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Climate
US Electric Grid Heading Toward 'Crisis' Thanks to AI Data Centers
"No good comes of having an AI data center near you."
Jan 02, 2026
The massive energy needs of artificial intelligence data centers became a major political controversy in 2025, and new reporting suggests that it will grow even further in 2026.
CNBC reported on Thursday that data center projects have become political lightning rods among politicians ranging from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the left to Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the right.
However, objections to data centers aren't just coming from politicians but from ordinary citizens who are worried about the impact such projects will have on their local environment and their utility bills.
CNBC noted that data centers' energy needs are so great that PJM Interconnection, the largest US grid operator that serves over 65 million people across 13 states, projects that it will be a full six gigawatts short of its reliability requirements in 2027.
Joe Bowring, president of independent market monitor Monitoring Analytics, told CNBC that he's never seen the grid under such projected strain.
"It’s at a crisis stage right now," Bowring said. "PJM has never been this short."
Rob Gramlich, president of power consulting firm Grid Strategies, told CNBC that he expects the debate over data centers to become even more intense this year once Americans start getting socked with even higher utility bills.
"I don't think we’ve seen the end of the political repercussions,” Gramlich said. “And with a lot more elections in 2026 than 2025, we’ll see a lot of implications. Every politician is going to be saying that they have the answer to affordability and their opponents’ policies would raise rates."
Concerns about data centers' impact on electric grids are rising in both red and blue states.
The Austin American-Statesman reported on Thursday that a new analysis written by the office of Austin City Manager TC Broadnax found that data centers have the potential to overwhelm the city's system given they are projected to need more power than can possibly be delivered with current infrastructure.
"The speed in which AI is trying to be deployed creates tremendous strain on the already tight resources in both design and construction," says the analysis, which noted that some proposed data centers are seeking more than five gigawatts, which is more than the peak load for the entire city.
In New York, local station News 10 reported last year that the New York Independent System Operator is estimating that the state's grid could be 1.6 gigawatts short of reliability requirements by 2030 thanks in large part to data centers.
Anger over proposed data centers has even spread to President Donald Trump's primary residential home of Palm Beach County, Florida, where local residents successfully postponed the construction of a proposed 200-acre data center complex.
According to public news station WLRN, locals opposed to the project cited "expected noise from cooling towers, servers, and diesel generators, along with heavy water use, pollution concerns, and higher utility costs" when petitioning Palm Beach County commissioners to scrap the proposal.
Corey Kanterman, a local opponent of the proposed data center, told WLRN that his goal is to shut the project down entirely.
"No good comes of having an AI data center near you," Kanterman said. "Put them in the location of least impact to the environment and people. This location is not it."
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'New Year's Eve Massacre': Trump Administration Makes Deep Cuts at FEMA as Climate Crisis Accelerates
A former FEMA official said that the agency "can't do disaster response and recovery without" the employees being terminated by the Trump administration.
Jan 02, 2026
The Trump administration this week made abrupt cuts to the top federal disaster response agency, even as US communities face increased threats from natural disasters caused by the global climate crisis.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported on Wednesday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) "has begun issuing termination notices" to staff at the agency's Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) that are effective as of January 2.
A FEMA staffer who spoke with Kabas described the terminations as "The New Year's Eve Massacre," and explained that "the driving force behind all CORE employees is supporting and enacting the mission of preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters."
A Thursday report from CNN added some additional details to Kabas' reporting, including that the decision to issue the layoffs was made by Acting Administrator Karen Evans, who was appointed to the role after former Acting Administrator David Richardson resigned in November.
One former FEMA official bluntly told CNN that the agency "can't do disaster response and recovery without CORE employees" that are being laid off by the administration.
The former FEMA official added that regional agency offices throughout the US "are almost entirely CORE staff, so the first FEMA people who are usually onsite won’t be there," which will mean that "states are on their own" when it comes to disaster response.
CNN also reported that there is anxiety among remaining FEMA staffers that these cuts could just be the start "of a larger effort" by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem "to shrink FEMA, potentially axing thousands of workers in the coming months who deploy during hurricanes, wildfires and other national emergencies."
President Donald Trump has been targeting FEMA for potential termination for nearly a year now, and he said shortly after being inaugurated last January that a goal in his second term would be "fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA," while emphasizing that individual states should bear the cost of responding to natural disasters.
“I think, frankly, FEMA’s not good,” the president said. “I think when you have a problem like this, I think you want to go, and whether it’s a Democrat or Republican governor, you want to use your state to fix it and not waste time calling FEMA.”
The Trump administration's deep cuts to FEMA come as the intensity of natural disasters is only projected to increase thanks to climate change.
According to a report published on Tuesday by the Yale School of the Environment, 2025 was the second hottest on record and was only surpassed by the previous year.
"The last three years have been, by a wide margin, the hottest ever recorded," stressed the report. "Each of the last three years has measured more than 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial times, putting the world at least temporarily in breach of an international goal to limit warming below that level."
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'A Wake-Up Call': Scientists Find 2025 Among Hottest Years on Record
"2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now."
Dec 30, 2025
Climate change driven by human burning of fossil fuels helped make 2025 one of the hottest years ever recorded, a scientific report published Monday affirmed, prompting renewed calls for urgent action to combat the worsening planetary emergency.
Researchers at World Weather Attribution (WWA) found that "although 2025 was slightly cooler than 2024 globally, it was still far hotter than almost any other year on record," with only two other recent years recording a higher average worldwide temperature.
For the first time, the three-year running average will end the year above the 1.5°C warming goal, relative to preindustrial levels, established a decade ago under the landmark Paris climate agreement.
"Global temperatures remained very high and significant harm from human-induced climate change is very real," the report continues. "It is not a future threat, but a present-day reality."
"Across the 22 extreme events we analyzed in depth, heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires claimed lives, destroyed communities, and wiped out crops," the researchers wrote. "Together, these events paint a stark picture of the escalating risks we face in a warming world."
The WWA researchers' findings tracked with the findings of United Nations experts and others that 2025 would be the third-hottest year on record.
According to the WWA study:
This year highlighted again, in stark terms, how unfairly the consequences of human-induced climate change are distributed, consistently hitting those who are already marginalized within their societies the hardest. But the inequity goes deeper: The scientific evidence base itself is uneven. Many of our studies in 2025 focused on heavy rainfall events in the Global South, and time and again we found that gaps in observational data and the reliance on climate models developed primarily for the Global North prevented us from drawing confident conclusions. This unequal foundation in climate science mirrors the broader injustices of the climate crisis.
The events of 2025 make it clear that while we urgently need to transition away from fossil fuels, we also must invest in adaptation measures. Many deaths and other impacts could be prevented with timely action. But events like Hurricane Melissa highlight the limits of preparedness and adaptation: When an intense storm strikes small islands such as Jamaica and other Caribbean nations, even relatively high levels of preparedness cannot prevent extreme losses and damage. This underscores that adaptation alone is not enough; rapid emission reductions remain essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal” of 1.5°C, WWA co-founder Friederike Otto—who is also an Imperial College London climate scientist—told the Associated Press. “The science is increasingly clear.”
The WWA study's publication comes a month after this year's United Nations Climate Change Conference—or COP30—ended in Brazil with little meaningful progress toward a transition from fossil fuels.
Responding to the new study, Climate Action Campaign director Margie Alt said in a statement that "2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now."
"Today’s report is a wake-up call," Alt continued. "Unfortunately, [US President Donald] Trump and Republicans controlling Congress spent the past year making climate denial official US policy and undermining progress to stave off the worst of the climate crisis. Their reckless polluters-first agenda rolled back critical climate protections and attacked and undermined the very agencies responsible for helping Americans prepare for and recover from increasingly dangerous disasters."
"Across the country, people are standing up and demanding their leaders do better to protect our families from climate change and extreme weather," Alt added. "It's time those in power started listening.”
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New State Laws Aim to Protect Environment, Consumers as Trump Wages All-Out War on Climate
"The gridlock and partisanship we see in Washington, DC can be dispiriting. But history shows that states can build momentum that eventually leads to change at the federal level."
Dec 29, 2025
Even as President Donald Trump and his administration have been ripping up environmental and consumer protection regulations, a number of state laws are set to take effect next year that could at least mitigate some of the damage.
A Monday statement from Environment America and the Public Interest Network highlighted a number of new laws aimed at curbing corporate polluters and enhancing consumer welfare.
First, the groups highlighted "Right to Repair" laws set to take effect in Washington, Nevada, Oregon, and Colorado, which give people the right to repair their own appliances and electronics without burdensome costs or barriers.
The groups lavished particular praise on Colorado's "Right to Repair" laws that they said provide "the broadest repair protections in the country," with new regulations that will give businesses in the state "access to what they and independent repair providers need to fix their electronics themselves."
Illinois, meanwhile, will fully phase out the sale of fluorescent lightbulbs, which will be replaced by energy-efficient LED bulbs. The groups estimate that eliminating the fluorescent bulbs will collectively save Illinois households more than $1.5 billion on their utility bills by 2050, while also reducing energy waste and mercury pollution.
Illinois also drew praise for enacting a ban on polystyrene foam foodware that will take effect on January 1.
The groups also highlighted the work being done in Oregon to protect consumers with legislation mandating price transparency to eliminate surprise junk fees on purchases; prohibiting ambulance companies from socking out-of-network patients with massive fees for rides to nearby hospitals; and placing new restrictions on the ability of medical debt to negatively impact a person's credit score.
California also got a mention in the groups' release for closing a loophole that allowed supermarkets to continue using plastic bags and for creating a new privacy tool for consumers allowing them to request that online data brokers delete all of the personal information they have gathered on them over the years.
Emily Rusch, vice president and senior director of state offices for the Public Interest Network, contrasted the action being taken in the states to protect consumers and the environment with a lack of action being done at the federal level.
"The gridlock and partisanship we see in Washington, DC can be dispiriting," said Rusch. "But history shows that states can build momentum that eventually leads to change at the federal level. As we build on this progress in 2026, we look forward to working with anyone—Republican, Democrat, or independent—with whom we can find common ground."
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