SACRAMENTO, California — For a state that considers itself a leader in both tech and climate, California is falling behind in both building data centers and putting guardrails around their environmental impacts.
Democrats in Sacramento are taking cues from lawmakers in Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia as they explore special electricity rates for data centers aimed at controlling costs for other customers. They’re also weighing new energy reporting standards to better understand the supercomputers’ impacts on California’s electric grid.
Those proposals come as electric utilities are embracing data centers as a potential business savior that promises to increase electrical demand several fold after an era of energy efficiency.
“This trend is absolutely real for us,” Pacific Gas and Electric CEO Patti Poppe said during the utility’s most recent quarterly earnings call in April. “This will be so beneficial for our customers.”
