By the Founders, Department of Technology | San Diego, California | November 9, 2026


On November 3rd, voters across ten states said no to data centers almost every time they were asked. The reason is not that they oppose AI. It is that they have watched the buildout run ahead of the power grid, and they suspect the people steering it are not putting the public first.

In Ashville, Ohio, the village council had already approved an agreement with a data center developer. Residents petitioned to put it on the ballot anyway. On Election Day, 82% of voters rejected the deal, according to Northeast Ohio reporting by Fox 8.
Ashville was not an outlier. Ballotpedia counted 41 local data center measures on the November 3rd ballot across 10 states, with Ohio accounting for 21. Voters favored limiting data center development in 40 of the 41. The one exception was Harwood, North Dakota, where voters defeated a proposed review requirement. Voters in Granville, Ohio, approved a ban by 84%. In Urbana, 77% backed one.

This was not a one-day mood. A Heatmap poll reported by Forbes found more than 70% of Americans would oppose a data center planned for their area, with rising electricity prices the top reason.
Many voters may not weigh how much national AI leadership depends on new computing capacity. That is a fair criticism, and we take it seriously below. But the voters who showed up made a different judgment, and it deserves a hearing: they believe this buildout is being driven first by profit, with national strategy a distant second, and that their concerns about power bills and the environment were treated as obstacles rather than inputs.
The comparison with China shows why that suspicion is not irrational.

What China Did First
China and the United States are in a race for AI leadership, but they are not running it from the same starting line.
According to Inside Climate News, China added an estimated 540 gigawatts of generating capacity in 2025, more than 80% of it renewable. The United States added about 54 gigawatts, roughly 60% renewable. Al Jazeera reports that China already generates more than twice as much electricity as the US, and that BloombergNEF expects China to add more than six times as much generating capacity over the next five years.

Transmission, the high-voltage lines that carry power from where it is made to where it is used, tells the same story. Grid Strategies estimates the US needs roughly 5,000 new miles of high-capacity transmission per year but has averaged only about 600 since 2017, according to Yale Climate Connections. China, by the same report, has been building over 1,000 miles of ultra-high-voltage lines per year. In January, China’s State Grid announced a CNY 4 trillion (about $580 billion) investment plan for 2026 to 2030, up 40% from the prior plan, including 15 new ultra-high-voltage lines, according to Enerdata.

Getting connected is the other bottleneck. A ChinaTalk analysis finds that the time for a US generation project to connect has grown from under two years in the early 2000s to over four years for projects built from 2018 to 2024. Because China plans generation, transmission, and demand together under state direction, the American concept of a years-long interconnection queue for large loads barely exists there.

The US leads on the other side of the equation. Stanford’s AI Index counts an estimated 5,427 US data centers in 2025 versus 449 in China. As one analyst quoted by Al Jazeera framed it, the US has the chips and is short on power, while China has the power and is short on chips.

Cost is where the picture gets less lopsided. Reporting from bne IntelliNews puts Chinese industrial electricity rates roughly in line with the US, at about $0.08 to $0.11 per kilowatt-hour, while Chinese households pay about $0.08 versus $0.15 to $0.17 for American households. The Financial Times reported that Beijing is subsidizing power for data centers using domestic chips down to about 5.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, against a US industrial average of 9.1 cents.

The Warnings Were Public
Here is the part voters understand best. The power shortfall was not a secret.

In its Long-Term Reliability Assessment, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) raised its ten-year summer peak demand forecast sharply and said new data centers account for most of the projected growth, with several regions at high risk of supply shortfalls by the end of the decade. This spring, NERC issued a Level 3 alert, its highest tier, over large computational loads like data centers, and found that grid operators cannot reliably model how 77% of operating data center load behaves during grid disturbances, according to reporting by SAN and Utility Dive.

Grid operators are also being overwhelmed at the front door. Texas’s ERCOT built its process for a large-load queue of 40 to 50 projects, then received 225 new interconnection requests in 2025 alone, about 70% of them data centers, according to the Texas Tribune. ERCOT itself cautions that many requests are speculative and its demand forecast is probably inflated. That caution cuts both ways: it means some projects may never be built, and it also means officials are approving and planning against numbers nobody can fully trust.
We want to be precise. We are not claiming that officials privately concealed a known shortfall. What the public record shows is that independent grid reliability authorities published escalating warnings, and in many places projects advanced anyway, sometimes under nondisclosure agreements and sometimes over local objections. When voters see that sequence, and then see their bills, they draw a conclusion.

Why the Bill Concern Is Real, and Why It Is Contested
The electricity price argument is the most contested part of this debate, so it deserves care.

In PJM, the grid operator serving 13 states and Washington, DC, capacity auction prices rose from $28.92 per megawatt-day for 2024/25 to $329.17 for 2026/27, roughly tenfold. PJM’s independent market monitor attributed 63% of the increase in the 2025/26 auction to data center demand, about $9.3 billion in added costs recovered from ratepayers, according to analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
But capacity charges are only about 10% to 20% of a typical bill, as FactCheck.org notes, and several studies find no clear nationwide link between data centers and household rate increases. A Rutgers policy lab analysis found no statistically significant local bill effect yet, while warning that “not yet” is not the same as “nothing to worry about.” FactCheck.org also cites an estimate that capacity increases added about $18 per month to the average home bill in western Maryland and $16 in Ohio between mid-2025 and mid-2026, with 63% of that tied to data centers.

The honest summary: the bill effect is real and documented in some regions, overstated in others, and likely to grow if the cost-allocation rules do not change. Voters are reacting to the direction of travel, and the direction is up.

“Doesn’t Slowing Down Hand China the Win?”
This is the strongest objection, and it is not frivolous. If China is building power at this scale and pricing it for AI, then any delay in the US could cost real strategic ground.

But the China comparison cuts against the current approach, not for it. The binding constraint on American AI is no longer chips alone. It is power, transmission, and public consent, and the backlash of November 3rd shows what happens when a project skips the last of those. Projects imposed on unwilling towns get voted down, and every vote down is a delay no strategist planned for.

We also want to avoid the lazy conclusion that the US should copy Beijing. China’s model rests on centralized, state-directed planning that the US system, with its many jurisdictions and its commitment to local consent, cannot and should not replicate. China’s buildout has its own costs: Oxford Institute for Energy Studies notes it added as much as 80 gigawatts of new coal-fired power in 2025, and Al Jazeera reports a gap between China’s data center capacity and how much of it is actually used. The lesson is narrower and more useful: China treats the grid as infrastructure to be built before the load arrives. We have been building the load and hoping the grid catches up.

The Fix: Grid First, Public Accountability Always
The way out is not a moratorium on AI infrastructure and not a free pass for developers. It is a different order of operations. The framework at Department of Technology proposes layered accountability: a confirmed federal Secretary of Technology, and elected technology leaders at the state, county, and local level who answer to the voters whose bills and water supply are on the line. Concretely:
Grid first. No major data center approval without a utility- or grid-operator-certified plan covering power supply, transmission, and interconnection timing.

Make the large loads pay. Require large-load tariffs so the full cost of new generation and grid upgrades lands on the facilities that cause it, not on residential ratepayers. Pennsylvania’s governor has moved this direction with an executive order requiring developers to build, bring, or buy their own capacity, and a Republican challenger has pressed for a ratepayer-protection moratorium. This is not a one-party issue.

Publish the grid impact. Before any rezoning or tax abatement, publish projected power demand, water use, and cost allocation in plain language, and limit NDAs on projects that use public land, money, or incentives.

Fund the wires. Treat transmission and interconnection reform as national AI infrastructure, because it is. If the United States wants to out-build China on compute, it has to stop being out-built on the grid.

What Each of Us Can Do
Congress: Prioritize transmission permitting and interconnection reform, and pass transparency rules for large-load projects.
Statehouses and utility commissions: Adopt large-load tariffs and grid-readiness tests before approvals, and require public notice before rezoning or tax breaks.
Candidates and local officials: Answer two questions in public. Who pays for the power this project needs? Where is the grid study that says it can be delivered?

Voters: Ask every candidate those same two questions, at every level, before the next ballot.

The Choice
The United States can win the AI race, but not by asking communities to host the buildout on faith. China’s advantage is not that it has better engineers. It is that it built the power first. If we want national AI leadership, we have to earn it the way voters just demanded: build the grid, make the costs transparent, and put people accountable to the public in charge of the decisions.

Summary
Voters in 40 of 41 local data center ballot measures on November 3rd chose limits, and polls show most Americans oppose a data center near them. The backlash is not a rejection of AI. It reflects a buildout that outran the grid, a shortfall that grid reliability authorities publicly warned about, and a bill impact that is real in some regions and contested in others. China built power and transmission first, at a scale and speed the US has not matched, though its model is not one we should copy. The answer is to put the grid first, make the large loads pay, and make the decisions accountable to the people who live with them.
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