By Guy Page

Let’s talk about Senator Bernie Sanders, artificial intelligence, and—of course—blaming Donald Trump for America’s rising electricity rates.

After spending his political career saying NO to large baseload power producers, Bernie Sanders now says there’s “not enough electricity to go around.” And—big surprise—he’s pointing the finger at the billionaires again. 

In a letter dated November 10, signed by four other senators including Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey and more about him later, Sanders attacked the Trump Administration, accusing it of giving “sweetheart deals to Big Tech companies” building AI and saddling everyday Americans with bigger electricity bills. According to the letter, the Administration is failing to keep consumers from “subsidizing the cost of data centers”—costs that Bernie says are compounded by an “assault on clean energy.”

Imagine that! Ratepayers subsidizing an industry the government likes. What have we been doing in Vermont for 15 years but subsidizing all of the solar power and wind turbines at artificially high prices?

To give Bernie his due, his letter does cite some eye-popping power demands: Meta data centers using up to 5 gigawatts each—the equivalent of nearly four million homes—and national data-center consumption jumping from 5% to 12% of all U.S. electricity within three years. In other words: AI is young, growing and hungry, very hungry.

But here’s the part Bernie doesn’t mention: the U.S. lack of power supply is largely his fault. He and other Green New Dealers have intentionally pushed increased electricity consumption – heat pumps and electric cars anyone – while shutting down the energy sources that actually keep the power grid afloat. 

They’ve tried to shut down the coal industry altogether and have not lifted a finger – well, perhaps one finger – to keep nuclear power plants open. They never met a natural gas carrying, electricity producing pipeline they liked. 

And now he’s shocked—shocked!—that electricity demand is rising and prices are going up!

This is the fatal flaw of central planning: it never accounts for human ingenuity and technological leaps. Love it or hate it, AI arrived, and it arrived like a freight train. And here are two simple facts:

One: AI is now essential to military strength, industrial competitiveness, and economic leadership. It makes weapons deadlier and products work better at less cost. Without it, America falls behind China and everyone else.

Two: AI uses massive amounts of electricity. Not a little. A lot.

Bernie and his allies completely, willfully, blindly missed the possibility of a disruptive new technology like AI. They thought that with enough subsidies for wind and solar, we’d all drive electric cars, heat our homes with electric heat pumps, and the grid would somehow handle it. They thought they had the future neatly planned.

Then AI shows up, making demands they never accounted for—demands that dwarf what their offshore wind turbines (most of which haven’t been built yet and maybe never will be) can produce.

So what does Bernie do now? Admit maybe we need reliable baseload power again? Admit that nuclear, natural gas, and yes—even coal plants—should not have been recklessly pushed offline before replacements existed? Of course not. Instead, he points at Donald Trump.

But let’s look at the track record.

Where was Bernie when Vermont Yankee was shut down?

Where was Senator Ed Markey when Massachusetts closed the Pilgrim nuclear plant?

Answer: at best, looking on and holding the cloaks of those who cast the stones of license non-renewal. At worst, throwing the stones themselves. 

Where were Bernie and Markey when powerful New England environmental groups blocked a new natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to New England—leaving the region to import LNG from overseas to hopefully keep the lights on and homes warm during cold snaps?

And why did Sanders support the Obama Administration’s so-called Clean Power Plan, which tried to pick winners and losers in American energy production — shutting down coal, ignoring nuclear, and showering wind and solar with benefits? This plan was so biased that even a pre-Trump Supreme Court found it unconstitutional. 

Sanders backed the Green New Deal, a plan even more aggressive in phasing out fossil fuels and conventional power sources. Thankfully it never passed, but its influence lingers in state and federal policy.

He even supports offshore New England wind, a project billions of dollars deep that—so far—hasn’t produced a single kilowatt. Maybe someday it will, but not at the scale promised and not fast enough to meet skyrocketing demand.

And of course, Sanders opposed pipelines like Keystone XL, proudly declaring in 2017 that millions of people stood together to stop fossil-fuel infrastructure and push America toward renewables.

Well, congratulations: now the country faces growing demand, shrinking supply, and rising prices. Lack of electricity looms as a true existential threat to American military and economic security. 

AI didn’t break the grid.

Policy choices did.

And now Bernie wants to blame Trump for an electricity crunch caused by decades of shutting down nuclear, blocking natural gas, and betting the future on wind and solar alone.

If you remove dispatchable power from the grid and then demand more electricity for EVs, heat pumps, and now AI…well…don’t be shocked when the lights flicker and the bills go up.

So before Bernie Sanders blames billionaires or data centers, maybe he should take a look in the mirror—and ask why, after decades of opposing the very power sources that keep our lights on, America is suddenly running short of power.

It’s not complicated.

It’s just physics.

And physics doesn’t care about sternly worded letters and senatorial finger-pointing. Time for the Boin to feel the burn to develop electricity by the gigawatt, not the dribs and drabs that might have worked 20 years ago, but will soon leave us second-rate to hostile military and economic powers.