Electricity bills are rising, and data centers are getting the blame. But for 50 years, the American grid absorbed loads this large while real prices fell. The difference between then and now?
Page F2From§Eachthe matinee edition — 16 September 2026
Commerce Secretary calls water concerns 'propaganda,' a day after regulators halted a data center over water.
As it ran on the front
The American electrical grid, a bureaucratic contraption built mid-century to hum along quietly while nobody thought about it, has died of neglect it did not commit. It is survived by fifty years of real electricity prices that fell even as the grid absorbed load growth nobody remembers protesting, and preceded in death by the deregulated markets that took its place a generation ago and have been sold as reform ever since.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, on CNBC, laughed off the idea that data centers strain water supplies, calling the concern "propaganda." He is the same man who once said, plainly, that data centers "suck water." No receipt gives the date of that first remark, so this column will not pretend to know how long he sat with the thought before discarding it; the record shows only that the man who said the sentence and the man who mocked it share a name and a job.…
…(cont) The facts on the ground did not wait for him to make up his mind. On August 31st the President warned communities that reject data centers would end up "backwards and poor," the kind of threat usually reserved for tariffs. On September 1st a federal appellate panel, the Interior Board of Land Appeals, stayed approval of the Townsite Data Center, eighty acres on public land outside Boulder City, Nevada — the first such facility ever proposed for federal ground, and, for now, the first to be stopped. On September 4th a Gallup finding surfaced showing Americans would rather live beside a nuclear plant than an AI data center, by more than twenty points, a preference this column notes without comment on the merits of either neighbor.
None of that is what broke the grid. An essay in Jacobin this week walked the fifty years of the ledger and found the data centers innocent: the grid absorbed loads this size before, for decades, while real prices fell, and what changed was not the size of the load but the deregulated market built to price it. The machines get the blame; the deregulation gets the press release.
Malarkey, mostly, is what a man calls a fact once it has become politically inconvenient to have said it. Some shit does not need spin, just a memory. The grid is survived by the bills. In lieu of flowers, send an accounting of who priced the power and why, filed with the public utility commission of your choice.
“They halted the thing on federal land Tuesday over water and land, and by Wednesday the Commerce Secretary's on TV calling the water part "propaganda" — that's not a contradiction, that's the sales pitch swapping outfits mid-sentence. Nobody in this story disputes the fifty years of falling prices before the machines showed up; they just need you looking at the machines and not the deregulated market that's actually pricing your bill.”
“Look, the Secretary isn't saying data centers don't use water, he's saying the people worried about it are being — well, "propaganda" was his word, not mine. Sure, he's the same guy who said "suck water" about the exact same thing, but that was the old him, this is the CNBC him, keep up. And communities that don't want the facilities can enjoy being, in the President's own phrase, "backwards and poor" — that's not a threat, that's an incentive structure.”
The receipts
· Panic! At the Data Center: Americans would rather live next to a nuke than an AI facility from the morgue, 4 Sep 2026
· Trump Commerce Secretary Once Said Data Centers ‘Suck Water,’ Now Scoffs That Such Concerns Are Just ‘Propaganda’ from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· Out-of-Touch Trump Says Communities That Reject AI Data Centers Will Be 'Backwards and Poor' from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· Federal Panel Halts What Would Be First Data Center on Public Lands from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.