Is Your Power Bill Higher Because of Data Centers and AI?
Everybody's pointing at the data centers.
Adam Butcher isn't.
He's President and Managing Partner of Basin Ventures. He's managed over $1.25 billion in oil and gas projects for more than 50 players in the industry. He's deployed over $500 million into minerals and royalties. He's a land guy — leases, title, ownership — which means he sees the part of this story cable news never covers.
And he walked into The Brian Nichols Show with a number that stopped me cold.
🎧 Listen to the full episode (TBNS 1095): https://www.briannicholsshow.com/is-your-power-bill-higher-because-of-data-centers-ai-tbns-1095/
Cheap Oil Is a Mirage
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest level since 1983.
Roughly 35 days of cover. Draining every single week.
Adam's take? Cheap oil is a mirage. We've been hiding that with artificial levers instead of taking our medicine.
Meet people where they're at. Most folks don't care about megawatts. They care about the number at the bottom of the envelope. So that's where we started — and then we followed the wires back to the real constraint.
Your Bill Went Up. Here's the Stat Sheet.
I brought him the numbers:
• Retail electricity up 7% in 2025
• Up roughly 40% since 2021
• Utilities requested $31 billion in rate hikes in 2025 versus $15 billion the year before
• Another $9.4 billion in Q1 of 2026 alone
• Virginia has 663 data centers; Texas has 405 — together over a quarter of every data center in the country
Adam looked at all of it and called data centers the new boogeyman.
Not because servers don't use power. Because pinning the entire bill on AI warehouses lets politicians skip the harder conversation about supply, exports, grids, and the policy choices that capped production while demand kept rising.
Somebody's paying for the wires. The question is whether we keep pretending the only villain is a server rack in northern Virginia.
Venezuela Won't Save Us Until 2028
We got into Venezuela — and why Adam says 2028 is the real timeline, not the press-release timeline.
We got into why he says he's always made more money under Democrats than Republicans. (That's not a campaign ad. That's an operator describing incentive structures.)
We got into the LNG export shutdown nobody wants to talk about on cable. ERCOT's grid math. Zuckerberg's city-sized facility outside Shreveport. And why Adam moved his fund to 50/50 oil and gas, betting on a 2027 boom.
If you're waiting for a single villain to explain a 40% power-bill jump, you're going to wait forever. Energy is a system. Systems break at multiple points at once.
Data Centers Are Real. They're Not the Whole Story.
Texas needs multiples of its current power buildout if demand keeps doing what demand is doing. Adam put it bluntly on the show: the scale problem is real.
Blaming AI for every rate case is still lazy.
Data centers concentrate load. They show up on maps. They make great chyron graphics. Underinvestment, reserve policy, export decisions, and "take our medicine" pricing that never got taken — those are harder to put in a 15-second clip.
Adam's whole pitch is land-and-lease reality over narrative. When the SPR is at 1983 lows and still draining, the "everything is fine and AI did it" story starts to sound like a distraction.
What Oil Should Actually Cost
Adam's June call — the $60 conversation that made people blink — wasn't bravado. It was his way of saying the sticker price you've been living with is a political artifact, not a free-market miracle.
We've used the SPR like a thermostat. Drain when prices hurt. Skip the part where you refill and build supply. Do that long enough and "cheap" becomes a story you tell yourself while cover days shrink toward 1983.
He also talked about the snake problem in energy politics: every solution creates a new choke point, and every choke point gets a lobby. LNG exports, grid interconnects, permitting timelines, data-center load in Virginia and Texas — they stack. Blaming the newest stack (AI) for the whole bill is how you avoid fixing the older ones.
Texas needing on the order of 5x power capacity if growth keeps compounding isn't a vibe. It's grid math. Meet people at the envelope total, then walk them back to generation, transmission, and policy. That's the episode.
The Bottom Line
Your power bill is higher. That part isn't a conspiracy.
What's contested is the cause list. Adam Butcher says data centers became the convenient boogeyman while the deeper supply story — SPR cover, LNG policy, grid capacity, and years of artificial cheapness got soft-pedaled.
Watch the episode. Follow the money and the minerals. Then look at your bill with clearer eyes.
Educated. Enlightened. Informed.
Listen to the Full Episode
Is Your Power Bill Higher Because of Data Centers & AI? | TBNS 1095
https://www.briannicholsshow.com/is-your-power-bill-higher-because-of-data-centers-ai-tbns-1095/
Guest: Adam Butcher — President & Managing Partner, Basin Ventures
Basin Ventures: https://www.basinventures.com
Adam's bio: https://www.basinventures.com/team/adam-butcher
Follow Brian: @BNicholsLiberty on X, Facebook, and Instagram
Show site: https://www.briannicholsshow.com
Sponsor note: Cardio Miracle — 15% off with code TBNS at https://cardiomiracle.com/TBNS
Host
I'm Brian Nichols... and I spent years watching the liberty movement lose arguments it should've won.
Not because the ideas were wrong. Because nobody knew how to sell them. That's where I come in.
I come from the world of sales and marketing - helping businesses communicate better, close more deals, and actually solve real problems. Somewhere along the way, I realized those same skills translate directly to politics, policy, and culture. So that's what TBNS is.
Sales. Business. Politics. Health. Taught like a real human talks. No partisan cosplay. No debating obscure philosophy. Just practical conversations about what actually works - one episode at a time.
1,100+ episodes in. Still going.
Also: unapologetic Cowboys fan. We don't need to talk about it.
