Is Your Power Bill Higher Because of Data Centers & AI? | TBNS 1095

Adam Butcher joins Brian Nichols to reveal what's actually driving your electricity bill higher and why blaming data centers and AI misses the real story about America's energy supply.

Everybody's pointing at the data centers. Adam isn't.

He's the 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 and 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 nobody on cable news covers.

And he came on with a number that stopped me cold. 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... and we've been hiding that with artificial levers instead of taking our medicine.

So I brought him the stat sheet. 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.

And Adam looked at all of it and called data centers the new boogeyman.

We get into Venezuela and why 2028 is the real timeline. We get into why he says he's always made more money under Democrats than Republicans. We get into the LNG export shutdown, ERCOT's grid math, Zuckerberg's city-sized facility outside Shreveport, and why he moved his fund to 50/50 oil and gas betting on a 2027 boom.

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.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Somebody's Paying For The Wires

02:26 Billy Bob Made Us Famous

03:35 The $60 Call He Made In June

04:05 Cheap Oil Is A Mirage

08:03 Venezuela Won't Save Us Until 2028

11:48 I Make More Money Under Democrats

13:23 The LNG Shutdown Nobody Talks About

15:24 The Snake Problem

18:27 What Oil Should Actually Cost

22:11 We Have To Take Our Medicine

22:46 Your Bill Went Up 40 Percent

25:05 Data Centers Are The New Boogeyman

29:15 Texas Needs 5X Its Power

31:06 Final Thoughts

CONNECT WITH ADAM BUTCHER

Basin Ventures: https://www.basinventures.com

Adam's bio: https://www.basinventures.com/team/adam-butcher

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamwbutcher

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CONNECT WITH BRIAN

https://www.briannicholsshow.com

brian@briannicholsshow.com

X, Facebook, Instagram: @BNicholsLiberty

Recorded at Cardio Miracle Studios in eastern Indiana. New episodes Thursdays.

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