Who Will Pay for the Power Upgrade?
A conservative doesn’t oppose growth. But a conservative does insist that the people who build private facilities pay their own way instead of handing the bill to the grandma down the road.
Drive past Kuna and you can see the future being poured in concrete. Meta is building their data center on 485 acres that could draw 400 to 600 megawatts of electricity. Micron’s expansion may eventually need up to 1,000 megawatts. The proposed Gemstone Technology Park could take another 600 to 800. Add them up and Idaho Power may have to expand its entire generating capacity by 50 to 75 percent so it can serve a handful of enormous customers, most of them among the richest corporations on the planet.
Idaoan’s are told this is progress, and that the properly conservative response is to get government out of the way and let the innovators innovate. It is a very seductive pitch. It is also, on inspection, the opposite of a conservative one because the question is never whether this buildout costs a fortune. It obviously does. The question is, Who Will Pay for it?
That is the oldest conservative question there is. A free market means the person who orders the steak pays for the steak. When a private company builds a private facility and quietly slides the cost of new power plants and transmission lines onto families and farmers who will never set foot inside it, that is not capitalism. This is corporate welfare wearing a hard hat.
In Idaho, this is not a hypothetical about someday. It is already on the bill. Since 2021, our irrigators have watched their power costs explode and overall irrigation costs are up roughly 45 percent, and the demand charges are up a staggering 138 percent. One family farm reported a $73,000 increase. A single 150-horsepower pump’s monthly charge climbed from $777 to $1,840. Meanwhile, regulators approved a $110 million Idaho Power rate increase that took effect in January 2026. Not every dollar of that traces to data centers or inflation as wildfire hardening, plus ordinary growth all play a part, and honesty requires saying so. But the arrival of these gigawatt-scale customers is a major driver of the infrastructure spending now landing on everyone’s statement and will continue into the future.
If you want to see where this road ends, look east. In the 13-state PJM grid region (Let me first explain what a PJM is, it is a “regional transmission organization” (RTO) essentially the traffic controller for the electric grid across a big chunk of the eastern United States. It doesn’t own power plants or send you a bill. Instead, it operates the high-voltage transmission network, runs the wholesale electricity markets, and makes sure supply and demand stay balanced second by second across its whole footprint so the lights stay on. PJM runs a capacity auction. This is a market held years in advance where power generators get paid simply to promise they’ll be available to deliver electricity during peak demand. Those payments get folded into everyone’s utility bills.
It is concerning that the data-center boom sent the most recent capacity auction up 82 percent a $7.2 billion jump with more than $16 billion in annual costs passed straight through to customers in the 13 state grid. In 2024 alone, ratepayers in seven states were charged $4.3 billion for transmission projects that existed, by the grid operator’s own accounting, only to connect data centers. Analysts estimate the average family there will pay around $70 more a month by 2028. Idaho isn’t in PJM, and our grid works differently but the physics and the temptation are identical. When a giant electric load shows up, somebody builds the infrastructure, and the utility would very much like that somebody to be you.
Here is the good news, and it is a genuinely a conservative success story: Idaho saw it coming and acted. This spring the Legislature passed House Bill 911, requiring new large-load customers to pay their fair share of the system upgrades they trigger, with a review at the Public Utilities Commission to protect the grid and existing ratepayers. It passed the House 65–3 and the Senate 34–1 about as close to unanimous as Boise gets and the governor signed it into law effective July 1. Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen put the principle plainly: the point is to protect “the little grandma on a fixed income or the young family trying to pay their bills.” That is the free market doing exactly what it should making the person who orders the steak pay for the steak.
But nobody should mistake one good law for a finished job. Developers make cheerful pledges to cover their own costs; those pledges often carry no real enforcement teeth. Generous tax exemptions still flow to some of these projects even as new ones line up like the $2.6 billion campus near Pocatello and more in the Magic Valley. Vigilance, not a victory lap, is what the moment calls for here in Idaho. The correct posture toward a trillion-dollar company promising it’ll pay its own way is the one Reagan took toward Moscow: trust but verify.
That same instinct of verify; don’t just believe the sales pitch is exactly what’s missing from the broader debate about where this technology is headed. The same firms asking us to socialize their electricity costs also ask us to trust them, and them alone, with the safety of the artificial intelligence these data centers exist to build. That should give any conservative pause. The Hoover Institution, which is no nest of left-wing activists, has convened serious national-security voices to warn that frontier AI, especially freely downloadable models that can never be recalled, pose real risks that no company’s marketing department should be trusted to police. Even the Heritage Foundation, hardly a fan of red tape, argues for commonsense guardrails should be handled through the states rather than giving a blank check. Being wary of a technology’s unconstrained rollout is not being anti-technology. It is being a grown-up by asking the right questions.
None of this requires that Idaho turn away growth or apologize for prosperity. It requires only that we hold to the principle that made prosperity possible in the first place: you build it, you pay for it, and you don’t get to pass the tab to your neighbor because you’re big enough to get away with it. HB 911 was a start. The families and farmers of this state are counting on their leaders not to stop there. This is a time when we have to hold our legislators’ feet to the fire.
Stewardship, not blind cheerleading, is what conservatism has always been about, and it starts with reading the electric bill.
Remember, “We Get the Government we Deserve.”
