Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 2026

Abstract

For the first time in over a decade, flat and stagnant electricity demand is expected to skyrocket. This increased demand is driven in large part by data centers that support artificial intelligence, crypto mining, and cloud computing. This is straining the electric grid, its stakeholders, and legal constructs in significant ways. Legal energy scholarship has spent the last fifteen years focused on the challenges of managing an electric grid transitioning to clean energy, in a world where privately owned electric utilities maintain powerful monopolies across the country. But there are no accounts of how the balance of power in this regulatory grid space is being disrupted by the entry of a new energy player—Big Tech. This absence is striking given the repeated barrage of headlines predicting the insatiable electricity demands of Big Tech as it scrambles for sufficient electricity to power its ever-growing army of data centers.

Using theories of structural power developed in the political science literature, this Article demonstrates how Big Tech’s ability to control the production, information, financing, and security of the electric grid is providing it with structural power that challenges even the durable monopoly power of electric utilities. It explores the implications of such a shift in power, including a future where more customers self-supply their own electricity, sidelining utilities that are used to their state-sanctioned monopoly power. Utilities and public utility commissions will need to consider new rate structures that prevent ratepayers from subsidizing large load energy investments. State and federal regulators may even be forced into uncomfortable judgments about differential treatment of data centers in a legal regime that prohibits “undue discrimination.” This Article demonstrates how regulators can rely both on established strategies to limit Big Tech’s exit options, as well as on novel approaches to harness their structural power in ways that better allocate risk and balance innovation with public policy goals. Together, Big Tech’s shaping of the resources, providers, and locations of grid infrastructure, as well as regulators’ development of new regulatory tools, arrangements, and innovative rate structures are defining the next phase in electricity history that this Article has coined the “Tech Energy Transition.”

Download

Share

COinS