Trump Says Data Centers Are 'Mandated by Me' to Make Their Own Electricity. Two Months Ago He Said Towns That Fight Them Would End Up 'Backwards and Poor', and His Own FERC Just Ruled Only States Can Order It
About This Episode
In a Truth Social post early Wednesday, October 21, President Trump wrote that new large data centers are 'mandated by me to make their own electricity' and sell any excess to the local grid, and urged developers to pay communities a 'dividend'. It reverses his August line that towns opposing data centers would end up 'backwards and poor'. Twelve days earlier, on October 9, FERC, run by his appointees, rejected PJM's bring-your-own-new-capacity rule because it intruded on state authority over retail customers, so no federal mechanism exists to carry out the mandate; experts say only states can impose it, and the midterm electric-bill backlash is already showing in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Our Take
The president just adopted the data-center opponents' core demand in a post, but the only federal body with grid authority ruled twelve days earlier that the demand belongs to the states, so the fight over whose electric bill pays for AI now has no one in charge of it, two weeks before an election where it is on the ballot.
Continue Reading on Unscarcity
Who Pays for AI's Electricity? The Grid Cost Fight
The article's frame is exactly tonight's fight: the capacity-auction mechanism by which data-center demand lands on household bills, and the contest between hyperscalers, Congress, grid operators and states over who absorbs it.
Data Center Moratoriums: Who Vetoes the AI Buildout?
The article's thesis, that the right to say no is the scarce layer and that it sits in zoning boards and states rather than Washington, is what Trump's post collides with and what FERC's ruling confirms.