A paper released by Consumer Reports and Telemark Energy Consulting outlines what it truly means for AI data centers to “pay their own way” and provides tools to help advocates, regulators, and policymakers evaluate individual projects.
The paper takes a deep dive into the various ways that large data center projects can impose or shift costs and risks on to regular residential ratepayers. It identified a total of a dozen different, direct, indirect, and risk based mechanisms that could increase costs for other grid users now or in the future.
Published Oct 20, 2026