Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / 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

Transcript

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 · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the President posted a rule and nobody can find the pen. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, October 21st, that President Trump has declared large data centers, in his words, mandated by me to make their own electricity.
• 0:17
  [Guest] He posted it on Truth Social before dawn. New and large, in some cases gigantic, data centers must generate their own power and sell any extra back to the local grid, and he says electric bills could see a substantial decrease.
• 0:31
  [Host] We covered this in September, when the President told towns fighting data centers they would end up backwards and poor, and his own Vice President said the real objection was the electric bill.
• 0:43
  [Guest] Seven weeks later he is on the Vice President's side. Earlier this month, at a rally in Ohio, he was still telling the crowd you can't just turn them off, they'll go to China.
• 0:55
  [Host] So the President now agrees with the people he called backwards. Does my bill go down?
• 1:01
  [Guest] A post does not lower a bill. The Journal's own write-up says it is not clear how the mandate could be carried out, and twelve days earlier the one federal agency that oversees the wholesale grid said that exact job belongs to someone else.
• 1:17
  [Host] Which agency are we talking about?
• 1:19
  [Guest] The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, led by the President's own appointees. The biggest grid operator in the country had asked permission to make new data centers bring their own power plants or go to the back of the line in an emergency. The commission turned that down.
• 1:36
  [Host] So no to data centers paying their own way, in the same month the President demanded it?
• 1:42
  [Guest] Not because it is a bad idea. Because a data center is a retail customer, and under American law who pays what at retail is the states' call. The order says states have a crucial role to play, and one commissioner wrote that state regulators need to set clear rules for who gets cut off first.
• 2:02
  [Host] So the President mandates it, his regulator says the states have to do it, and the states are where?
• 2:09
  [Guest] Mostly in the middle of an election. Travis Fisher at the Cato Institute says the rules change not just every four years but occasionally overnight via tweet. Nobody finances a power plant against a post.
• 2:21
  [Host] What about the dividend part? He said pay the community.
• 2:25
  [Guest] Earlier that week he told a local TV station about a town where everybody got ten thousand dollars and thought it was the greatest thing. The town he seems to mean is Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, where a developer offered every household exactly that to accept an Amazon campus.
• 2:42
  [Host] And they took it?
• 2:44
  [Guest] They are fighting it anyway. The Journal talked to residents there last month, and the word that kept coming up was bribe. The township had already turned the project down on zoning and passed its own moratorium.
• 2:57
  [Host] Ten grand a household, and they still said no. So what is it about, if not money?
• 3:03
  [Guest] It is about what comes after the check. Residents organized against the power lines planned to serve the campus, because a one-time payment is set against a bill that lasts as long as the building does.
• 3:16
  [Host] Is anyone saying yes?
• 3:17
  [Guest] Van Buren Township, outside Detroit, said yes last week to a Google data center drawing a gigawatt, about what seven hundred fifty thousand homes use, with a local tax break thrown in. Marketplace reports residents packed meetings for most of a year asking the board to refuse.
• 3:34
  [Host] Why didn't it?
• 3:35
  [Guest] The supervisor, Kevin McNamara, said you can't just say no, because if you do a court decides how it gets built, and he was not going to let a judge in downtown Detroit build the data center for him.
• 3:49
  [Host] So the President says make deals, and the one township that made a deal says it had no choice?
• 3:56
  [Guest] That is what moved since the summer. Back then the fight was whether a town had any right to object. Now everyone agrees it does, the President included, and the open question is who holds the pen that turns an objection into a rate.
• 4:12
  [Host] Say my state picks up the pen and orders data centers to bring their own power. Does my bill actually fall?
• 4:19
  [Guest] Fisher at Cato says he is not convinced it guarantees that. The biggest piece of a rising bill is the wires and poles, not the power plants, and a campus with its own turbines does nothing about the wires.
• 4:33
  [Host] Then what would bring it down?
• 4:35
  [Guest] A rate your state commission actually signs, plus a town that can actually refuse. Hazle Township has the refusal and not the rate, Van Buren had neither, and the President has a post.
• 4:47
  [Host] Seven weeks ago the worry was that letting data centers build their own power lets the richest customers walk away from the shared grid. Is that still the worry?
• 4:58
  [Guest] It is now the stated policy of the United States. The only federal body that could write the terms of the walk just said that job belongs to the states. So the exit is official, the terms are blank, and your bill is the page they get written on. For more on the grid cost fight and the right to say no to a data center, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.