There is something almost too neat about this story. The AI industry has discovered that it wants more electricity than the American grid can deliver, and one of the industry's own founding figures has a product ready: Redwood Materials, run by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, is launching a business to help data centers get power without waiting in line for the public system.
As far as it goes, this is better than the alternative. Redwood's pitch, as the company has described it, is to repurpose retired electric-vehicle batteries as storage for power-hungry facilities. That beats the other thing the AI boom is producing in volume, which is new gas turbines bolted onto server farms. A battery that already exists and would otherwise be a recycling problem is a more honest answer to AI's energy appetite than another pipeline. Credit where due.
But the Left shouldn't stop at applause, because the phrase doing the work in this story is "avoiding congestion." Congestion on the grid isn't weather. It is the product of decades of underinvestment in transmission, interconnection queues that stretch for years, and a political system that has treated the grid as a private-sector afterthought. Ordinary households and small businesses have lived with the consequences. Now that the richest companies on earth are stuck in the same queue, the solution on offer is to build around it.
That should make us uneasy. The grid is a public good, the thing that connects a hospital in Ohio to a retiree in Phoenix to a factory in Georgia. When the biggest, best-capitalized customers peel off into private power arrangements, the pressure to fix the shared system eases for exactly the people with the most clout to fix it. A two-tier grid, with fast private lanes for those who can pay and a creaking public road for everyone else, is not an accident of engineering. It is a choice about who matters.
Meanwhile, households are already absorbing costs. In the mid-Atlantic, capacity auction prices tied to surging data-center demand have fed into higher utility bills. Customers who never asked for a chatbot are subsidizing the infrastructure behind it. That is the real test of any "solution" for AI power: does the company that creates the load pay the full cost of serving it? Self-supplied, battery-backed power can answer yes. Quietly leaning on the shared grid when convenient, and disconnecting when not, answers no.
And here the political hypocrisy is hard to miss. Washington's leadership insists that winning the AI race is a national priority on the scale of the Cold War, then gutted clean-energy incentives that would make cheap, fast, domestic power possible. You cannot demand an industrial revolution and legislate against the solar panels, batteries and transmission lines that power it. Redwood is filling a vacuum that policy created.
Democrats are not off the hook either. Too many of us have been happy to cheer "clean AI" press releases while permitting reform stalled, transmission lines died in local fights, and the interconnection process stayed a bureaucratic swamp. If the climate and affordability agenda means anything, it means making the public grid fast, abundant and fair, not admiring the private workarounds.
So the standard should be simple. Let data centers bring their own clean power, and make them pay for every public megawatt they touch. Require that their private energy build-out add capacity rather than hoard it. Treat any company that gets ahead of the queue as owing something to the people still standing in it. Redwood's batteries may be a smart tool. Whether they become part of a shared energy future or a gated one is a question for voters and regulators, not for a keynote at CES.
How it may affect me
Data-center demand is already influencing electricity costs in some regions. Check whether your utility or state regulator has adopted "large-load" tariffs that make big data centers pay for the grid upgrades they require, and watch rate cases, where those costs are decided, since public comment can shape the outcome.
