data Center Apocalypse on the Julian Whately Channel if you want to learn those answers.