CREC and Data Centers

(This page will be updated if new information becomes available)

From streaming services and remote work to medical records and financial transactions, data centers have become an essential part of the 21st-century economy. Whenever you email, stream a video, shop online, bank online, use social media, artificial intelligence, or access GPS from your phone, you’ve used a data center.

Cuivre River Electric Cooperative (CREC) continues to grow with residential developments, schools, and local businesses making their home in our area. Our priority is to uphold the cooperative principle of "Concern for Community," working for the responsible and sustainable development of our communities, while protecting our existing members from undue rate burden.

CREC has not sought out data center projects; however, area municipalities across Missouri, including those within CREC’s service territory, have been approached.

CREC is obligated to serve all locations within our designated service boundaries. This "obligation to serve" ensures that all property owners, whether residential, commercial, or industrial, have equal access to reliable electricity. Our role only begins after local government bodies have granted the developer the right to build.

Currently, there are NO contracts for CREC to serve a data center. However, should that change, our priority is ensuring that as any large-scale facility(s) join our grid, the interests of our existing members remain protected. This page is designed to help you understand how we manage these requests, who makes the decisions, and how we ensure that growth pays for itself.

The cooperative does not have the authority to approve or deny land use, zoning, or annexation—those decisions are made by the municipality in which a proposed data center is located. CREC’s role is strictly to provide safe, reliable electric service to all locations within our designated service boundaries. This obligation to serve ensures that all property owners, whether residential, commercial, or industrial, have equal access to reliable electricity.

If CREC were to serve a data center, a specialized rate schedule would be established to ensure that the data center rate class fully and fairly covers the costs and obligations it creates for the cooperative. No class of members subsidizes any other class.

Data center members would face high demand charges (kW), which are the costs associated with having the power capacity ready for their highest usage peak. This is often a significant portion of their bill and incentivizes them to manage their peak load.

It is still CREC’s mission to keep rates as affordable as possible and ensure the reliable, safe delivery of electricity.

The cooperative has been under a period of significant rate pressure for several years. Doug Tracy, our President/CEO, has emphasized this in his report to members at the last several CREC annual meetings. This pressure is driven by factors including increased demand, system upgrades, and rising costs. These cost drivers and necessary system upgrades existed and were impacting our rates long before the data center conversation entered CREC’s space.

Because of these factors, future rate increases will likely be needed to ensure service reliability, whether or not a data center joins our network.

How data centers use power

· Most of the electricity used by data centers – about 60% on average, according to Pew Research – powers the servers that process and store digital information.

· AI-optimized hyperscale* data centers contain advanced servers equipped with powerful computer chips that can perform trillions of mathematical calculations per second. These chips consume much more energy than their traditional counterparts, requiring two to four times as many watts to run.

· The next-largest component of energy use at data centers is the cooling systems that prevent servers from overheating. This share ranges from about 7% at efficient hyperscalers to over 30% at less efficient enterprise facilities.

*Ability of an IT architecture to scale up or down to meet demand, particularly in computing environments that handle massive amounts of data. Companies that operate these data centers, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, are known as hyperscalers.

Infrastructure costs for data centers If a data center cannot fund the necessary infrastructure for electricity delivery, CREC cannot serve them. One of our core principles is that "growth must pay its own way." When a data center requires massive upgrades to substations or transmission lines, the developer pays for the necessary infrastructure upfront, ensuring that the financial burden does not fall on our residential or small business members.

Serving a data center DOES NOT increase the risk of power outages or brownouts for residential members.

We are required to ensure that serving any new member does not negatively impact the reliability of service for our existing members. Before any large facility connects, we work with our generation (Associated Electric Cooperative Inc/AECI) and transmission (Central Electric Power Cooperative) partners to determine if the current grid can handle the load. Independent of any specific project, we continuously plan and fund system upgrades to ensure long-term stability and to meet the growing energy needs of our entire community.

In the event of a rolling blackout, data centers would be subject to the same load-shedding requirements as any other member. They will not be prioritized over residential homes if rolling blackouts become necessary. Our commitment is to manage the system fairly and ensure that no single sector is given an unfair advantage during an energy crisis.

RELATED LINKS:

· New transformer not intended for a data center

· The co-op model: generation, transmission, distribution

· CREC annual reports

2025/26 Annual Report is now live.:

Location

Data Center Rates

Residential Rates

Infrastructure

Reliability