DATA CENTER SCREWS OVER NEARLY 50,000 people...
The Sierra Nevada tourist hub—home to ski resorts, lakeside casinos, and roughly 25 to 28 million annual visitors—is facing an energy crisis with a familiar culprit: the data centers powering the AI boom.
NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe’s electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities—the small California company that services the region—that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes told Fortune. Hughes is a North Lake Tahoe resident, CEO of the nonprofit Tahoe Spark, and a supervisor within the California Energy Commission’s Efficiency Division.