Dan Charles

Well, the data centers themselves don't have to pay extra to get connected.

But you know, a famous economist once said, there is no such thing as a free power line.

So guess who's really paying the bill for this?

Yeah.

The electric companies are adding the cost of building these power lines into their customers' electric bills, which Mike thinks is outrageous.

And why a lot of people want that to change.

And I'm Dan Charles.

And you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Well, Mike's starting point was we need more clean energy, more solar and wind, you know, instead of burning coal and gas, which pollutes the air and warms the planet.

But the thing is, solar and wind farms have to send that clean electricity to where people need it.

Yeah.

And as a grid geek, Mike spends a lot of time looking at obscure documents on the websites of electric utilities.

These are the companies that build and maintain that network of power lines and send us an electric bill every month.

So, for instance, he was going through this document from Dominion Energy, which serves most of Virginia.

It lists the projects they have in the works.

So in this one document from 2024, a couple of dozen projects just in Virginia, he went to similar documents from six more states in this same part of the regional electrical grid, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and West Virginia.

And he found 130 projects for data centers costing in total over $4 billion.

Wow.

Yeah.

So I picked one of the places in that list of projects that Mike saw, and I drove out to Fairfax, Virginia, to look at it.