“I’m one of the smart Black Republicans,” he said, leaning forward and adjusting his glasses.
“Are you saying the others aren’t smart?” I asked with an awkward chuckle, trying to parse the layers of what he’d just told me.
“No, they aren’t,” he said, digging in.
He had invited himself to the seat next to me, and then into this conversation. We were in a hallway at the Congressional Black Caucus conference, and I’d been buried in my phone, editing a social video I’d filmed the day before. He’d come down from Philly. In a sea of Democrats, calling himself a Republican certainly made him stand out.
“I’m retired now, but I spent more than 20 years working in energy policy,” he said, before walking me through the rest of his résumé.
“So what should I know?” I asked, playing along.
For the next 15 minutes, he explained things I’d already come to understand pretty well from covering data centers: the tangled web of energy policy, and how confused people are about who the players in it actually are. When I kept up, sometimes finishing his facts before he could, his eyes brightened.
“Oh, so you do know something about this.”
“Not as much as you do,” I said, still fiddling with my edits.
Then he leaned in and said something that made me put my phone down and look him in the eye.
“Everyone keeps talking about AI data centers using energy, but nobody seems to be planning for the energy cryptocurrency uses.”
“What do you mean?”
The country needs data centers to reach the next frontier, he told me. He didn’t understand why people complained about rising energy costs. To him, it was like complaining about the price of fancy shoes or a designer bag, something expensive you’d chosen to buy. And data centers weren’t the only thing the energy people he’d worked with in government were watching. Cryptocurrency devours electricity too, he said, and together the two would come with a steep price. In his view, it was one the public should be willing to pay.
That’s when I told him about last winter, about the people who put several layers of clothing on while inside their homes, trying to stay warm without turning up the thermostat. For some people, affording heat in January or cool air in July is a matter of life and death.
I could see him picturing scenarios in his mind he hadn’t considered before. He adjusted his glasses and shifted uncomfortably.
Later, I checked what he’d told me. I sat in on a session about cryptocurrency and realized this was something people were actively studying, and the projections were staggering. He wasn’t wrong that it’s worth watching. A peer-reviewed study published in May by researchers at North Carolina State, Carnegie Mellon and two other universities projects that demand from data centers and crypto mining could push power costs up by as much as 57% in some parts of the country by 2030. Maryland and Pennsylvania are among the places where those increases would be sharpest. That’s the state I cover and the one he’d come from.
He was smart. He’d made sure I knew that.
Updates!
I’m only on the 20th draft of my book proposal. It’s 95 pages, so I feel like I’ve already written the book. I have a great agent who has represented journalists with much bigger followings than mine, and she took me on I believe because this story is amazing! I’ll share more as it progresses.
Next week, I’m joining journalists from around the world to teach a masterclass on AI, Journalism and Society at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute. I’ll be focused specifically on covering the resistance to AI data centers in the United States.
So far, I’ve really enjoyed writing Worth Mentioning. It’s fun to share parts of conversations that don’t make it into stories but are still worth discussing. Let me know what you think. I read everything.
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