Data Centers are not the main reason for increased electricity prices
So says former Oklahoma oilman turned data center supporter Robert Hefner. As he told OK Energy Today, he left the oil and gas industry in 2021 to focus on building power, infrastructure and data center projects and did so through Hefner.Energy.
Hefner admitted he thought he could step back from public commentary and live a quieter professional life.
“That held until data centers became the latest political lightning rod in the energy conversation. As the narrative has hardened, I’ve been struck by how little of it survives even basic scrutiny—particularly from the standpoint of grid operations, market structure, and upstream energy realities. Seeing that gap persist has made it clear to me that staying silent is no longer responsible,” he wrote in an email conversation.
His offering of comment, he said, “focuses narrowly on falsifying a specific claim that is beginning to shape policy, despite weak evidentiary grounding.”
The following is his offering:
Why Data Centers Are Not the Primary Driver of Rising Electricity Prices
Evidence, timing, and geography tell a different story
Electricity prices are rising across the country, and families are feeling it. When bills go up, it’s natural to look for a clear cause—especially one that sounds large, new, and energy-intensive, like data centers. But before assigning blame, a more disciplined question is required: does the evidence actually support the claim?
To answer that question, we need a standard stronger than repetition or intuition. Philosopher Karl Popper made a crucial observation about truth-seeking: no amount of confirmation can prove a claim true, but a single counterexample can prove it false. If billions of people observe swans and record that they are white, repetition might suggest that all swans are white. Yet the observation of just one black swan is sufficient to falsify that conclusion. This asymmetry between verification and falsification is how claims are tested, not reinforced.
A growing refrain across the political spectrum is that data centers should “pay their way” to protect ratepayers. That position rests on a widely repeated claim: that data centers, as a class, are a primary causal driver of retail electricity price increases. The claim at issue is not that electricity prices can never rise for other reasons, but that data centers are a primary or systematic driver of higher power prices where they operate. Recently, Yahoo advanced this argument, citing a PJM study in support.
If data centers were driving higher electricity prices, states without them would be insulated from those increases. Maine has virtually no data center load, yet its electricity prices have more than doubled since the early 2000s—far outpacing the national average increase of roughly 30 percent. That counterexample alone is sufficient to falsify the claim that data centers are the causal driver of rising electricity prices.
Maine illustrates that electricity prices can rise sharply in the complete absence of data centers. That fact does not, by itself, explain price movements elsewhere. But it does falsify the claim that data centers are a necessary driver of rising rates and raises the burden of proof for anyone asserting they are a primary one.
Moreover, large and sustained electricity price increases occurred throughout the 2010s—well before hyperscale data centers became a material share of national load. A phenomenon that was marginal or nonexistent during that period cannot plausibly be the primary cause of those increases.
States with the largest concentrations of hyperscale data centers—such as Virginia and Texas—do not exhibit electricity price behavior consistent with the claim that data center load is a primary driver of rate increases. Despite rapid growth in data center capacity, both states have kept retail electricity prices at or below the national average, with only modest increases over the past decade. That pattern is inconsistent with a simple demand-driven explanation.
I work in the data center industry, and I care deeply about getting this right—not because my industry should be protected from scrutiny, but because policy decisions should not be based on claims that do not survive basic falsification. The United States has an opportunity to lead in one of the few industries still meaningfully adding to GDP. That opportunity is jeopardized when correlation is mistaken for causation.