The electric bills for many Houston-area residents will be going up, but it's just the usual seasonal rate adjustments -- the race to build new power infrastructure in Texas is just getting started.
CenterPoint and other electricity distributors are raising their rates to your retail power provider as they do each September, and the company says those rates will go down again as the Spring season arrives in March, and the higher bills some will be seeing is not related to the much-publicized artificial intelligence and data centers that are being planned.
Some of those data centers are only in the planning stages and some are being built, but the onslaught of new power demand is mostly coming from consumers these days, as people from other states continue to move to Texas.
"AI is going to be a huge power drain, a huge consumer of power [soon] and I think it's really important that as those data centers are being built that they be built in ways that can be responsive to the grid," Rice University Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Daneil Cohan says.
The latest idea to help data centers stay online is requiring them to bring their own in-house power generating systems, whether it's solar, wind or nuclear.
But there's a race going on, as electricity distributors such as CenterPoint and Entergy Texas work to expand their infrastructure to handle higher power demands.
"If it's done right, if it's done responsibly, it doesn't have to be a problem for Texas consumers," Cohan says.