Tell your state leaders that data centers can pay for home electrification!

Pioneering electrification nonprofit Rewiring America has presented a fascinating new policy proposal: that new high-electricity-demand “hyperscaler” data center projects should fund home electrification, like heat pumps, rooftop solar, and home batteries for nearby households, to increase available generation capacity on the grid.

Replacing older, inefficient heating systems with clean and cheap heat pumps could free up substantial amounts of electricity on the grid — and it would be a lot more beneficial to the community if data centers paid for home electrification to ensure they could get the electricity they need, especially as clean power build-outs keeps getting blocked by weaponized red tape.

“Converting electric resistance households to heat pumps is particularly well matched with regions that are expected to see high data center growth, including the Southeast and the Pacific Northwest.

This solution alone would create 24 GW of capacity nationally.

If hyperscalers paid for 50 percent of the upfront cost of installing heat pumps in homes with electric resistance heating, they could get capacity on the grid at a price of about $344/kW-year — a similar cost to building and operating a new gas power plant, which currently costs about $315/kW-year.”

— Rewiring America.

There’s already some emerging political support for similar ideas to get data centers to pay their fair share and help bring more clean power onto the grid. Lieutenant Governor-elect Ghazala Hashmi of Virginia has already announced plans for major policy shifts on new AI data centers under the incoming new administration, requiring such projects to “pay their fair share” on connecting new clean energy to the grid. A recent report found that this could help save a typical Virginia household up to $712 per year by 2030!

In a time of fast-rising household electricity bills due to senseless blockages of clean energy, state leaders should ensure that data centers at the very least don’t create a scarcity of electricity for surrounding families. Ideally, this could be an opportunity to leverage the extensive capital available to build data centers to help advance clean electrification and build a grid with abundant electricity for all!

Tell your state leaders that data centers can pay for home electrification!