Past due utility balances just hit an all time high of $789, and honestly, that's only the beginning. Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation right now, which is wild when you think about it. We're talking 10 percent increases in just seven months while everything else is going up around 2 percent.
Some states are already brutal, California's hitting 31 cents per kilowatt hour while the national average sits around 15.8 cents. The grid wasn't designed for what's about to hit it and utilities are basically saying we have no idea how to forecast this anymore. Only 19 percent of utility leaders feel confident predicting future demand and over half of them straight up don't have enough power available to connect new customers. The infrastructure just isn't there.The real problem is AI infrastructure. Data centers are pulling insane amounts of power, we're talking 3,000-5,000+ watts per AI server compared to 300-500 watts for regular servers. Right now data centers use about 4 percent of U.S electricity but Goldman Sachs is projecting a 165 percent jump in data center power demand globally by 2030. The International Energy Agency thinks data center consumption will literally double by 2030. Here's the kicker though, data centers can go from concept to fully operational in 18 months, but electrical infrastructure takes six years to build. We're already seeing the strain in places like Northern Virginia where data centers are consuming 26 percent of the region's electricity. The bottleneck is real, and it's only getting tighter.Source: StockMarket.News
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