How digital demands could affect U.S. electricity prices

An important resource of the Open Energy Outlook (OEO), a key research initiative at the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, is an open-source modeling framework called Temoa that is capable of performing holistic analyses of macro-energy systems, with the OEO focusing on energy transition pathways in the United States. The initiative is a productive, ongoing collaboration between Carnegie Mellon and NC State University. 

“If you think about energy in your own life, you might wonder about gasoline and electricity prices, or the cost of renewables, or whether to buy an electric vehicle,” said Joe DeCarolis, head of CMU's Department of Engineering and Public Policy and co-director of the OEO along with Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at CMU, and Jeremiah Johnson, a professor in civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State University. “We feed the model input data, and it optimizes the deployment and utilization of  energy technologies across the system.”

Temoa is a mathematical model implemented in Python that operates on a large input dataset to produce projections about the US energy system years to decades in the future. 

Since factors like public policy, resource availability and pricing, and new technologies are constantly evolving, Temoa’s database requires regular upkeep to ensure that its analyses are as relevant and accurate as possible. 

One of the biggest challenges with a model like this is that it’s very data-intensive. It’s a continuous process to keep the database refreshed, and it requires a lot of resources.

Joe DeCarolis, Co-Director, Open Energy Outlok

With support from the Scott Institute’s 2025 hardware and software tool upgrade program, the OEO team updated Temoa’s framework to portray how growing energy demands — particularly from data centers and cryptocurrency mining — could affect electricity costs in the US. The OEO team gathered information about where data centers are located around the country and the rate at which electricity demand could grow over time, to be applied towards the analysis. 

Enabled by this new information, the OEO published a paper in Environmental Research Letters in May 2026 which estimated that electricity prices could rise anywhere between 6 to 29 percent over the next several years in areas around the U.S. that have clusters of data centers. 

The team models hourly demand to estimate the impact of data centers on electricity consumption, prices, and emissions. This report is the latest example of how Temoa, first created by DeCarolis at NC State in 2010, can be a resource for public understanding and policymaking. 

The Scott Institute’s hardware and software tool upgrade program supports the steady work that drives long-term vitality of energy research on campus, such as Temoa’s database updates. 

The Open Energy Outlook was made possible through generous support by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.