Ronald Bailey, technical advisor, left, and Todd M. Smith, commercial advisor, walk through one of the underground tunnel connections at the Westland Bunker, an underground data center facility in Montgomery.

West San Antonio has seen a boom in data center construction. Microsoft's center in Texas Research Park is seen in this aerial photo from 2020.

Sage Geosystems, a Houston-based geothermal startup, will build a new facility to power Meta data centers, the two companies annnounced Monday, Aug. 26.

Meta, the Facebook parent company, is opening a new data center in Temple, Texas.

Data centers providing artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining are making enormous demands on the nation’s electric grid, with generators wondering how to produce so much more electricity and environmentalists worried about perpetuating fossil fuels.

The new facilities also threaten to drive up home electric bills by 70% in 2030, the nonpartisan, right-leaning Jack Kemp Foundation calculated. Texas customers who are already paying much more for power due to natural disasters and existing data centers could suffer even more because state leaders are trying to attract even more crypto business.

“As data center expansion accelerates, consumers and small businesses are likely to bear the brunt of the consequences through higher electricity costs and brownouts and blackouts across the country,” Ike Brannon, co-author of the study, wrote. “The average American household could pay over a........

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