Two United States government officials recently spoke about how the demand for powering artificial intelligence and the country’s data center growth will make electricity cheaper in the long run. Building on the many unique advantages of our region, Entergy is capturing this generational growth opportunity to deliver what our customers want – low-cost, reliable and cleaner power, which creates opportunities for the region to thrive.

At a recent energy conference in Washington, D.C., United States Energy Secretary Chris Wright argued that building data centers will ultimately drive down electricity prices through the addition of new generating capacity and better use of existing backup power resources.

“When people say, ‘AI is going to drive up my price of electricity,’ it’s actually the opposite,” Wright said. “The way to get electricity prices down is to produce more electricity,” explaining that the faster the U.S. builds data centers and reshores manufacturing, the more average electricity prices will fall.

Entergy Louisiana recently broke ground on a pair of natural gas generating facilities recently approved by the Louisiana Public Service Commission, which will deliver modern, efficient and dependable energy to all customers in north Louisiana including Meta’s state-of-the-art data center. The LPSC approved a total capacity of 2.2 gigawatts of natural gas power generation and authorized Entergy Louisiana to procure up to 1,500 megawatts of new solar and/or hybrid resources. Under the terms of the agreement, Meta will pay for the full cost of the energy infrastructure needed to connect its Richland Parish data center to the grid.

On a separate panel at the energy conference, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Commissioner David Rosner expressed optimism that energy rates can be protected even with the growth in data center demand. Rosner said he hears from tech companies that they want to build faster and to pay for the services. He highlighted Entergy and the state of Mississippi’s deal to bring Amazon to the state as an example of how to structure such agreements to benefit customers.

“[R]ate design can solve these affordability problems. If you look at Entergy in Mississippi, they designed a rate for the tech company to pay for everything they need to connect the data center to the grid and a little bit more,” Rosner said. “We have to make sure the public knows we can solve this problem.”

Thanks to a thoughtful, customer-focused agreement with Amazon, Entergy Mississippi’s residential customers could see 16% lower electricity prices than they would otherwise face. Revenues from Amazon are saving customers money on construction costs to replace 50-year-old legacy gas plants with modern natural gas plants that are 40% more fuel efficient.

As a fully integrated electric company that generates, transmits and distributes power to 3 million customers, Entergy is making investments in the energy grid to support the expansion of large-scale industrial customers, data center expansion, the onshoring of jobs and broader economic development opportunities. These grid investments will benefit all customers through improved service reliability, more power capacity and redundancy during a time of much-needed economic growth in our region.

Learn more at Entergy.com/DataCenters.