All those big, new data centers being built around the country will use a whole lot of power. Bloomberg New Energy Finance said that in the next 10 years, data centers are likely to burn through 36% more energy than it was forecasting just seven months ago.

On the East Coast, demand from new data centers could nearly match all the power being added to the grid in the next four years. In Texas, that could happen within two.

Much of the current power grid system was built in the 1960s and ‘70s — a slightly different time.  

“We didn't know that people were going to increasingly urbanize, we didn't know electric vehicles were going to become adopted, we didn't know about rooftop solar,” said Kyri Baker, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

She said the power grid wasn’t exactly built in the most optimal way for how we use it today. 

“And so, it's getting very, very challenging because the grid is already aging, it's already strained. We have been increasing energy use in general in many areas of the U.S., and so this is just adding an additional layer of complexity now that we have these massive, multi-hundreds of megawatts or gigawatts loads that are getting added to the grid,” Baker said.

Data centers are the most talked about reason electricity demand is growing. But Joshua Rhodes, research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said there’s also population growth and the push to electrify much of the economy, with EVs and heat pumps.

“But data centers are the most visible part of that growth. And really it's all kind of coming together at the same time, when we have other supply chains that are also under constraint,” he said.

Rhodes said it’s going to be a challenge for utilities and the grid to keep up, especially with these massive new data centers.

“If you look at the top-level numbers for the number of data centers and their power demand, I mean, you're talking about doubling, tripling the grid in some places, in just a handful of years,” he said.

Doing that will require replacing and building a lot of physical infrastructure, which takes time, Rhodes said, and has gotten more expensive.

“All of those things that we use to build the grid, from the power plants to the transformers to the power lines … the cost of these things is double, sometimes triple what it was just a few years ago,” he said.

And he says those higher costs will likely be passed on to consumers in the form of higher electricity bills.

Barbara Kates-Garnick, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, agrees.

“Yes, we're going to see our bills go up tremendously, and … we have to decide who pays, when they pay, and how they pay,“ she said.

This is a huge issue that is just starting to come to a head, Kates-Garnick said.