Business Electricity
How Much Electricity Does a Data Center Use in Texas?
A data center's electricity use is its IT load multiplied by its PUE, so a facility supporting 250 kW of IT equipment at a PUE of 1.5 draws about 375 kW and uses roughly 274,000 kWh per month, while a 1 MW facility uses about 1.1 million kWh. Floor area is not a useful guide, because two buildings of identical footprint can differ by a factor of ten depending on rack density. As of September 2026.
That makes this the one category on this site where you should ignore the square footage figures entirely and work from the formula below. Do that and you have a number precise enough to take to a supplier, which at this scale is worth a great deal: a flat, high load factor profile is genuinely attractive to buy for, and it should be priced accordingly rather than quoted off a standard small commercial rate card.
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Last reviewed September 1, 2026. Method and sources at the bottom of this page.
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Understanding the bill
Why does floor area tell you nothing about a data center's electricity use?
Because a data center is sized by the IT load it supports rather than by the space it occupies. Two buildings with the same footprint can differ by a factor of ten depending on rack density, and a modern high-density hall can draw more from a few hundred square feet than an entire office floor does. Every other kind of commercial building scales with area. This one does not, which is why the federal building survey has no useful figure for it.
| IT load | At PUE 1.4 | At PUE 1.6 | Monthly kWh, 1.4 to 1.6 | Illustrative cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 kW | 35 kW | 40 kW | 25,550 to 29,200 | $2,133 to $2,438 |
| 50 kW | 70 kW | 80 kW | 51,100 to 58,400 | $4,267 to $4,876 |
| 250 kW | 350 kW | 400 kW | 255,500 to 292,000 | $21,334 to $24,382 |
| 1 MW | 1,400 kW | 1,600 kW | 1,022,000 to 1,168,000 | $85,337 to $97,528 |
| 5 MW | 7,000 kW | 8,000 kW | 5,110,000 to 5,840,000 | $426,685 to $487,640 |
| Arithmetic on the formula above at 730 hours per month. Illustrative cost applies 8.35 cents per kWh, the EIA average Texas commercial price. That average does not describe what a load of this size actually pays, and is shown only so the scale is legible. See the cost section below. | ||||
One number you will not find anywhere on this page is kWh per square foot. It exists in some industry material and it is close to useless, because it goes stale within a hardware generation as rack densities rise. If a vendor quotes you a per square foot figure for a data hall, ask what IT load they assumed. That is the number doing all the work.
How much electricity does a server room use?
A server room or IT closet inside another business typically supports 5 to 25 kW of IT load, which at a PUE of around 1.5 means 7 to 38 kW of facility draw and roughly 5,000 to 28,000 kWh per month. That is often the single largest load in an otherwise ordinary office building, and because it runs every hour of the year it sets the floor under the whole site's bill.
If you have one of these, it is the reason your building's overnight baseload is higher than anyone expects. It also means a plan structure judged on your working hours will misprice you, since a meaningful share of your consumption happens when the building is empty. Worth modelling before you sign anything.
How much electricity does an edge or single-cabinet colocation site use?
An edge site or a small cabinet deployment usually supports 25 to 50 kW of IT load, giving roughly 26,000 to 58,000 kWh per month once cooling and losses are included. At this size the facility is still small enough to sit on an ordinary commercial delivery rate, but the load factor is close to 100 percent, which makes it behave very differently from any other business of a similar bill size.
A near-flat load is the single most attractive profile a retail supplier can be offered, because there is almost no shape risk to price around. That is worth raising explicitly when you go to market, since a standard rate card will not reflect it and a supplier asked the right question often will.
How much electricity does a colocation facility use?
A colocation facility supporting 250 kW of IT load draws roughly 350 to 400 kW of total facility power and uses about 256,000 to 292,000 kWh per month. At this scale the account is demand metered without question, transmission and capacity charges become a large share of the bill, and procurement moves away from the fixed retail products a small business would buy.
There is also a commercial question underneath the energy one, which is how power is recovered from your own tenants. Whether you sell by the cabinet, by committed kW or by metered consumption changes who carries the risk when the market moves, and it is worth settling that before you fix the term on the supply side.
How much electricity does an enterprise or hyperscale data center use?
A 1 MW facility uses roughly 1.0 to 1.2 million kWh per month, and a 5 MW facility five times that. At this scale a site is a wholesale market participant in all but name: pricing is structured rather than quoted, transmission cost allocation is managed actively, and the contract is negotiated rather than selected from a list. Power Choice Texas can help at this size, but through our commercial desk rather than an online enrollment.
Being straight about that is more useful to you than pretending otherwise. Nothing on a comparison site is going to price a multi-megawatt load properly, and anybody who says it will is quoting you a product that does not fit. Ring 855-798-9075 and we will start from your interval data instead of from a ZIP code.
What is PUE and why does it matter?
Power usage effectiveness is total facility power divided by IT power, so a PUE of 1.5 means half a watt of cooling and losses for every watt of computing. It is the multiplier on your entire bill: at 1 MW of IT load, moving from a PUE of 1.6 to 1.4 removes about 146,000 kWh a month without touching a single server. In Texas the number is harder to hold down than in cooler climates, because outside air economisation is available for fewer hours of the year.
| PUE | Facility load | Monthly kWh | Against PUE 1.6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.2 | 1,200 kW | 876,000 | 292,000 kWh less |
| 1.4 | 1,400 kW | 1,022,000 | 146,000 kWh less |
| 1.5 | 1,500 kW | 1,095,000 | 73,000 kWh less |
| 1.6 | 1,600 kW | 1,168,000 | baseline |
Reported industry averages sit near 1.5 to 1.6 while well-designed modern facilities run considerably lower. If you have never measured yours, that is the first thing worth doing, because every procurement conversation from that point on is more precise for having it.
What does a data center's electricity cost in Texas?
At an illustrative 8.35 cents per kWh, a 250 kW IT load costs roughly $21,000 to $24,000 a month and a 1 MW facility roughly $85,000 to $98,000. Treat those as arithmetic rather than as a quote, because a load this size does not buy at the average commercial rate. Pricing at this scale is built from wholesale energy, capacity, ancillary services and transmission components rather than quoted as a single number.
Which cuts both ways. You will not be offered the headline rate a small shop sees, and you should not want it, because a product designed for a variable retail load carries risk premiums you do not need. A flat, predictable, high load factor profile is worth better terms than a rate card can express, and getting that recognised is most of the work.
How do ERCOT peak charges affect a large Texas load?
In ERCOT, transmission costs for large loads are allocated according to demand during a small number of peak intervals across the summer, which means a facility's transmission bill for a whole year can be set by its behaviour during a handful of hours. For a load that runs flat around the clock this is a genuine problem, because there is far less to curtail than in a factory. The current rules and intervals should be confirmed directly, as the mechanism has been under review.
This is the largest single lever available to a Texas load of this size, and it is not a rate question. No retail supplier changes it, because it is a transmission cost allocation set by the market and passed through by your delivery utility. What changes it is what your facility does during those intervals: on-site generation, battery discharge, workload shifting between sites, or simply having enough visibility to know when they are happening.
If nobody at your facility can say what your demand was during last summer's peak intervals, that is where to start. It is worth more than any negotiation on the energy rate.
Delivery charges and rate classes are set by your utility: Oncor, CenterPoint Energy, AEP Texas Central, AEP Texas North, TNMP.
How do you calculate your facility's electricity use?
Take your IT load in kilowatts, multiply by your PUE to get total facility load, then multiply by 730 to get monthly kilowatt-hours. Then separate the bill into its energy and capacity components, because at this scale they are negotiated differently and a lower energy price does nothing for the transmission and demand side.
- Take your IT load in kilowatts from your PDU or UPS metering, which is the power drawn by servers, storage and network equipment before any cooling.
- Divide total facility power by IT power to get your PUE, or use a planning assumption in the range of 1.3 to 1.6 if the facility is not separately metered.
- Multiply your IT load by your PUE to get total facility load in kilowatts, which is what the utility meter sees.
- Multiply facility load in kilowatts by 730, the hours in an average month, to get monthly consumption in kilowatt-hours.
- Split the bill into the energy component in kilowatt-hours and the capacity and transmission components priced in kilowatts, because they are negotiated and managed in completely different ways.
- Compare the calculation against your interval meter data rather than a monthly bill total, since at this scale the shape of the load matters as much as the volume.
For the building around the facility: Understand Your Texas Electricity Bill.
Which electricity contract structure is best for a data center?
For anything above a few hundred kilowatts, a structured product rather than a retail fixed rate. A load factor close to 100 percent and a flat profile are attractive to suppliers and should be priced as such, which a standard small commercial fixed rate will not do. Below that size a fixed rate is still sensible, and the deciding question is whether the facility is large enough to be quoted rather than listed.
| Structure | Fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Retail fixed rate | Under ~100 kW | Simple, and the load is small enough that a rate card is not leaving much on the table |
| Structured or block and index | Above ~250 kW | Lets a flat, predictable profile be priced on its merits instead of averaged into a product |
| Fully indexed | Only with management | Exposes a round-the-clock load to summer volatility unless it is actively hedged |
| Usage-threshold products | Never | Bill credits and minimum usage fees are retail constructs and have no place on a load like this |
Request a commercial energy quote
Prefer to talk it through? Call 855-798-9075.
Can a data center switch electricity providers in Texas?
Yes, in the deregulated part of Texas served by Oncor, CenterPoint Energy, AEP Texas or TNMP. Only the supply side changes hands and there is no interruption, which matters more here than anywhere else in commercial electricity. The delivery utility keeps the wires and the meter, and no equipment, feed or redundancy arrangement is touched by a change of retail supplier.
That is worth stating plainly because it is the first question facilities people ask and the answer surprises them. Switching supplier is a billing arrangement, not a physical one. Nothing is de-energised, no feed is transferred, and your redundancy design is unaffected either way.
Also useful: How to switch electricity providers. For the building around a server room, see the office guide.
Data center electricity questions
Why isn't there a published kWh per square foot figure for data centers?
Because the measure does not describe the building. The federal Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey publishes intensity by principal building activity and has no data center category, and any figure derived for one would be obsolete within a hardware generation as rack densities rise. The industry uses IT load in kilowatts and PUE instead, and so does this page.
How much of US electricity do data centers use?
Data centers used about 176 TWh in 2023, roughly 4.4 percent of total US electricity, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report prepared for the Department of Energy. Later editions of that work project a substantially higher share by the end of the decade under a range of scenarios. Texas is one of the largest markets for new capacity, which is why grid and transmission cost questions arrive here earlier than in most states.
Does a business with a server room need this page or the office page?
Both, and in that order. Use the office guide for the building and this page for the server room inside it, because the room often carries more load than the rest of the floor combined and behaves nothing like it. A room that runs flat around the clock changes the shape of the whole site's load, and that shape is what a plan is priced against.
Sources, method, and refresh schedule
The consumption figures on this page are arithmetic, not survey data. Monthly kilowatt-hours are IT load in kilowatts multiplied by PUE multiplied by 730, the hours in an average month. Every input is the reader's own, and the worked examples state the IT load and PUE assumed so any figure can be reproduced.
The federal Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey, which supplies the intensity figures used elsewhere on this site, publishes no data center principal building activity and is not used here. No kilowatt-hour per square foot figure appears on this page, deliberately, because rack density rather than floor area determines the load and any such figure ages badly.
National context figures come from the United States Data Center Energy Usage Report produced by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy, which estimated data center consumption at approximately 176 TWh in 2023, about 4.4 percent of total US electricity. Later editions revise the historical series and extend the projections, and the most recent edition should be consulted for current figures.
The description of ERCOT transmission cost allocation is general. The mechanism, the intervals used and the charge basis are set by ERCOT and by delivery utility tariffs, and have been subject to review. Nothing on this page should be relied on as a statement of the current rules, and anyone acting on it should confirm the position directly.
The illustrative cost figures apply the EIA average Texas commercial price from Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A. That figure is average revenue per kilowatt-hour across all reported commercial sales and does not describe what a load of this size pays. It is used only so that the scale of the arithmetic is legible, and the page says so where it appears.
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A, published monthly.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, CBECS 2018, consulted and not used, as it publishes no data center activity.
- ERCOT protocols and delivery utility tariffs for transmission cost allocation.
- Delivery utilities: Oncor, CenterPoint Energy, AEP Texas Central, AEP Texas North, TNMP.
Refresh procedure: national context figures are updated when a new edition of the LBNL report is published. The price benchmark is refreshed monthly. Transmission cost allocation statements are rechecked whenever ERCOT or a delivery utility revises the mechanism.
Power Choice Texas is a registered Texas electricity broker, PUCT registration BR190365. We are compensated by the retail electric providers whose plans appear on this site. See how we make money. This page is general information about facility energy use and contract structures. It is not a rate quote, a recommendation, or advice about any specific account. PowerChoiceTexas.org is not affiliated with Power To Choose, powertochoose.org, or the Public Utility Commission of Texas.
