Physical Economy Nosedives, ‘Data Center Growth’ in Ten States Masks the Disaster

The Energy Information Administration reports that commercial sector electricity sales increased by only 1% last year from 2019 levels. It gets worse: The 1% is an average of a positive growth of 10% in 10 states building large-scale computing facilities, such as data centers, and cryptocurrency operations that gobble up electricity—a total of 42 billion kWh between 2019 and 2023. In the same period, demand in the 40 other states fell by 3%, or by 28 billion kWh. Meanwhile, in the physical economy, steel production fell from 87.8 million tons in 2019, to 82.0 million tons in 2022 (the last year with available data), and car production decreased from 200,000 units to 120,000 units between 2020 and 2024.