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Congress, White House Try to Get Ahead of the Growing Local Backlash to Data Centers

By  |  January 18, 2026

With the backlash growing at the state and county levels to the construction of massive AI data centers and their impact on local energy prices, Congress and the White House are racing to get ahead of the issue. On Thursday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) introduced a bill to force tech companies to pay a bigger share of the cost to upgrade the electric grid to provide the energy the data centers need.

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    His move stole a march on the White House, which is planning to introduce a proposal on Friday for PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest grid operation, hold an auction in which tech companies would bid to have new power plants built to support their facilities, according to the Wall Street Journal. Like the Van Hollen bill, the goal of the proposed auction is to get tech companies to shoulder more of the costs of building the infrastructure needed to keep their data centers humming, rather than passing those costs on to ordinary rate-payers.

    President Trump also had praise for Microsoft, which on Tuesday pledged to pay higher electricity rates to cover the electricity costs of their data centers, per the Journal.

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    The costs associated with data centers and the additional power infrastructure needed to run them, has emerged as a hot political issue in state, county and local elections. According to a tally by Heatmap Pro, at least 25 data center projects were cancelled in the U.S. last year in the face of local opposition, more than four times as many cancellations in 2024.

    Related: OSTP Official Lays Out Details on White House AI Initiatives At House Hearing

    Those canceled projects accounted for at least 4.7 gigawatts of electricity demand — a meaningful share of the overall data center capacity projected to come online in the coming years, per Heatmap.

    A Heatmap review of local records turned up 770 planned new data centers across the U.S., and another 200 currently being built. Many of those may never come online, however. Per Heatmap, at least 99 of those projects are currently being contested by local activists or residents; about 40% of projects that attract meaningful local opposition are ultimately shelved, it said.

    According to research cited in Van Hollen’s bill, data centers are set to more than double their electricity consumption, accounting for 6.7 percent to 12 percent of all energy demand by 2028, which is causing electricity prices to increase for ratepayers.

    “What we hope to do is create a national set of rules so that no matter where someone wants to build a data center, consumers know they are not going to get screwed with the costs,” Van Hollen told the New York Times.

    According to a recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, data centers actually reduced average retail electricity prices in recent years by spreading the fixed grid costs over more customers. But the study’s data ended in 2024, and the authors said it was hard to know whether this trend would continue as energy demand continued to rise sharply, according to the Times. The report noted a large increase in power prices last year in the Mid-Atlantic region, where Van Hollen’s home state of Maryland is located, that it linked to the expansion of data centers.