New York becomes FIRST STATE to impose data center moratorium

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Live look for you this morning over New York City after New York's Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order barring the construction of new hyperscale data centers using 50 megawatts or more of power up to one year. It's the first statewide data center ban in the country fueled by fears that these centers could consume a lot of power and potentially outpacing the grid's capacity, driving up costs for consumers. But as we learn from U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, these data centers are actually being used to stop the rise in [00:00:29] Speaker 2: electricity. He joined us right here on the national news desk to talk about how the Trump administration is working on a new pledge with top American AI companies to ensure American consumers are protected from energy price hikes. If the United States backs away, drags our feet on data centers, China wins. Nobody, nobody wants that. Look, the green energy mandates, those are what drive up energy costs. New York has expensive electricity and they produce less electricity electricity today than they did 10 years ago. That's the problem. That's a New York state energy policy problem. It's not a data center problem. With President Trump's ratepayer protection pledge, data center development, that's the way to get your electricity prices down, your job opportunities and your wages up. Now that seems to be kind of like the fault line here. You have some people on one side saying, yes, we have to have these data centers to keep up with China. They have folks in many communities worried about their electricity bill going up. What is it? [00:01:29] Speaker 1: What's the Trump administration doing to try to hold some of these companies accountable to try to hold some of these companies accountable to make sure they maybe absorb some of these costs? What are you doing? [00:01:36] Speaker 2: The Trump administration ratepayer protection pledge. We were implementing it before we even released the pledge, but it's to get the developers of these data centers to bring money up front into communities to invest in the electrical infrastructure to grow the capacity to produce electricity. And all of them have come with multi-year freezes on electricity prices. They're actually been used as a mechanism to stop the rise in electricity. create just enormous local tax revenues, job opportunities, and higher wages. If you visit the communities where a modern data center is being developed today, they are thrilled. Their electricity prices are locked in for three or four years. The rises are over. New job opportunities are there. Local businesses are booming. Local restaurants and shops and stores are seeing increased activity. Look, done right, of course they can cause problems. If you've got green energy mandates that doesn't allow your state to produce any more electricity, well, a data center development there is not going to work so well. But the problem is those state green energy mandates, it's not the data center development. They're a force to drive prices down. [00:02:51] Speaker 1: Do you know how many people or a ballpark, how many people have signed up for this pledge? And it's voluntary at this point, right? [00:02:57] Speaker 2: It is, but it's all the large developers. All of the large data center developers have said, yes, we want to do that. They understand they're behind the eight ball. The same forces, and again, they're American forces, but of course they're funded and supported by the Chinese and Russians. The same groups opposed fracking 15 years ago. They wanted to stop America to become the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world. Fortunately, they didn't win that battle, but they went out and tried to scare everyone about fracking and the shale revolution. Those same people are doing the same thing about data centers, and they're wrong this time, too. They want to drive energy prices up and export American jobs overseas, and that's just not the Trump administration agenda. [00:03:44] Speaker 1: No, we talked about what's happening in New York right now with that moratorium. Did you hear about this national day of protests against data centers that is actually planned for this Saturday? These folks are concerned about everything from power use to water consumption to higher utility bills. There's also a lot of misinformation out there when it comes to what's going to happen when these data centers are built or in the process of being built. How are you trying to combat some of this information, and what is some of the stuff that you think that's kind of falling through the cracks that people are hearing that may not be accurate? [00:04:18] Speaker 2: Yeah, these groups are very effective at scaring people, and this is large new investments in communities. I get people's concerns about it. They should be met and addressed head-on. They should have all their questions answered before decisions are made. So there's a real issue here, but this spreading of fear and falsehoods is just destructive. Water is one example. All the new data centers being built use a thing called closed-loop. They don't evaporate water away. They use precious little water. They bring large investments. They do not increase electricity prices. In fact, they're the easiest tool I have at the Department of Energy to stop the rise of electricity prices, is to get a data center developer to come into your community. In Indiana, we've had filings to reduce electricity rates for local consumers. The worst case is freezing rates at where they are today. These are big wins for communities, but again, there's groups out there that want to scare Americans, that want to preach fear and doom. And of course, in states that have been 20 years of just driving up the electricity prices in their states, no wonder people are upset about rising energy prices, and they want that to stop. But what they need to stop is the green energy mandates that have been driving up the prices. They're the problem, not the data centers.