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Everything that goes into building operations takes electricity, from the overhead lights to the power supplied to desktops. But what about the buildings that store all of your phone and computer's information?
Data centers consume and demand a significant amount of energy and resources.
The average home in the United States uses about 900 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per month. Data centers use a lot more, millions and millions of watts more.
"People are constantly on their phones, people are constantly utilizing this information," Steven Anthony said. "Data centers are always constantly running, 24/7."
Anthony is the vice president of business development with the Kansas City Economic Development Council. He explained data centers are moving away from states like California and Virginia and searching for more land and more energy power.
"Companies are looking at places like the Midwest where you can find the decent amount of land, decent amount of infrastructure that you need in order to build these out," Anthony said.
Evergy is supplying the power for the Northland's largest data center, the Google campus.
According to filings with the Missouri Public Service Commission, the power company expects these developments to use at least 200 million watts of electricity. That's almost 20,000% more than the average home.
Google is just one of the 193 data centers Evergy will supply in both Kansas and Missouri.
KSHB 41 News asked Anthony if Kansas City has the infrastructure in place to support these massive developments.
"I think our utility partners have been growing and innovating and getting better at being able to provide that type of energy to these types of facilities," Anthony said.
Evergy declined an on camera interview after we asked about their infrastructure plans for data centers. Instead, we received a statement.
"There are many data centers in our region that Evergy has powered for years," a spokesperson wrote. "In partnering with companies and communities, Evergy develops resource plans and grid operations plans to meet the growing energy needs in our region. We have enough power supply available to meet the energy needs of our customers."
Evergy increased base rate costs by about $8 a month in January for customers and some Northland residents to recover generation capacity investments.
"Hopefully they don't take power from me," resident John Mark Jones said. "I'm not sure how it's all connected but I guess that's my only concern."
The company's data center report predicts an increase in wind and solar generation capacity by 2030. In a statement, Evergy said it will make sure customers don't subsidize data center costs and points out their prices are government regulated.
"The addition of new large power users can benefit existing customers because new customers contribute to paying the costs of maintaining and upgrading the power grid shared by all of our customers," a spokesperson wrote. "Our prices are regulated in Missouri and we will work with our regulators to ensure existing customers don’t subsidize new large customers."
But with years to go on the Google data center, we've yet to see what changes it could bring.