Why one energy advocate wants conservatives to welcome data centers as paying customers

DENVER — The fight over artificial intelligence data centers has scrambled the usual political lines, and Daniel Turner wants conservatives to think hard about which side of it they end up on. The founder and executive director of Power the Future, a nonprofit that advocates for American energy jobs, told The Kim Monson Show that the surge in computing demand is something American energy producers should be racing to serve.

“I see data centers as a customer base for American energy workers,” Turner said on the show. “We need more coal. We need more electricity. We need more natural gas.” His argument turns a project many rural residents dread into an opportunity, and it set up a frank exchange with Monson, who came to the conversation from what she called the grassroots side, worried about her quality of life and about surveillance.

A buyer for power, not a threat to it

Turner’s case starts with supply and demand. Data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity, and that load has to be generated somewhere. Rather than treat the demand as a burden, he wants energy companies to build to meet it with the most reliable sources available.

He pointed to a Meta project in Ohio as the kind of arrangement he favors. State regulators have approved natural gas plants there that operate behind the meter to serve an adjacent Meta data center, units that supply the facility directly and are not connected to the regional grid, according to POWER Magazine. For Turner, deals like that add dispatchable generation that would otherwise never get built.

He credited a Trump administration policy with opening the door. The White House executive order “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” signed July 23, 2025, eases federal permitting for large data center projects and the baseload generation built to serve them, including gas, coal and nuclear. Turner described the effect as letting technology companies act like utilities. “For the first time, the president has said, okay, look, these data centers are gonna require a lot of power, you all have a lot of money, so build a natural gas plant with it, build a coal plant with it,” he said.

The opposition Turner says he distrusts

The heart of Turner’s warning is about who he believes is organizing the national resistance to data centers. He argues the coordinated, well-funded campaigns against them trace back to the environmental left rather than to local residents.

Turner argues the national resistance is neither organic nor authentic, and he traces it to “the climate left that hates anything related to American energy.” He worries that rural conservatives skeptical of new development will find common cause with activists who, in his telling, will move on to the next target once the data center fight is over. “I never want to be in bed with the climate left,” he said. “That’s the point of our work.”

Power the Future has put that claim in writing. In a May 4 report titled “Manufactured Outrage,” the group alleged a coordinated, billionaire-funded and “potentially foreign-backed” campaign against data center development, and it has asked Congress to investigate whether foreign money is involved.

The affordability question

Where Turner and Monson found easy agreement was on the cost of electricity. Turner’s Power the Future report, “The Looming American Electricity Affordability Crisis,” frames climbing power costs as a wealth transfer away from households. Monson, who said she read the full report, called rising power costs a wealth transfer on air as well.

The price increase is documented. National residential electricity averaged 13.66 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2021 and reached 18.83 cents in March 2026, according to the EIA, a rise of roughly 38%. Turner blames the retirement of reliable generation. He says more than 100 natural gas and coal plants were closed nationwide under Biden administration EPA rules, and he cited the closure of the two Indian Point reactors in New York, shut down in 2020 and 2021 under a settlement with the state, as reported by the EIA. The mechanics, he argued, are basic economics. “If the supply of something decreases and the demand even stays the same, prices go up,” he said.

Where the guest and host parted ways

The sharpest moment came over what the data centers are for. Monson accepted the national-security argument, that the country wants to stay ahead of China on AI, but said her deeper worry runs elsewhere. “I think it’s to surveil everyday people,” she said, invoking the COVID-era sorting of Coloradans into essential and nonessential. Her fear is a standing surveillance infrastructure that could be activated “when the political winds change.”

Turner shared the concern. “I agree with you there 100%,” he said, and pointed to Congress as the place to regulate the technology. He drew a distinction between surveillance people invite into their homes and surveillance imposed on them. “I don’t have monitors. I don’t have smart meters. I don’t have smart appliances,” he said. “You really can’t be surveilled if you’re not buying cameras.” Monson raised a case that troubled both of them: a Fortune report that about 49,000 Lake Tahoe customers of Liberty Utilities were told their wholesale supplier, NV Energy, would stop delivering power after May 2027, with the utility citing data center growth. NV Energy has called the change a long-planned transition. Turner called that kind of corporatism frightening and said residents in that position should be free to build their own power.

A government that does the boring things

Underneath the disagreement sat a shared idea about what government is supposed to do. Turner returned again and again to the unglamorous functions he believes elected representatives neglect in favor of grander causes. “I need you to provide reliable power,” he said. Government should “fix roads, fix bridges, make sure I have hospitals. And stay the heck out of my life.”

“Power is boring. Electricity is boring,” Turner said. “But by golly, we need people to do the boring stuff.” His case was that delivering reliable, affordable energy is the kind of competent, limited governance that lets people pursue their own ends, and that a buildout serving real demand can fit that vision if elected representatives hold the line on the surveillance questions Monson raised.