Henry Epp
speaker
233 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard yesterday
Henry Epp’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Five more guests, and they'll pay their share.
So the price per person of that buffet goes down for everybody to $66.
To translate this to power prices and data centers, the buffet is the fixed cost of running the power grid, building and maintaining all the power plants, poles, wires, and substations.
And your cousin and her friends, they're a new data center.
hooking up to the grid.
You're taking the fixed costs of managing the grid, and you're able to essentially have more customers pay for those fixed costs.
This is how data centers pushed electricity prices down in recent years, according to a study released this spring by the Electric Power Research Institute.
They helped spread out those fixed costs of providing electricity, says Asa Watton, the co-author of that study.
Average residential retail rates
in the average state, would have been about 6% higher without the data centers built from 2019 to 2024.
One big caveat there, it's a national average.
In certain states, adding data centers has lowered electric bills, says Ryan Ledick at the consulting firm The Brattle Group.
Those states that have experienced those price decreases are states that already had room on their power grid to accommodate these new customers without needing to go out and make big investments.
investments in new infrastructure.
North Dakota is a good example, he says.
It had an excess supply of electricity from coal, natural gas, and wind, bringing in large industrial customers, including data centers, lowered prices for residential customers.
But in other regions that don't have much excess power supply, data centers have started to have the opposite effect.
If it's a utility or a system or a market that doesn't have that headroom, then it is possible that the data center is going to drive up electricity prices.
This is what's starting to happen in the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest, overseen by the grid operator PJM, Ledeck says.
Demand has risen quickly, and there isn't enough generation capacity that's available to keep up with that demand.
Showing 141–160 of 233 · page 8 of 12
← Previous
Next →