Powering Pennsylvania’s Potential

Drive across Pennsylvania right now and you’ll start noticing something new going up alongside the farms and factories: data centers. Big, unglamorous buildings full of servers. If you’ve read anything about them lately, you’ve probably heard the warning: they’re the boogeyman, straining the power grid and eating up electricity nobody can spare.

Here’s the number driving that fear: according to research from Americans for Prosperity’s policy roadmap, a data center can use up to 50 times more electricity per square foot than a typical office building. By 2028, these facilities could account for a dramatically larger share of the country’s electricity use.

To some, that sounds like a problem. I’d argue it’s a sign of something going right.

Meet Sarah, who runs a small marketing firm. Two years ago, she couldn’t compete for national clients: she didn’t have enough staff, nor a budget to be successful. Today she’s using AI tools to do work that used to require a team of twelve, and she’s landing contracts she never could have touched before. None of that happens without a data center running somewhere in the background.

Meet Tim, who owns a precision manufacturing shop here in the commonwealth. He’s using AI-assisted design software to shave weeks off production timelines that used to slow him down against bigger competitors. Meet the family in rural Pennsylvania whose kid is getting tutored in calculus by an AI program because the nearest specialist tutor is ninety minutes away. None of it happens without power, and lots of it.

That’s the part the doom-and-gloom coverage leaves out. A data center isn’t the destination—it’s the plumbing. It’s what lets millions of Pennsylvanians build, compete, and solve problems nobody in Harrisburg or Washington ever could have planned for them. This is how progress has always been achieved in this country: not because a handful of planners mapped it out in advance, but because people closest to a problem were free to experiment, try things, and build.

Here’s where it gets frustrating: the digital economy moves fast. Our permitting system, however, does not. Our roadmap points out that the median federal Environmental Impact Statement takes almost three years to complete. Three years, in an economy that reinvents itself every eighteen months.

Pennsylvania has coal country, natural gas, and the workforce to build the energy infrastructure this moment demands. Why don’t we have a permitting process built for the century we’re living in?

How can we power our potential? It’s clearing the path: modernizing the grid, streamlining permitting so it still protects legitimate interests without defaulting to “no,” and letting entrepreneurs build the infrastructure this state needs instead of waiting years for a green light.

This is what the principle of mutual benefit looks like in practice: Sarah’s firm, the family tutoring their children, that data center down the road—none of it succeeds unless it’s creating something valuable enough that someone else chooses to use it. Nobody’s forcing that. It’s just how a free economy works when you let it.

Yes, data centers use a lot of energy. So did the factories that built Pennsylvania’s middle class. So did the railroads that once ran through this commonwealth and connected it to the rest of the country. Every generation faces the same choice: ask how to restrict rising demand or ask how to build enough to meet it. Pennsylvania didn’t become an industrial powerhouse by choosing the first question, and there’s no reason to start now.

Head to americansforprosperity.org to learn more about what commonsense permitting reform could mean for Pennsylvania’s energy future.

This is Emily Brey, State Director with Americans for Prosperity-PA.