WASHINGTON – Your power bill has gone up and nobody has explained why. A panel here put that question to people who deal with it. One was a congressman.
The Brookings Institution held it on 15 September. There is no company on the panel. The moderator seated one panelist in industry’s place and told her so. The moderator wanted “some balance and not necessarily have someone from industry on the panel but someone who understands what’s going on”.
Everything below is what a speaker said. The figures are their claims, attributed here one by one.
Contents
The congressman says it happened to him#
Virginia’s 10th district is represented by Suhas Subramanyam, a former White House technology policy adviser. The captions render his name “Suas Subramanian”, and the moderator says “did I say right?” The spelling comes from his House site. His answer was not about policy.
“my expertise on data centers comes from uh me living next to a lot of them and and me seeing my utility bill go up. So when someone tells me data centers lower your utility bill, I say, ‘What? What are you talking about? Look at my utility bill.’”
He objects to who pays for the connection.
“there’s something just wrong or unfair about having to have a power line go through your community that you have to pay for …”
He names two positions and sits between them. One, “total ban, which I think probably has a lot of support at this point because people are so fed up …”. The other, “the golden goose side”, where “this is liquid gold”.
By his count there are fourteen moratoriums. The captions garble the word: “there’s tons of mortals that 14 across the country right now …”.
Why the bill rose, and the part that complicates it#
Marie Sylla-Dixon broke the bill into its parts. She founded Tuckahoe Creek Strategies, after more than twenty years in corporate affairs and public policy. Her field, the moderator says, is telecom and energy regulatory strategy. The captions garble her name and her firm. The moderator adds that she “formerly worked with companies like Exon, Amazon, T-Mobile and others”. That is the balance the moderator meant, and it is worth knowing before reading her answer.
“when you look at your bill, you’ll have, you know, distribution, what you pay for distribution, what you pay for generation and transmission. But if you look at the generation, um the the supply cost has gone up exponentially.”
She hedges a figure on it: the generation side, she says, has “I think it’s more than doubled”. The grid underneath is old: “In a lot of parts of the country the grid is over 100, 150, 200 years old.”
Then the part that cuts against a simple story, and it is her claim.
Where one company both generates and delivers the power, called vertical integration, she says the outcome differs. In Georgia and the southeast those providers “have actually been able to um freeze um or lower uh some of their rates …”.
Her sentence does not stop there. The freeze came, she says, “from some of the the deals that they have been working with um with some of the data um factories”.
She is saying the freeze came out of the data centre deals themselves. Where the market is not vertically integrated, “it becomes very challenging … because you don’t have enough generation that has come online …”
The story that should make a town sit up#
Ronald Newman is senior vice president of distributed power solutions at Groundswell, “an organization focused on supporting local resilience, particularly in rural communities”.
Developers have moved from cities to rural land, he said, and a town’s instinct is to say yes. Then an example of a town being handled.
“there’s a small town in Louisiana, small town, few thousand people. And they were approached a couple of months back by a data center developer …”
What came next is worth carrying to a council meeting.
“it took the town’s land use and zoning rags and marked them up and sent them a red line …”
The captions render regulations as “rags”. The instruction:
“Pass this and do it under the cover of this NDA that we have signed with you …”
The developer marked up the town’s own zoning rules and asked for the redline to be passed in secret. The town is never named.
He offers it as the bad end of a range, not the rule. Louisiana is “not where we want to be”, he says. A town can “make those engagements even better if you actually get industry involved too”. His conclusion is the opposite of a boycott. People “actually may not oppose if you don’t ignore them”.
His rule fits on a card. Land use and zoning decisions “should always happen in the context of a public hearing”. And: “There should be an opportunity for the communities to hear, learn, ask questions.”
What actually works, and why#
Abre’ Conner directs the NAACP’s Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, work the moderator describes as “dismantling environmental racism”. Her advice starts with turning up.
“making sure that you know people are showing up um to every single meeting …”
City council, planning and zoning commission, guard rails. Her verdict: “That has made a difference.”
The reason it works is a small town’s only leverage. She states its limit herself: “not necessarily to say that we’re going to be able to stop them everywhere”.
“the timeline for many of these companies is short. they are on a really strict timeline and if there are any changes to that that makes a big difference …”
Delay is the lever. Not outrage, not a petition. A hearing that must be held, on a schedule that cannot slip.
Her own campaign was doubted: “we’re not going to be able to slow anything”. Her answer: “we have we have been able to slow down development”.
Companies, she says, are “used to going into certain places and being able to have conversations just with elected officials”. They assume “the community is not going to be holding them accountable”. She does not stop there. It led to “deeper conversations with companies as well”.
What nobody on the panel had#
No figure for what a data centre adds to one household’s bill. The transcript was searched for per month, a month, monthly, dollars a month and average bill. All five return nothing.
Missing is the one number a person could check against their own statement. A congressman saying his bill rose without giving one is the shape of this panel’s argument.
So, practically. Ask your county when the planning and zoning hearing is, and whether anything was signed under a non-disclosure agreement. Ask your utility whether it is vertically integrated; Sylla-Dixon says that changes the answer. Then read the panel itself rather than this page.
The same test applies here: how to check a claim. This industry’s physical machinery is where the power goes. When somebody hands your council a document to sign, remember that statute, rule and guidance are not the same thing.
Source: Brookings Institution, “Can communities mitigate their rising concerns about data centers?”, held 15 September 2026 and published the next day, full transcript pulled and read, 16,850 words. The congressman’s own site is subramanyam.house.gov. The transcript carries no speaker labels, so every speaker is identified from the moderator’s introductions. Names and titles are corrected against the Brookings event page. Nobody from this masthead was in the room.