The Impact of Rising Electricity Utility Costs Driven by Data Center Load Growth on Low- and Moderate-Income (LMI) Homeowners and Affordable Housing Markets

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-654-8_57How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Data centers; electricity load growth; utility cost escalation; energy burden; low- and moderate-income households; affordable housing; electricity tariffs; energy equity

Abstract

The high rate of data centers growth caused by cloud computing, artificial intelligence and digital services has caused a significant growth in electricity demand, putting strain on local power grids. The grid improvements and capacity additions needed to support utility companies in their operations are normally paid back by the electricity tariffs that are then transferred to the consumers at the homes. The proposed paper examines the indirect effects of electricity cost increase caused by data centers on Low- and Moderate-Income (LMI) householders and affordable housing. An analytical framework is suggested to have a quantitative measure on data center load growth, model utility cost escalation, measurement of residential tariff pass-through and estimates on household energy burden change. The findings have shown that an increase in electricity costs has a disproportionate impact on LMI households, which makes them vulnerable to high energy costs and financial hardships. Also, the increased electricity rates increase the operating expenses of affordable housing providers, which destabilize the rents and the financial sustainability in the long run. The results underscore the importance of considering energy equity and housing affordability in the process of building the data center, designing the utility rate, and investing in infrastructure.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mohak Chauhan
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/24
TI  - The Impact of Rising Electricity Utility Costs Driven by Data Center Load Growth on Low- and Moderate-Income (LMI) Homeowners and Affordable Housing Markets
BT  - Proceedings of the Global Conference on Sustainable Energy Systems, Smart Electronics and Intelligent Computing (GCSESEIC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 723
EP  - 733
SN  - 2352-5401
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-654-8_57
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-654-8_57
ID  - Chauhan2026
ER  -