Gallup Poll Finds 71% of Americans Oppose Local AI Data Centers

Data centers did not raise average U.S. household electricity prices from 2015 to 2024, and may have slightly lowered them when the grid had room to grow.

The reason being that electricity grids have big fixed costs, so more steady demand can spread those costs across more power sales.

When a durable new load uses the system more heavily, those fixed costs can be spread across more kilowatt-hours, especially if new generation is cheaper than the aging mix already built into rates.

The authors test this by comparing U.S. states from 2015 to 2024 and using old highway routes as a tool to separate data center location from normal price trends.

Their main estimate says a 10% rise in data center capacity was linked to about a 0.4% fall in average residential electricity prices.

The reason is not that electricity becomes free to produce, but that grids, wires, and generators can sometimes serve more demand at a lower average cost.

The paper also warns that this only holds when the grid can keep building enough supply, because shortages or overbuilding could flip the effect and raise prices.

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Link – arxiv. org/abs/2606.19777

Title: "Have Data Centers Raised Your Electric Bill? Causal Evidence from the United States"