As data centers become political hot potatoes across the nation, a federal agency responsible for analyzing data about the different aspects of energy production, power and use in the U.S. is preparing to conduct a massive national study of data centers. An out-in-the-field study and not one conducted behind the desks of federal workers in Washington, D.C.
“We need to go out to data centers and meet with the corporates also, but we need to meet with people who will be, responding to our surveys because we cannot deal in a vacuum. We cannot be sitting behind a desk and writing reports without actually doing it.,” said Tristan Abbey, the man who is the Administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a job he took on in September of last year.
Abbey recently made a guest appearance at the Hamm Institute for American Energy in Oklahoma City, explaining not only the intent of the EIA, but its purpose.
“So, the US Energy Information Administration was created about 50 years ago as part of the Department of Energy. And we are the semi-independent stats arm of the Department of Energy. So, we are part of the Department of Energy, but we produce independent stats and analysis,” he said in a recent interview with Scott Mitchell of the podcast, “Mitchell Talks Energy with Jerry Bohnen.”
The EIA’s role is to provide a national energy information system, and it tracks energy stats on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual and even longer basis. Abbey admitted the EIA has tended to stay inside Washington, D.C. and present its findings and analysis to Washington, D.C. think tanks. When he became administrator, he ordered changes in the way things had been done.
“I decided that it would be an important priority for this agency to go out into the field. To go out to the rest of the country and share the information that the rest of the country pays for.”
Some of the information to be shared is the growing demand for electricity and consumers in many cases are blaming the ballooning growth of AI—-data centers. Such as the January report entitled, “EIA forecasts strongest four-year growth in U.S. electricity demand since 2000, fueled by data centers.”
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) published its first energy-sector forecasts through 2027 in the January Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO). The report stated the EIA expects U.S. electricity use to grow by 1% this year and 3% in 2027. This increase would mark the first time since 2007 that power demand has risen for four years in a row and the strongest four-year growth period since 2000. The driving factor behind this surge is increasing demand from large computing centers.
“U.S. energy production remains strong, and natural gas output is expected to grow to nearly 109 billion cubic feet per day this year,” said Tristan Abbey, Administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Natural gas supply is critical as we forecast that U.S. liquefied natural gas exports expand and electricity demand rises through 2027, driven largely by increasing demand from large computing facilities, including data centers.”
“EIA’s role is to try to gather as much information as we can to better understand what exactly is happening, how quickly it is happening. We did three already in Washington State, Texas, and Virginia. We are going to do more in the Rocky Mountain”
For now, the EIA projects a rising demand for electricity for the next two years.
“We have no idea what will happen exactly in the year 2040. These scenarios are in there to help us think through what they might look like in the future. Absolutely, so for the past 15 years prior to the past couple years, energy demand as far as electricity generation was flat across the United States.”
Then, AI took over.
“Over the past five years or so, we have seen small increases each year. These small increases, just a couple percent a year, add up. What we are really seeing is electricity be at an inflection point where demand for power generation is going to go up. A lot of that is being driven by data.”
Data centers are behind some of it and the EIA wants to learn more about their impact on the demand for more power from utilities who are, in many cases, responding with power-expanding projects and their approval by state regulators, not just in Oklahoma but elsewhere.
“There are possible scenarios. We have full energy information available. Meeting with Americans, meeting with American companies, talking to people who run no different with data centers.”
Abbey was sworn in on September 25, 2025, as the 11th administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Prior to joining the U.S. Department of Energy as a senior advisor in June 2025, Abbey served as a Distinguished Fellow at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, Inc., and a Senior Fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics.
He previously served on staff at the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, the National Security Council, the National Economic Council, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Prior to government service, Abbey worked as an associate at Clarium Capital Management LLC, a global macro hedge fund, and as a summer associate at the venture capital firm Founders Fund.
