Rough Notes, May 14, 2026: Power Diversions, Cerebras's IPO Flow Implications, etc.

Four things that caught my eye today:

1. Lake Tahoe's data center problem
2. Utilities telling the truth about data centers
3. New data on AI and job vacancies
4. Cerebras's IPO flow implications.

Let's do this:

1. centersLake Tahoe's data center problem.
   1. Berkshire Hathaway-owned NV Energy will stop wholesale electricity deliveries to Lake Tahoe’s provider after May 2027. It is being redirected to a slate of new northern Nevada data centers, adding up to 5,900 MW of new load by 2033.
   2. Data centers already consume roughly 20% of Nevada's electricity, potentially rising to 35% this decade.
   3. Liberty Utilities serves only ~49,000 customers and depends heavily on NV Energy transmission infrastructure, making replacement supply difficult and expensive.
   4. Tahoe-area residential electricity costs have risen roughly 77% since late 2022, versus national electricity inflation of roughly 40% since 2020.
   5. We will see much more of this in the future, and that (most) politicians and utility leaders don't see what's coming remains remarkably blinkered.
2. Utilities backing away from data centers.
   1. In its recent quarterly call, CEO Joe Nolan of Eversource did something unusual, at least for a U.S. utility: he said the quiet thing out loud. He said that data centers coming to his service area were bad for customers, whether industrial or residential, and would drive up prices.
   2. Utilities have historically treated load growth as positive because it socialized fixed infrastructure costs. For a utility to treat load growth as a negative, given built-in cost recovery is ... wildly unusual and noteworthy.