AI data centers drive high-voltage transmission expansion as landowners fight back

SUGARLOAF, Pa. — A surge in artificial intelligence data center construction is driving utilities across the United States to plan high-voltage transmission lines at accelerating speed, pitting the tech industry’s growing electricity appetite against landowners, conservationists and state regulators who say the projects impose heavy costs and disruptions on communities that receive little benefit.

In Sugarloaf, Pa., John Zola has watched his 40-acre property — apple orchards, a barn and four houses for himself and his adult children — become a proposed corridor for a 500-kilovolt power line, according to the Associated Press. The line’s 240-foot steel towers would rise roughly ten times as high as the century-old apple trees they would cross, and would stand near the swimming pool where his grandchildren play.

The conflict has spread from Pennsylvania orchards to Texas riverbeds and a $22 billion Midwest regulatory battle, as communities across the country challenge whether they should bear the costs of energy infrastructure built primarily to serve large commercial customers — and question whether cheaper alternatives have been adequately explored.

A grid under mounting pressure

Analysts say the power grid remains inefficient and aging, and with demand spiking from AI data centers, risks widespread blackouts on the coldest or hottest days, the AP reported. Utilities argue that any new transmission line — even those driven primarily by large customers such as data centers — benefits the broader grid by adding capacity.

Transmission spending is projected to nearly double to almost $50 billion a year between 2019 and 2028, driven primarily by these large-scale projects, according to the AP. Utility giants say the growth in their capital spending will be led by transmission.

In eastern Pennsylvania, Amazon and other developers have so many data center projects underway that PPL Corp., which serves more than 1.5 million electric customers, projected its peak electricity demand will more than triple by 2030, the AP reported. The 12-mile Sugarloaf project would reuse and expand a corridor that once carried a since-removed residential line, rather than establishing a new one, PPL said.

President Donald Trump has identified AI as critical to the nation’s economic and national security, the AP noted, but the technology’s energy demands are straining a grid that was not built for this pace of growth.

Opposition from multiple fronts

Resistance has materialized across the country at multiple scales.

In Texas’ Hill Country, the Hill Country Preservation Coalition formed to fight the southernmost of three 765-kilovolt lines — the highest voltage used in the United States — that Texas regulators commissioned to cross the state in east-west corridors. The coalition’s founder, Jada Jo Smith, said it is pressing state regulators to adopt a route that follows existing highway corridors instead.

“Why would you choose a route that would potentially harm our most iconic rivers that we have left in the state of Texas?” Smith said, according to the AP.

West Virginians are also fighting a pair of proposed transmission lines that would connect coal-fired power plants to northern Virginia, home to a dense cluster of data center facilities. In the Midwest, utility regulators in North Dakota, Montana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana have urged federal regulators to block a $22 billion regional transmission package, and that fight has stretched for months.

Pennsylvania’s state consumer advocate, Darryl Lawrence, is protesting a $1.7 billion proposed line that would span more than 200 miles from West Virginia across half of Pennsylvania, the AP reported. Lawrence has questioned whether cheaper alternatives exist, whether projected data center demand will actually materialize and why grid operators would import power into a state that normally exports it as a major power producer.

Some members of Congress have sought to strip new transmission lines of state-level or certain environmental reviews, the AP reported. Some tech companies are attempting to build their own power plants, or locate data centers adjacent to existing ones, in part to sidestep the permitting and siting disputes.

Todd Snitchler, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, which represents independent power plant owners, said consumer attention to transmission costs has grown sharply.

“These are real dollars and consumers are paying a lot of attention,” Snitchler said, according to the AP.

The Indiana-based Midcontinent Independent System Operator told federal regulators in a filing that the need for new power transmission “has never been greater,” citing demand growth from manufacturing and data centers.

Offers landowners say they cannot accept

PPL has offered cash payments to property owners in return for access to their land for the Sugarloaf project. Landowners who decline risk facing eminent domain proceedings in court, the AP reported.

Zola said PPL recently raised its offer to him from $17,000 to $85,000.

“Just like that,” he said, according to the AP. “And there’s no amount of money for me.”

PPL said it did everything it could to balance the impact on residents with its obligation to deliver electricity and protect grid reliability, the AP reported.

Zola disputed that characterization.

“They don’t look at whose lives they are destroying, whose property they are destroying,” he said.