Hawley and Warren Want Data Centers to Report Their Power Bills. Cooling Will Be on That List.
Two senators who agree on almost nothing agree on this.
Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent a joint letter to the Energy Information Administration on March 26, requesting that the agency create a mandatory annual reporting requirement for data centers and large electricity loads. The letter calls for detailed data on power consumption and grid impact. Bipartisan Senate action is rare enough that it signals something: both the populist right and the progressive left have arrived at the same conclusion about data centers, for different reasons, and the reporting mechanism is where they can work together.
Hawley's concern is grid reliability and consumer electricity prices. Warren's concern is corporate accountability and environmental impact. The framing differs. The ask is identical. Get the numbers on record.
For the data center cooling industry, this is the moment the energy conversation shifts from voluntary disclosure to compelled transparency. And cooling is not a footnote in that conversation. It is a primary subject.
The Scale of the Problem They Are Measuring
US data centers consumed approximately 176 TWh of electricity in the most recent annual measurement period, representing roughly 4.4% of national electricity consumption. That number is growing fast. The Electric Power Research Institute projects that data centers could represent between 9 and 17% of US electricity demand by 2030, depending on AI infrastructure build rates. The range is wide because the primary variable is how quickly hyperscalers commission new GPU capacity.
At 176 TWh annually, data centers already consume more electricity than the entire state of California's residential sector. At 17% of national consumption by 2030, they would rival the combined residential load of the ten most populous US states. These are not marginal loads that utilities can absorb without planning. They are structural changes to the grid that require capacity additions, transmission upgrades, and generation investment measured in tens of billions of dollars.
The problem Hawley and Warren are naming is that none of this is currently tracked in a way that gives regulators, grid operators, or the public a clear picture of where the demand is growing, how fast, or what it consists of. Voluntary disclosures from major operators exist, but they are inconsistent in methodology, incomplete in coverage, and not aggregated in any official dataset. The EIA's existing data collection does not break out data centers as a distinct load category with the granularity needed for grid planning.
Why Cooling Specifically Gets Exposed
Cooling accounts for 30 to 40% of total data center power consumption, depending on facility age, design, and climate. In legacy air-cooled facilities with poor PUE, that share can reach 50%. In modern liquid-cooled hyperscale campuses with free cooling and heat reuse, it can drop below 10%.
That spread is the story. When mandatory reporting arrives and cooling energy consumption appears as a distinct line item in federal datasets for the first time, the gap between best-in-class operators and the median will be visible to anyone who looks. Regulators who examine those numbers will not need to be told that a facility drawing 45% of its power for cooling is a target for efficiency mandates. The math will make the argument for them.
Operators who have already converted to direct liquid cooling, closed-loop systems, and free cooling strategies will show up well in that data. Their PUE figures are already in the range of 1.1 to 1.3, meaning roughly 10 to 30 cents of overhead power consumed for every dollar of IT power delivered. Operators still running raised-floor air cooling in 2026 are looking at PUE figures of 1.5 to 2.0 or worse. That is 50 to 100 cents of overhead per dollar of IT work. On a government spreadsheet, that difference will be difficult to explain away.
Pennsylvania Moves First at the State Level
While the Senate letter targets the federal EIA, Pennsylvania did not wait. On March 24, the Pennsylvania House passed H.B. 1834 by a 104-95 vote, creating the first state-level regulatory framework specifically governing data center power consumption and its impact on the broader grid.
The bill has three provisions that matter. First, it prohibits utilities from shifting costs of grid upgrades required by data center loads onto residential and commercial ratepayers. Second, it requires data centers to cover the infrastructure costs their demand creates. Third, it mandates 32% clean energy sourcing by 2035 for covered facilities.
Representative Robert Matzie, who sponsored H.B. 1834, stated the case plainly: "Nobody's electric bill should go up one cent if a data center comes to Pennsylvania." That sentence is the entire policy in one line. The 104-95 vote was not overwhelming. But it passed.
Pennsylvania has 101 active data centers today with 54 more proposed. That is a meaningful concentration of load in a state that has watched its grid infrastructure buckle under existing demand from industrial and residential customers. The legislature's willingness to act is a direct response to utility rate increase proposals that cited data center growth as a contributing factor.
Other states are watching. What Pennsylvania enacted in March 2026 is the template that Ohio, Virginia, Texas, and Georgia will be debating within 12 to 18 months. Virginia is the most likely next mover; it hosts the highest concentration of data center capacity in the world and has been managing grid strain from that load for several years.
What Reporting Mandates Actually Do to Cooling Decisions
The mechanism matters. Mandatory reporting does not directly require operators to change their cooling infrastructure. But it creates the data that makes efficiency mandates possible, and it changes the internal calculus at every operator with a significant legacy air-cooled fleet.
Right now, a colocation operator running a 2006-vintage raised-floor facility at PUE 1.8 can frame that as "within spec" for its vintage without external comparison. Once that PUE sits alongside the 1.15 reported by a neighboring hyperscale liquid-cooled facility in the same federal dataset, the conversation with regulators, with tenants negotiating lease renewals, and with utility commissions examining rate cases changes materially. Disclosure creates competitive pressure even before mandates arrive.
The operators most at risk are mid-tier colocation providers with aging stock and limited capital for infrastructure modernization. They cannot match the cooling efficiency of a greenfield hyperscale build, but they can be forced to justify the gap or face rate increase liability under frameworks like Pennsylvania's. The reporting mandate is the first move. Efficiency standards are the predictable follow-on.
For liquid cooling vendors, the reporting era is an accelerant. Every energy efficiency argument they have been making in sales conversations gets externally validated by government data. The PUE differential between air and liquid cooling stops being a vendor claim and becomes a documented fact in a public federal dataset. That changes how procurement conversations go inside large enterprises that have been slow to move.
The Timeline Is Not Slow
The Hawley-Warren letter requests a mandatory reporting requirement from an agency that moves on multi-year rulemaking timelines. The Pennsylvania bill still needs to clear the state Senate. Neither of these is an immediate operational mandate.
That framing would be a mistake. The direction of travel is set. Multiple states are drafting legislation based on the Pennsylvania model. The federal EIA has already signaled that its data center reporting methodology is under review. FERC has been examining large-load interconnection issues that require better consumption data. The SEC's climate disclosure rules, even in their revised form, push large public companies toward more detailed energy reporting. These are parallel tracks converging on the same outcome: mandatory, granular, publicly accessible data on data center power consumption, including cooling.
Operators who treat this as a 2028 problem are going to spend 2027 in emergency retrofit mode. The facilities being designed and permitted today will be operating under mandatory reporting requirements before their first major equipment refresh cycle. Build the cooling architecture that looks good on a government spreadsheet, because that spreadsheet is coming.
Hawley and Warren do not agree on much. When they agree on something, pay attention.