About

I’ve spent nearly two decades inside the utility machine—mostly designing energy systems and structuring deals, plus a stint as Washington, DC’s energy chief, where I earned EPA’s 2014 Climate Leadership Award. My forthcoming book, BLACKOUT, INC., part memoir and part financial thriller, draws on that experience to tell the story of the most rigged businesses in America: they always win, they never lose, and our bills soar.

Now AI has handed the machine its biggest payday ever. As utilities race to build power plants and wires for data centers, the industry is on pace to spend more than $1 trillion in the second half of this decade.1 In Louisiana, a single utility has ten power plants in the pipeline for a single customer, Meta; the century-old firm currently has sixteen power plants, total, for its 1.1 million customers.2 This, as they say, is a big f'ing deal.

The great thing about the AI boom—if you’re an electric utility—is that your bet comes with a giant pool of customers who can’t leave. When utilities spend money, they’re guaranteed to get paid back, profit included; that’s how the monopoly system has worked for a century. So while most AI bets put money from Wall Street and Silicon Valley on the line, the downside here is on you, me, and everyone else with a power bill. Utilities and Big Tech constantly say the data centers are paying their own way, a claim the press almost always repeats. As I’ll show here, that isn’t true.

The grid’s also where the AI hype machine becomes measurable. Press releases can say anything, but meters are less imaginative. Looking at things with a utility lens, I’ll follow what’s actually getting built, how quickly, and on whose dime.

And while the AI boom is new, it’s also kerosene on a fire that was already burning. Utilities have perfected a heads-they-win, tails-everyone-else-loses playbook: profiting from hurricanes that level their grids; replacing poles and wires with newer poles and wires, but calling it “modernization” and charging 3x; financially engineering outcomes in the finest tradition of Wall Street (and Enron); and building a mountain of debt that only makes sense if they live forever.

Expect original reporting and are-you-kidding-me stories about who’s building what, who’s profiting, and who’s actually paying. I’m not afraid of this fight: the last time I found systemic utility fraud, the government tried to bury it, so I prosecuted it myself (that story hasn’t been told yet).

Have something you think I should see? Signal: @sambrooks.01