The company said bringing those data centers online would save residential customers $5 billion in charges over a decade. The full picture of data centers’ impact on monthly bills is more complicated. Slocum also pointed to how data centers compete with electric utilities’ other needs for equipment like transformers. “Data centers have essentially become an inflationary component of utility service that is not accounted for in this policy narrative of ‘data centers should pay their fair share,’” Slocum said. But as local backlash to data centers surges, “the utilities here are not neutral arbiters,” according to Slocum.