How much power does it all need?

If you were at the civic club meeting where hundreds of Baldwin County residents packed the room, you already know the basics. 4,500 acres of timberland in north Baldwin County, slated for a 260-megawatt solar farm. The energy feeds Alabama Power's grid. The renewable energy credits go to Meta, which uses them to offset its data center campus in Montgomery.

The room had a lot of questions. The biggest one wasn't really about solar panels or timber. It was simpler than that: why does an AI company need this much power in the first place?

The short answer: AI uses a lot of electricity. More than most people realize.

Training and running large AI models rely on thousands of specialized processors, often operating continuously for weeks or months. Unlike an office building or even a traditional server farm, these facilities don't really have slow hours. They run at or near full capacity around the clock, and they generate enormous amounts of heat, which means they also need massive cooling systems running alongside them.

A single hyperscale data center can consume as much electricity as a mid-sized city.

That's not a figure of speech.

Nationally, the trend is clear. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which monitors the U.S. power grid, projects that summer peak electricity demand will increase by 224 gigawatts over the next decade. That's a 20 to 25 percent jump, and it's the fastest acceleration in demand since NERC started tracking this data in 1995. AI infrastructure is a major driver of that growth.

So what does this look like in Alabama?

Alabama Power's most recent long-term planning documents project a capacity shortfall beginning in 2029. The utility hasn't publicly pinned that gap entirely on data centers, but the timing lines up with a wave of large-scale projects either under construction or in planning.

Meta's Montgomery data center campus is expanding beyond $1.5 billion in investment. The Stockton solar project is directly tied to that expansion.

Worth noting how the math actually works. The 260-megawatt Stockton solar farm, once built, would generate somewhere around 500,000 to 600,000 megawatt-hours a year. Solar panels only produce when the sun is up, so a 260-megawatt solar farm puts out far less energy than a 260-megawatt data center draws. Meta gets the renewable energy credits on paper. The physical electrons powering the Montgomery campus still come from wherever Alabama Power happens to be generating at any given hour, which is mostly natural gas and nuclear.

In Bessemer, a separate hyperscale campus known as Project Marvel has been proposed at roughly 1.2 gigawatts across 18 buildings, and it's already generating local debate about water use, emissions, and land clearing.

To put that in local terms: Mobile County as a whole, every home, business, school, and factory combined, uses about 7.2 million megawatt-hours of electricity a year. A 1.2-gigawatt data center campus running around the clock would use closer to 9.5 million. One project, more power than an entire coastal Alabama county. Statewide generation in 2025 came in around 142 million megawatt-hours, which puts Project Marvel alone at roughly 7 percent of Alabama's total electric output.

To shore up capacity, Alabama Power agreed in late 2024 to acquire the Lindsay Hill Generating Station, an 855-megawatt natural gas plant in Autauga County, for approximately $622 million. That purchase goes into the utility's rate base, the pool of assets that gets factored into what customers pay every month.

Alabama's residential electricity price in January 2026 sat at about 16 cents per kilowatt-hour, up roughly 6.4 percent from the same month a year earlier. That increase reflects a mix of factors, not just data centers. But the direction is clear. Demand is growing. Infrastructure is being built to meet it. And those costs eventually show up somewhere.

Those that know me know I'm extremely pro AI. I want the technology to succeed, and I want the Gulf Coast to get the benefit of it. But pro AI doesn't mean pretending the grid isn't strained.

The loud read is that Big Tech is externalizing its power costs onto families and small businesses that never asked to underwrite a data center. The quieter read is that this is how most major American infrastructure has been built, roads, railways, broadband, with costs spread across the grid, not just the companies using the most of it. The truth, as usual, is messier than either camp wants to admit. It depends on how the rates are structured, who gets first claim on new generation, and whether the utility passes the capital costs through to residential customers or negotiates them into the industrial tariff.

Those structural choices are the ones worth watching.

What people are watching

Alabama PSC President Twinkle Cavanaugh said publicly in late 2025 that the state needs to make sure families don't "get stuck with the bill" for large-scale data center infrastructure, and that the standard should be "no free rides for Big Tech." Those are signals about where the commission's thinking is headed, though they haven't translated into formal policy changes yet.

Across the country, at least 11 states introduced legislation in 2026 proposing temporary pauses on new data center development. Maine became the first to actually pass one. The common thread isn't anti-technology. It's a desire to study the cumulative effects on power grids, water supplies, and electricity rates before approving more projects.

Alabama hasn't pursued a moratorium. But with multiple large projects in the pipeline and a projected capacity gap just a few years away, the conversation about how these costs are shared is only getting started.

Why this matters for our community

You don't need a data center in your county to feel the ripple effects. When utilities build new generation and transmission to meet large industrial demand, those capital costs work their way into the rate structure. How much of that cost lands on residential customers versus the companies driving the demand is a policy question, and it's one Alabama regulators will be answering in real time over the next several years.

For a small business owner in Fairhope or a nonprofit director in Mobile, the electric bill is the utility cost you can't negotiate and can't outrun. Worth knowing what's coming.

— Kai

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