Part 5: Getting into the Weeds of Local Electricity Acquisition (Electricity Part 3)

After Jordan and I spoke with the CEO of United Power, I walked away with a feeling of both ease and dread.  My ease was in the fact that unlike Excel Energy customers, we have some better security in being a co-op.  What goes along with that, however, is making sure we elect good people to the board.  The part that gave me “a bit of the ick” is a bit more complicated.

I’m not sure how to explain things sometimes, but here is my general feeling about United Power.  They are not against data centers.  They also don’t seem to be totally crazy excited about them either.  They’re not neutral either.  I’d say they’re on the mild-moderate side of pro-data center.  If I understand all of this correctly, their basic concern is that if they don’t work with the data centers, the data centers will find a work around that will definitely be bad for the community.  United Power also appears to see this as an opportunity to get infrastructure upgrades at the expense of the data center, not the rest of us.  All of that makes a lot of sense to me, but here is where it goes off the rails.  In terms of purchasing power and getting it to the data center, United Power seems to be placing all of their eggs in the basket of “the bigger amounts of power purchased at a time = cheaper per unit of power.”  I believe that is likely the case right now, but I believe there is every reason to think that might fall apart in the near future.

Goldman Sachs published an article in February, 2025, entitled “AI to drive 165% increase in data center power demand by 2030.”  It states,  “Goldman Sachs Research forecasts global power demand from data centers will increase 50% by 2027 and by as much as 165% by the end of the decade (compared with 2023), writes James Schneider, a senior equity research analyst covering US telecom, digital infrastructure, and IT services, in the team’s report.”

In an article dated today (9/3/2026), Fortune stated, “…there’s also an emerging imbalance: OpenAI, Google and Meta can finance and build AI infrastructure faster than the U.S. can build the electricity generation and transmission needed to power it.”  It went on to say, “Kathryn Burke, who leads U.S. specialty energy and power growth at insurance firm Marsh, told Fortune that access to power is “probably the number one, if not top five bottlenecks for data center development in the U.S. right now,” but that demand is now colliding with an energy grid that still needs updating.“

So, can you see the problem?  Is energy actually going to be cheaper when we need larger amounts of it and it is not as available as it once was?  In addition, the current administration has backed out of supporting nearly all green energy.  With the unending war in Iran, is it reasonable to think that making electricity from the oil industry will be cheaper?  Add to that, for home solar users Chinese solar panels had gotten very cheap (admittedly by their own financial support of the industry).  With tariffs and the Chinese government limiting support for the solar panel industry, there is another force driving us back to oil, coal, diesel, and gas energy solutions.  Now add to that, an industry with hundreds of trillions of dollars in investor funds fighting every American for electricity, and this is a recipe for disaster.

• Photo from “Tom” @ fotos-von-uns.de