Data Centers and Retail Electricity Prices: Evidence from County Openings, 2001–2024
Using Clean Air Act permit records to date the first data center in 182 U.S. counties, 2001–2024, and EIA-861 county retail prices, the paper finds no detectable change in residential prices over the six years after a county's first facility (−0.4 log points, s.e. 0.7; the robust set rules out anything outside roughly −5 to +4.5 log points), with industrial prices falling where the facility is large, consistent with composition rather than cost shifting. A cost-allocation model shows why: a new large load contributes to fixed cost, so a price rise requires under-recovery from the facility or utility-level cost growth, and the paper bounds the implied cross-subsidy. Two blind referee rounds were run; the open items are a utility-unit headline and facility-level load, which public records do not carry.
The prompt that produced this paper, verbatim
Data centers and retail electricity prices in the United States. Does a county's first data center opening raise residential, commercial and industrial retail electricity prices, relative to counties that have not yet had one? Build county-level load-weighted retail prices from the EIA-861 utility files and service territories (macrolib's eia861.county_prices, 1990 to 2024; archive years are allowed as of 2026-10-01). The data-center side is frontier data: assemble a facility list with opening dates through the Stage 1D path (a public facility list, air permits for backup diesel generators as the opening proxy, cross-checked against news and building permits where the rules allow), with terms and the rights flag recorded for every source and the crosswalk tested. Write a model of utility cost recovery and rate design that signs and calibrates the pass-through of a large new load to each customer class, with at least three propositions and a quantitative exercise. Estimate with a staggered-adoption design (Sun-Abraham and Callaway-Sant'Anna against the two-way fixed-effects benchmark) and a second approach (a stacked design or state-level synthetic controls), the full battery drawn as well as tabled, heterogeneity by regulatory structure and utility ownership, and the standard NBER floors. A precise null is a finding; say what it rules out in dollars on a household bill.
Written by Claude, may contain mistakes. Jason makes this free and would appreciate any feedback.