I can't stop thinking about a thunderstorm in Virginia.
It was July 10, 2024. Just after 10 p.m. A single piece of equipment failed on a power line in Fairfax County. The line has a name: Ox-Possum. One small part broke. In less time than it takes to blink, 60 data centers shut themselves off from the grid.
1,500 megawatts vanished. That's enough power for 1.2 million homes. Gone in an instant.
The grid nearly broke that night. The frequency jumped. Operators at PJM and Dominion Energy had minutes to act. If they missed, the blackout would have rolled across the Mid-Atlantic. Lights out from D.C. to New Jersey. They caught it. Barely.
I don't think most people realize how close we came.
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Here's what worries me. The thing that caused the near-miss isn't going away. It's growing. Fast. Yesterday Meta said it's firing 8,000 people. That's 10% of the company. Why? To pay for AI. Just four companies — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft — will spend $650 billion on AI gear next year. Most of that money builds data centers. Giant warehouses full of computers that never sleep.
And those data centers sit on the same grid that almost went dark last summer.
I want to tell you about Ken and Carol Apacki. They live in Granville, Ohio. They're retired. They keep a spreadsheet of their electric bill. In 2020, they paid 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. Today they pay 19 cents. Their rate jumped 60% in five years.
They didn't buy a bigger house. They didn't add a pool. They're using the same lights, the same fridge, the same TV. The power just costs more. A lot more.
Bloomberg pulled the numbers for places packed with data centers. Electric rates in those zones shot up 267% over five years. Not 27%. Two hundred sixty-seven.
I get it. That sounds fake. I had to read it twice.
Last year, utility companies asked for $31 billion in rate hikes. That's more than double what they asked for the year before. They have to build new power plants. They have to string new wires. They have to keep up with data centers that each pull as much power as a small city. Somebody has to pay for all that. You know who.
In Dominion's zone — Virginia, the heart of data center country — the price to reserve power for next summer rose 833% in one year. Eight hundred thirty-three percent. That cost doesn't stop at the state line. It bleeds into your bill too.
And nobody knows how bad it gets from here.
I keep thinking about that night in Fairfax. One lightning arrestor. One tiny part. Sixty data centers all pulling the plug at the same instant because they're built to protect themselves first. Not the grid. Themselves. When they drop off, they leave a hole 1,500 megawatts wide. The power plants can't slow down fast enough. The frequency spikes. Things start to break.
We got lucky that night. We might not get lucky next time.
The tech giants are in a race. Each one is terrified of falling behind on AI. So they build. And build. And build. Every new data center is another tenant on a grid that's already strained. Every new data center is another customer that votes with its checkbook while you just get the bill.
I think about Ken and Carol and their spreadsheet. A retired couple in Ohio, writing down the numbers every month. Watching the cost creep up. Trying to figure out what changed. They didn't change. The grid changed around them.
11 cents to 19 cents. That's the number I can't shake. That's the number I'd tell my neighbor over the fence.
Because that's the story nobody is telling you on the news. The AI boom isn't just a Wall Street story. It's not just a Silicon Valley story. It's a story about your power bill. It's a story about whether the lights stay on this August when it hits 98 degrees and everyone turns on the air conditioning at once.
I don't want to scare you. I want you to see what I see. There's a thin wire between a thunderstorm in Virginia and your kitchen light. We didn't know that wire was there. Now we do.
More on this tomorrow.
— Lauren
Editor, American Ledger
