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- Your New Neighbor Wants 80 Megawatts
Your New Neighbor Wants 80 Megawatts
Charlie Cichetti
June 14, 2026
Smart strategies. Sharp stories. Sustainability that sticks.
📬 Intro: The Quietest Building on the Block
Quick: name the biggest new electricity customer in your county. If you said the data center that went up last year, you are paying attention. If you never noticed it at all, that is the point. No windows, no people, just a fence and a low hum.
Data centers drove roughly half of all US electricity demand growth last year. The buildings are boring. The power bill is anything but. And this spring, the utilities stopped saying yes to everything.
🌍 Field Notes: The Building That Eats Power
⚡ Half the Growth, One Building Type
US electricity demand grew about 2% in 2025, the second-fastest pace since 2000.
The IEA pins about half of all US electricity demand growth last year on data centers, and expects them to keep driving half of it through 2030. Globally their draw is set to more than double to 945 TWh by 2030, roughly Japan's entire annual consumption. Half of every new megawatt the country added last year went to a windowless box.
🏗 Bring Your Own Power
Georgia is where this got real. State regulators approved a plan this spring that changes the deal for big new loads.
The framework lets large customers bring their own clean energy online to earn a connection, up to 3 GW through 2035. Georgia Power says it sees more than 50 GW of new commercial and industrial demand coming over the next several years. Want a grid connection in Georgia now? Bring your own power to the table.
🔋 Building the Plant Next Door
In May, Enbridge announced the Cowboy Project near Cheyenne, Wyoming.
It is 365 MW of solar paired with a 1,600 MWh battery, a $1.2 billion build to feed Meta's data centers, online by the end of 2027. The deal lifts Meta's contracted capacity with Enbridge to about 1.6 GW. Earlier in May, Meta also signed a separate 250 MW solar deal in Arkansas. Meta's answer to the power problem was to build the power plant itself.
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🏛 Built to Last
For twenty years the deal was simple. You put up a building, you plugged it into the grid, the grid handled the rest. That arrangement is closing. When a single customer wants 80 megawatts, the utility stops being a bottomless outlet and starts being a partner with terms.
The terms show up as on-site generation, storage, and demand response written into the connection itself. The data center is the first building type big enough to force the issue. Warehouses, chip fabs, and cold-storage sites are next.
Takeaways by Role:
⚡ Utilities: A single hyperscale campus can match a small city's peak. Price the interconnection like it.
🏗 Developers: On-site generation and storage are moving from amenity to entry ticket for large loads.
🏢 Facility managers: Demand response and islanding are no longer backup. They are how you get connected.
💧Sustainability leads: Ask where the new power comes from. The grid has stopped being an answer.
💬 Quote of the Week
“Every big building is about to have the conversation data centers are having now. The grid cannot just absorb you. You bring something to the table, or you wait in line.”
— Charlie Cichetti, CEO of Skema and LEED Fellow
🧠 TL;DR
Data centers drove about half of last year's US power growth. Utilities are responding by making large loads bring their own generation and storage to earn a grid connection.
🧰 Action Step
Call your utility account rep this month and ask one question: if our load grows, what will you require us to bring? On-site solar, storage, demand response? Get the answer before you design, not after.
🧱RETROFIT THIS
🔧TOOLS DOWN
For twenty years the grid was a wall socket. Plug in, it coped.
The AI boom just broke that deal.
Now data centers show up with their own solar, their own batteries, their own terms.
Bring power to the table, or bring a chair for the wait.
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✍️ Brian Bollinger, our Head Writer, helps sustainability professionals connect performance, workflow, and real-world results.
🌍️ Charlie Cichetti, our Fearless Leader and CEO of Skema and LEED Fellow, has guided more than 150,000 professionals as building practice continues to evolve.
Let’s Green Up together.
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