In 2009, NV Energy sold its California operations — which largely serviced the Lake Tahoe region — to Liberty Utilities, a newly created subsidiary of a pair of publicly traded Canadian companies, so that Nevada's largest power provider could focus on its operations in Nevada and stop answering calls from the California Public Utilities Commission. Those operations, however, included little power generation capacity. Consequently, NV Energy agreed to supply Liberty and its customers with power for five years so that Liberty would have time to find other suppliers of electricity for its customers.

Since then, Liberty funded construction of a solar power facility near Luning, Nevada, and started purchasing power from the solar facility next to the Apple data center near Reno. After requesting to extend its agreement with NV Energy in 2015, Liberty announced in 2018 that it would no longer need to purchase power from NV Energy. Both companies, however, quickly discovered that NV Energy lacked sufficient transmission capacity to support Liberty's purchase of electricity on the wholesale market, so they renewed their agreement again in 2020.

Then, in 2025, NV Energy started investing in transmission capacity.

Now that the investment is nearing completion, NV Energy informed Liberty that, as originally planned by both companies for several years, NV Energy will no longer be Liberty's supplier of electricity once sufficient transmission capacity exists for Liberty to purchase power from a different supplier. Though Liberty was caught off guard, it will now be able to resume the plan it originally pursued before 2020 to make itself independent of NV Energy's power generation facilities.

The end.

***

As far as ledes go, the above paragraphs rest uncomfortably between the introduction to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace ("Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." Riveting!) and the average decision issued by a public utilities commission. ("Pursuant to the authority provided in Pub. Util. Code § 399.13(a)(1), today's decision accepts the draft …") 

They may, in fact, be the least energizing (pun intended) way anyone has ever started an opinion column in this publication. To the editors who fell asleep while reviewing this column, I apologize.

But what if someone, somewhere, added a pair of magic words? Data centers.

"Nearly 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents have to find a new power source after their energy source looks to redirect lines to data centers," Fortune announced breathlessly. "Energy supplier abandons Lake Tahoe residents to serve data centers," echoed Ars Technica.

Unbelievable! Nevada's largest utility is refusing to serve 44,000 customers (who, despite the efforts of Isaac Roop, Nevada's first territorial governor, mostly live in California, not Nevada) because it's more profitable for the utility to power em dash-abusing artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots? I am shocked (pun intended)!

In case it isn't obvious, my tongue is so firmly planted in my cheek that I am tasting earwax. 

Local coverage, which is less beholden to the modern attention economy, has been considerably more nuanced and fact-based. Following up on reporting by CalMatters, which tied NV Energy's desire to stop providing power to Liberty to increased demand from data centers, South Tahoe Now reported in March that Liberty was given at least a year to go to the open market for power. Moonshine Ink, an independent newspaper based in Truckee, California, then followed up with a detailed report last Thursday that added context to Liberty's relationship with NV Energy and explained why Lake Tahoe's energy utility erroneously assumed it would need to renew its agreement with Nevada's largest energy provider — which expires in 2027 — one more time.

The reason, as described in Liberty's integrated resource plan and a supplemental letter submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission in 2020, was that Liberty had attempted to terminate its agreement with NV Energy and purchase power on the wholesale market before, only to discover that NV Energy was overreporting its available transmission capacity.

It turned out that NV Energy did not, in fact, have the transmission capacity needed to allow Liberty to purchase electricity from anyone other than NV Energy. Though NV Energy announced to regulators that year that it would begin constructing Greenlink West — a large-scale transmission line between Reno and Las Vegas that, once finished, will allow both companies to make large-scale wholesale renewable energy purchases from California's energy market — Liberty assumed construction might not finish until 2031.

So, in 2022, Liberty shrugged and told regulators it would just continue purchasing power from NV Energy. It's not like it could physically buy it from anywhere else anyway. When the five-year agreement between the two companies expired in 2025, NV Energy dutifully extended the agreement until May 2027.

Given that Liberty's optimism in NV Energy's capabilities had led to disappointment, it's understandable why Liberty's leadership adopted a more pessimistic attitude toward its primary energy supplier's capabilities a few years later. That pessimism, however, caught Liberty flat-footed once it became clear that NV Energy will actually complete construction of Greenlink West — and will consequently no longer be obligated to provide power to Liberty's customers in California — before the since-extended contract expires.

Even so, Liberty's failure to anticipate NV Energy's motivations or construction timelines won't lead to anyone losing access to power. According to statements published by Liberty and NV Energy, "NV Energy will continue to provide energy until Liberty has its own transmission access in place."

So why was a contractual dispute between two public utilities covered as if it was an impending catastrophe?

***

Data centers are looming monuments that deliver us the increasingly troublesome virtual worlds we carry in our pockets. Their growing presence reminds us of the anxieties and concerns we increasingly share about our new and technologically connected world.

When the internet was first deployed to the masses, it promised to connect everyone with everyone. We got that, all right, good and hard — then we got a pervasive surveillance society on top of it that pinky-promised it was only watching us to sell us targeted advertising. Now, just as we're starting to internalize the idea that we're living in a world filled with camera-equipped drones that are monitoring our cars, which surreptitiously tattle on our driving habits to insurance companies, all while our most vulnerable minds soak up potentially malicious content from endlessly scrolling screens, along comes AI, which its supporters — its supporters! — claim may cause mass unemployment and human extinction.

But only if we feed it enough terawatts and microchips first.

Standing athwart this future, yelling Stop, at a time when no one with actual political or financial power seems inclined to do so, seems only sensible when our current moment is framed this way.

Once you accept this frame, arguments become soldiers against total catastrophe. Abstract ideals, such as objective truth and journalistic integrity, suddenly seem much less important than stopping human and environmental extinction.

Do data centers use a lot of electricity? Sure — so do sports arenas but you don't see Reno passing a moratorium on them anytime soon.

Will 44,000 Tahoe residents really lose their power because of data centers? Who cares? If claiming that they might brings us one step closer to banning their construction, humanity will take one step back from the brink.

And if a few opportunists happen to catch on that the words "data center" can be used as a magic button that can be pressed to make people feel and react in predictable and easily manipulable ways, well, that's the tithe we pay to vice so we can advance the virtue of avoiding calamity. We certainly wouldn't want to learn anything from President George Bush's war on terror, President Bill Clinton's war on crime, President Richard Nixon's war on drugs or Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare, right?

More seriously, prospective apocalyptic futures may impress credulous investors who should be rooting against such visions, but they're ultimately sales copy — and like all sales copy, reality seldom quite measures up as advertised.

For example, some managers and executives might think AI will boost productivity enough to allow meaningful cuts to their workforces but workers are finding that AI causes as many problems — and at least as much work — as it solves. If AI drives cuts to employment, it will do so because companies are investing far too much in increasingly expensive AI tokens that aren't producing corresponding value and profit, not because of catastrophic gains in productivity that allow a single benighted executive to replace a workforce of independently thinking humans with a perfectly orchestrated army of AI agents.

Meanwhile, AI is starting to deliver some concrete benefits. Researchers are starting to successfully use AI to accelerate early drug and vaccine discovery, while software developers are finding that AI — if properly used — can be used to quickly find and fix the sort of security vulnerabilities that plague our always-online world.

At some point, we do need to ask ourselves why the builders of AI were handsomely rewarded for openly pitching the same cartoonishly evil logic used by the fictional company Vault-Tec in Fallout to sell underground shelters while it instigated nuclear armageddon. The material success of that initial sales pitch is not the product of a healthy culture or society.

While we ask that question, however, let's make sure we don't throw the truth out with the bathwater.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenvor email him at [email protected]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.