Levi at Joe's. Photo: Daniel Moore / Axios
Josh Levi is leaning on utilities, grid operators and others to help make the case that data centers are being unfairly singled out for power-grid impacts.
Why he matters: Levi, who founded the Data Center Coalition in 2019, is a leading voice on trying to grow the grid and broaden the public's perception of data centers as giant windowless sites that hike energy prices.
- Some utilities are already echoing Levi that the centers will lower electricity prices over time.
Levi sat down over a salad at Joe's Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab recently. His remarks have been edited for length.
You spent more than two decades at the Northern Virginia Technology Council and saw the rise of "Data Center Alley." Did you see data center growth being a national headline issue?
The idea was to grow incrementally, starting in Virginia, and then to expand over time.
The pandemic hit, that went out the window, and instantly it was "Hey Josh, can you call the governor's office in California and make sure we can get our workforce there?" … And we found ourselves becoming a national voice much more quickly than I had anticipated.
Residential customers fear paying higher utility bills to accommodate data centers, especially as electricity prices have risen across the country. How would you respond?
That's a narrative that lends itself to proof points and validation by the folks that, on the one hand, regulate power prices and, on the other hand, the utilities that provide the power.
[Virginia officials found that] data centers pay their full cost of service in Virginia. That was, I think, a surprise to some, but it did help to really establish that, at the moment, data centers are paying their full cost.
PG&E [in California] is saying that if they can get their 10 gigawatts of data center load that they anticipate on the grid, not only will consumer rates come down, but there's 50,000 [construction] jobs.
It sounds like you're hoping the energy sector helps with some of data centers' messaging challenges.
The utilities are starting to find some voice on this. Our role at the moment is to help provide visibility around those data sources and to educate folks in terms of what's real and what's perceived.
What we've learned over time is, if we're not doing it, somebody else is out there talking about the industry in a way that may not be quite as accurate.
So you're arguing that there's not a direct causal link between higher power prices today and data centers — but maybe there's some work to do to make sure that doesn't happen in the future?
We've gone through this 20-year period of relatively flat load growth. You're now at a time when economic development opportunities generally are tied to power. We just passed a lot of laws across the states trying to retire fossil fuel facilities and trying to reinvent how we generate power.
The easy message that we've seen some adopt is just to look at the demand and not to look at the supply. If you're looking just at the demand side, you're missing this whole aspect of the power story.
There's political bickering over the type of power generation needed to supply data centers. Do data centers care where power comes from?
We are, at the end of the day, end users, but we're also an industry that's really leaned in, in partnership with a lot of different energy generators.
There's a time horizon issue that I think is very important, and we try and keep that front and center for policymakers. In the short term, it seems like some of those renewable sources can come online much quicker. And we are in a race.
While we are leaning in on dispatchable clean energy like nuclear and other things, we also know that there's a time horizon of when it'll actually come to fruition. In the interim, you've got to deal with a lot of supply chain issues — we're certainly hearing a lot about gas turbines.
