Erin Stone
covers climate and environmental issues in Southern California.
Published March 24, 2026 5:00 AM
Red sand verbena, a native dune plant, blossoms with small purple flowers in the spring and is a key plant for the formation of dunes.
(
Erin Stone
/
LAist
)
Topline:
Some 30 acres of sand dunes will be restored on an iconic stretch of beach in Santa Monica to help combat rising sea levels and worsening erosion.
The background: Thousands of acres of sand dunes once stretched from south of Santa Monica to the Palos Verdes Peninsula, providing habitat for local wildlife and buffering the coast against storms. Development and worsening climate change is threatening the beaches as we know them today, but research is finding bringing back dunes could help.
Keep reading...for more details on the restoration effort and how to get involved.
On a recent morning, traffic on Pacific Coast Highway sped by the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica, below where San Vicente Boulevard and Ocean Avenue meet. A few hundred yards away, the waves crashed on the shore.
But 100 years ago, when Hollywood starlet Marion Davies lived in this once-rural spot of coast, standing this close to the house would put you knee deep in water at high tide.
“That low white concrete wall was the sea wall to protect the pool, to protect the backyard of that home,” said Tom Ford, CEO of the Santa Monica Bay Foundation, gesturing toward the house.
A century ago this wide flat beach was far narrower. Many beaches in the Santa Monica Bay were artificially widened from the 1930s through the 1960s.
The sand came from an ancient system of coastal dunes that extended from LAX all the way to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The endangered El Segundo blue butterfly is found only in the dunes’ restored, fragmented remains.
Expanding dune restoration
Now, change is coming again to this iconic stretch of beach. For a decade, The Bay Foundation has been figuring out how to bring back pieces of those ancient dunes. So far, the nonprofit has restored small patches of dunes on beaches from Point Dume to Manhattan Beach.
Their latest, and largest dune restoration effort so far, will extend about 30 acres south of Santa Monica pier to the border with Venice. Announced last month, it’s possible thanks to a partnership with the city and a $2 million state grant.
The nonprofit first installed dunes in Santa Monica in 2016 — “installed” meaning they put in a simple rope and little wood fence around about 3 acres, then scattered a bunch of native dune plant seeds. Nature did the rest.
The historic extent of sand dunes in the southern Santa Monica Bay.
(
Courtesy Kyle Emery
/
UC Santa Barbara
)
Now across about 8 acres of this beach, dunes up to 5 feet tall are crowned with low-lying plants: blossoming yellow beach evening primrose flowers, light green beach bur, saltbush — a foundational plant for growing dunes, Ford said.
“These are super tough characters. They can handle the salt water, they can handle the salt air," Ford said. “Their big roots are extending down into the beach.”
The native dune plants will provide more habitat to shorebirds, including snowy plovers, a threatened species.
Snowy plovers are a threatened species.
(
Photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Southeast
/
Licensed under CC BY 2.0
)
Ropes and signs surround the dunes to discourage people from trampling them.
(
Erin Stone
/
LAist
)
Within a few months of the dunes installation in 2016, a snowy plover nest appeared on Santa Monica Beach for the first time in some 70 years. Now, they can be spotted scurrying about the driftwood and dune plants.
Birds migrating thousands of miles along the Pacific Flyway will be able to rest and forage here too.
Not only that, the dunes can lessen the amount of sand that blows onto the bike path, parking lots and roads, a regular nuisance for city maintenance crews.
Help restore dunes
The Bay Foundation relies on volunteers to help with dune restoration, and a lot more help will be needed as the nonprofit expands their efforts. Find volunteer opportunities here.
Dunes and sea level rise
Long term, the dunes can help combat rising sea levels.
“Between the sea level rising and getting taller, more frequent, more violent storms hitting our coastline, we're likely to lose the beach,” Ford said.
But dunes “start to build a beach that grows in height, and that helps us keep up with sea level rise,” Ford said.
Tom Ford, CEO of the Santa Monica Bay Foundation.
(
Erin Stone
/
LAist
)
Ford picks up trash next to a plant blossoming on a dune.
(
Erin Stone
/
LAist
)
Sand dunes can withstand only so much water,but the Santa Monica dunes have been shown to reduce erosion and flooding.
Native dune plants hold onto sand, while allowing the dunes to remain dynamic, reducing erosion. That’s opposed to introduced species like iceplant, which have squeezed out many native dune plants and are akin to concrete to wildlife.
When not carpeted by iceplant, the dunes themselves can absorb waves’ energy, displacing less sand and redistributing it in a way that allows the beach to recover. In contrast, sea walls trigger a scouring effect when the waves reverberate off of them, said UC Santa Barbara coastal ecologist Kyle Emery, who is part of a team that has surveyed more than 120 dune restoration sites across the state, including the Santa Monica dunes.
His research found that those dunes also reduced flooding on the beach during significant storms in the winter of 2023.
“That restored dune site was able to prevent about 14 meters or 50 feet of water runup on the beach,” Emery said.
A batch of younger dunes forming on Santa Monica beach.
(
Erin Stone
/
LAist
)
There are only so many ways to adapt to rising sea levels. We may have to abandon some areas. Nourishing beaches with sandis one expensive tool.There’s hard infrastructure like sea walls, but that’s costly and worsens erosion. You can build sand berms like the ones that go up in the winter in Orange County — those can protect infrastructure, but don’t have much benefit for wildlife (or ocean views).
As for dunes?
“We've demonstrated that this nature-based solution can protect against sea level rise and storm-driven wave erosion,” Emery said.
Still, Emery emphasized, dunes are no silver bullet. Dunes won’t work everywhere, and some places are likely to simply be too inundated with water. More long-term research is needed, Emery said, but so far the research on dunes shows promise. A 2023 state law requires all coastal areas to plan for sea level rise — dunes are mentioned as a nature-based strategy. And Proposition 4, passed by voters in 2024, provides dedicated funding for such coastal resilience efforts.
The wide, flat, groomed beach we're all used to in Santa Monica.
(
Erin Stone
/
LAist
)
Restored dunes stretch along the shore in the other direction.
(
Erin Stone
/
LAist
)
Bolsa Chica State Beach, for example, is likely to seek such funding for its own burgeoning dune restoration effort (mostly to help with sand that piles up in parking lots and on Pacific Coast Highway), as are parts of south Orange County, where beach erosion has been a major problem for infrastructure, such as the Pacific Surfliner tracks, said Riley Pratt, a senior environmental scientist for State Parks Orange Coast District.
“ I think the writing is on the wall, and we're now looking at it differently, that we really need to get ahead of this,” Pratt said.
In Santa Monica, the dunes are something of a test. We’ve become used to volleyball and sunbathing on wide, groomed stretches of sand, but maybe it’s time to make room for dunes, too. They may be cluttered with some trash, but there’s also a patchwork of plants and small birds foraging. There’s also driftwood and kelp — once the foundations of developing dunes before we came accustomed to scraping the beach clean.
It’s a more complicated version of beach, but likely a more sustainable one.
Beach evening primrose is a native dune plant that helps stabilize sandy soils and provides habitat for coastal wildlife.
Why now: A group of local officials and organizations, including Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that runs the livestream, helped organize the “Wings Over Big Bear” weekend with a commemoration ceremony Saturday and Wildlife Education Day Sunday.
Read on ... to go inside the ceremony and hear from fans.
The Big Bear community and fans of the famous bald eagles that call the valley home are coming together this weekend to honor Jackie.
A group of local, state and federal officials and organizations, including the nonprofit behind the livestream, Friends of Big Bear Valley, helped organize the “Wings Over Big Bear” weekend with a commemoration ceremony Saturday and Wildlife Education Day Sunday.
Diane Lech came up from Carlsbad and stopped by to see the overflowing Jackie memorial at Fawnskin Freedom Park. She’s been watching the livestream since 2015, when the cameras were first installed.
“And [Jackie’s] been part of my life ever since,” Lech said, her eyes welling up with tears. “It’s heartwarming to know that she had such an effect on so many people.”
Nearly two months after Jackie's death, fans are still in mourning.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
A handcrafted wooden statue of Jackie flying with a fish in her talons next to the memorial in Fawnskin Freedom Park.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
A community comes together
Vanessa Bloom, a Huntington Beach resident, and her mom are regular viewers of the eagle livestream. Bloom said the ceremony feels like a coming-together at a time when there’s so much polarization and division in the world.
“Everyone's here for a common cause,” Bloom said. “There's a lot of unity and people just being with each other in a time of tragedy, which you don't really see that often, and I think that's special.”
Artist Wes Abarca spray-painting a memorial piece for Jackie on Saturday, Oct. 3 at Bear Mountain Ski Resort.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
A plane drew a "J" and a heart in the sky over the crowd watching the ceremony.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
About 2,000 people RSVP'd to the commemoration ceremony Saturday at Bear Mountain Ski Resort, according to organizers.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
Maggie Keen, a Thousand Oaks resident, took her first trip to Big Bear in years to attend the ceremony.
“[Jackie] was just amazing,” Keen said. “Very strong, took charge of everything and was just like an incredible bird to watch her with the fledglings.”
The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation kicked the ceremony off with several songs.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
Audience members were invited to dance along to celebration of life songs led by the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
Ron Wood, better known as Woody, works at Captain John's Fawn Harbor & Marina by Dana Point Park in Fawnskin, where he points out the nest to fans daily.
“We all thought that she was going to come around and be brought back here, and, you know, it's pretty depressing,” Wood said. “Every single person still that comes is teary-eyed.”
Ron Wood holds up a framed photo of what he said is a young Jackie, along with her parents Ricky and Lucy. He usually has the popular YouTube livestream of the eagle nest playing in the background.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
Jenny Voisard, media manager for Friends of Big Bear Valley, told LAist ahead of the ceremony that the turnout shows just how the love people have for Jackie.
“A lot of people were surprised at how much they were grieving,” Voisard said. “We all still miss Jackie.”
Michael Muhm and Peggy Muhm came from Colleyville, Texas to honor Jackie in their matching eagle shirts.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
Rachel Mulpas and Randy Mulpas, a father-daughter duo, drove up from Ladera Ranch in Orange County.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
Carmina Chun and John Chun wearing "Fly High, Jackie" shirts from the Ontario Tower Buzzers' August event honoring the eagle.
(
Makenna Cramer
/
LAist
)
Joan Eminger was all smiles Saturday at Bear Mountain Ski Resort, sporting a Jackie shirt and pin.
Move over, beach reads. With the fall equinox behind us, we can now curl up with cozy autumn books.
Why now: Here are our recommendations of new titles coming from Barbara Kingsolver, Chad Harbach, Jasmine Guillory and more.
Goodbye and good riddance to the beach read. At least for this year, we can stop pretending that baking on the sand in the hot sun or tilted awkwardly on a damp plastic lounge chair by the pool is the ideal setting for reading. Now, with the fall equinox behind us, we can look forward and embrace the one true ideal season for reading: autumn.
Or we can not be so dramatic about it and just say that there are a lot of books coming out between now and the holidays. A few we've included in our round up are long-awaited follow ups to stunning entrances onto the literary scene. Others are big, ambitious projects. Others yet are versions of older works only now being translated into English. There are obviously some high-profile titles that we missed in the name of brevity but, hopefully, there are a few titles here that weren't on your radar before.
FICTION
(
Mariner Books
)
The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw (Sept. 29)
Philyaw's 2020 short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies felt like a discovery. Published by a small university press, the book was brave and honest in its handling of sexuality and religion. It became such a sensation in certain corners of the literary world that you really had to wonder — what the heck has Philyaw been up to? Well, we find out soon in her first full-length novel about, well, sex, religion, gossip and marriage.
(
Harper
)
Partita by Barbara Kingsolver (Oct. 6)
It's Kingsolver's 19th novel. Fresh off her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, one of the most prominent voices in Appalachian writing comes out with a book about a pianist on her way to classical music stardom, until that path gets knocked off kilter. Kingsolver herself originally went to college to study classical music but never truly showed her love for it in her fiction — until now.
(
Scholastic Press
)
It's Only Dancing by Jasmine Guillory (Oc.t 6)
Every now and then I come across a video of a cute couple doing (or attempting to do) the Dirty Dancing lift. It's a bold move with a high-risk factor for completely eating it. Well, now Jasmine Guillory's showing similar boldness. Her upcoming book — her first YA novel — is a take on Dirty Dancing. It follows a young girl and her charming dance instructor, as they try to figure out their dance steps — and each other.
(
Little, Brown and Company
)
The Brightness by Chad Harbach (Oct. 27)
This is the long-awaited sequel to Harbach's acclaimed 2011 baseball/campus novel The Art of Fielding. We return to Westish College — but we put down the bats and balls and, instead, focus on sexual assault, feminism, campus politics and the high costs of speaking out.
(
New Directions
)
Behind the Gate & Other Stories by Amparo Dávila, translated by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson (Nov. 3)
With her 2018 short story collection The Houseguest, Mexican author Amparo Dávila became a fixture in the English-speaking cult canon of weird-girl literature. Dávila died at age 92 in 2020 but a new collection of her creepy, unsettling and odd stories are coming in English this fall.
NONFICTION
(
Drawn and Quarterly
)
I Can't Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex by Lisa Hanawalt (Oct. 20)
A graphic memoir from Tuca & Bertie creator Lisa Hanawalt that tells you exactly what it's about in the title. And the horses bit isn't a metaphor for life or whatever, there's actually a lot in here about riding horses, taking care of horses, and how loving horses is both silly/ridiculous/expensive and, also, one of the best things in the world. OK, maybe it is a bit of a metaphor.
(
New Directions
)
Celeste, Daughter of the Earth and Other Early Poems by Enrique Lihn, translated byJonathan Cohen and David Unger (Oct. 20)
This book collects translated early works of the celebrated Chilean poet Enrique Lihn. And they have the full-hearted verve and drive of a younger poet. In the poem "Steadfast," the narrator speaks to the subject angrily and bitterly but ends with the lines, "I will live secretly by your side / like the corpse I've been since loving you."
(
Simon Six
)
Look at Me by Dustin Hoffman with Ariel Levy (Nov. 10)
Dustin Hoffman is 89 years old now. In his lifetime, he's been at the center of some of the most enduring images seared into the minds of American culture. You can picture it, can't you? Him on the bus in The Graduate. Him at the office in All The President's Men. Him and the big crocodile thing in Hook. It's a sure bet his memoir will cover at least two of those movies in depth.
(
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
)
Weird Era: How Pitchfork Changed Music Forever: A Memoir by Ryan Schreiber (Dec. 1)
As the founder of the music website Pitchfork, Schreiber had a front-row seat to the changing tides of music, music distribution, music criticism, the Internet, snobbery, taste, stardom, obscurity and rating art on a scale of 1-10. The book goes into the origins of Pitchfork and offers insight into its eventual sale to Condé Nast, reminding readers that there is a real person behind that review you hated.
(
Penguin Press
)
The Co-Creation: How Earth Made Life and Life Made Earth by Olivia Judson (Dec. 13)
You have to give props to the big swings, and explaining the origins of life on Earth is maybe one of the biggest swings you could take. Judson is an evolutionary biologist but has spent most of her career as a science writer, explaining the world and all its inhabitants to the rest of us.
Copyright 2026 NPR
Keep up with LAist.
If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.
Long Beach Unified announced Thursday it expects to close Gompers and Edison elementary schools at the end of the school year, saying the campuses are underenrolled.
Why now: It’s the district’s latest effort to consolidate resources as enrollment continues to fall districtwide. LBUSD enrollment dipped below 60,000 students this year, the first time it crossed that thresholdsince the early 1980s.
Why it matters: As enrollment declines, so does school funding, and LBUSD is taking drastic measures as operating costs exceed revenue.
Long Beach Unified announced Thursday it expects to close Gompers and Edison elementary schools at the end of the school year, saying the campuses are underenrolled.
It’s the district’s latest effort to consolidate resources as enrollment continues to fall districtwide. LBUSD enrollment dipped below 60,000 students this year, the first time it crossed that thresholdsince the early 1980s.
Why the district wants to close schools
As enrollment declines, so does school funding, and LBUSD is taking drastic measures as operating costs exceed revenue. In a recent budget report, the district said it expects to draw nearly $45 million from its reserves this school year — the third year of deficit spending. Already, the district has reduced library support, mental health resources, and certificated and classified staff. Hoover Middle School closed last year due to low enrollment, the district said. Both LBUSD and the school board have signaled that more tough cuts are on the horizon; some are already here.
“It feels like a big loss,” said school board member Juan Benitez, whose district includes Edison Elementary. Yet he added that low birth rates will continue pushing enrollment down. The district and board have a fiscal responsibility to take action — not only to balance the budget, but to ensure students receive the best learning environment possible, which is difficult to maintain at schools with low capacity, he said.
Where students and teachers would go
If the school closures are approved by the board of education, the Gompers attendance boundary will be consolidated with three nearby Lakewood elementary schools: Cleveland, Holmes and MacArthur, according to a letter the district sent to families. Edison students would attend Chavez and Oropeza elementary schools, both within a mile of Edison’s downtown campus.
If families wish to send their children to different schools, they will receive priority in the school choice process, the letters added.
The campuses will not remain vacant, Benitez said. Edison may be used as a temporary site while other schools undergo modernization projects, and additional uses will be proposed for Gompers, he said. The Child Development Center currently housed at Edison will remain there for at least the next several years, he said.
Teachers on permanent contracts at Gompers and Edison will keep their jobs in the district, said Peder Larsen, president of the teachers union, and they will get precedence in school reassignments. But they may not learn their new school sites until April, once the school transfer and assignment process is underway, he said.
Families push back
The news has hit hard for families. Ashlee Napalan, an LBUSD teacher and a parent of three children at Gompers Elementary, said the news was “heartbreaking” and surprising, especially because Gompers underwent a significant remodel last year, including the installation of a new HVAC system, as well as fresh paint and new playground equipment, she said.
She described a tight-knit community at Gompers and said her children walk to school and play with other kids at the park across the street. When she told her son, a kindergartener, the news, she said he cried all night. “We’ve been really heavily involved with the school for seven years,” she said. “It’s a huge part of our lives.”
What happens next
Some parents have already begun organizing to oppose the move. A petition to keep Gompers open accrued more than 600 signatures in one day. Some parents said they plan to speak at the school board meeting on Oct. 7 when the issue will be presented to the board as an information item. The board is expected to vote on Oct. 21. Parents at each school have been invited to informational meetings in the coming month, according to the letters sent by the district.
Benitez said he is pushing for “ongoing, constant, clear responsive communication” to the families affected by these proposed changes. “The recommendation is not being taken lightly,” he said, adding that he — and the district — will be listening closely to students’ and families’ concerns.
Congress is scrambling to show that it understands voter concerns about AI data centers and their potential impact on electricity rates. But answering the question of how much of those costs will be shouldered by residential utility customers is surprisingly difficult to answer.
Why now: On Capitol Hill this week, Republicans have been trying to push through the Ratepayer Protection Act, sponsored by Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted. The bill would have state utilities consider holding "large-load" customers responsible for the increased costs. Several other data center and AI-related bills are at various stages in the legislative process.
Ahead of the midterm elections, Congress is scrambling to show that it understands voter concerns about AI data centers and their potential impact on electricity rates. But answering the question of how much of those costs will be shouldered by residential utility customers is surprisingly difficult to answer.
That uncertainty is at the heart of a growing fight on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers advance competing proposals aimed at protecting ratepayers in a debate that often belies the complexity of the underlying economics.
On Capitol Hill this week, Republicans have been trying to push through the Ratepayer Protection Act, sponsored by Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted. The bill would have state utilities consider holding "large-load" customers responsible for the increased costs.
Husted is in a heated reelection campaign against Democrat Sherrod Brown, who lost his Senate seat in 2024. Brown has made Husted's past support of data centers in Ohio a major campaign issue. The bill easily passed the House in September with strong bipartisan support.
Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer opposes the measure, saying its protections for ratepayers are voluntary. Instead, Schumer is promoting the GRID Savings Act, a similar bill authored by New Mexico Democrat Sen. Martin Heinrich, which he says has more teeth.
The question of how much of the energy and grid costs are being borne by ratepayers is a complicated one and has no universal answer, experts tell NPR. They say it varies by utility and state, but that in the end residential electricity customers will pay for a share of the AI buildout.
By one estimate, Maryland customers, for example, pay somewhere around $168 to $216 more per year on their electricity bills primarily due to the data center boom.
"We're talking tens to hundreds of millions of dollars [of infrastructure] that are being built by these local utilities," says Connor Waldoch, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Grid Status, which focuses on making electricity-market data easier to access and understand. "In many cases, it is just ultimately going to end up in customers' bills."
Tracking the impact of data center growth on residential bills isn't easy, however. How much of the increase is passed on to residential customers and when, depends on utilities' power-purchasing contracts, retail rates and regulatory decisions about who pays, according to Lucy Qiu, a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.
PJM is a regional transmission organization that coordinates the electricity grid and wholesale power market across 13 states and the District of Columbia. It supplies power to Northern Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world. PJM's Independent Market Monitor estimates that data centers have cost their 67 million ratepayers about $29 billion over roughly the past two years.
"Everyone pays those costs," says Ari Peskoe, director of the Harvard Electricity Law Initiative. "They're spread across the region to every business and resident that has an electricity meter."
An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes in Stone Ridge, Va.
(
Nathan Howard
/
Getty Images
)
How to determine who the grid infrastructure benefits?
Data center growth can push up wholesale costs of energy by increasing demand. This determines how much generating capacity utilities and regional grid operators need to secure, Qiu says. There are also costs with building new power lines, substations and other infrastructure to connect data centers to the grid. Determining how much of that exclusively serves data centers — and how much also benefits other customers — is part of the difficulty in determining who gets the bill, she says.
"It really depends on the scale of the upgrade and also how utilities are doing the accounting of that different share, whether it's being used solely by the data centers or also being shared by other customers," Qiu says.
No "single, clean number"
Even so, "a single, clean number" that applies nationwide is just not possible, Harvard's Peskoe says, because "a lot of the data about how much particular data centers are paying is hidden behind non-disclosure agreements."
Those NDAs have become a major sore spot on the local level, as residents opposed to new data centers call out local officials for the secrecy that has surrounded many deals. A study last year by the University of Mary Washington found that NDAs had been signed in 80% of Virginia localities where there were existing, approved or proposed data centers.
In an email to NPR, Jeremy L. Slayton, a spokesman for Dominion Energy, which serves Loudoun County, Va., home to about 250 data centers, said, "We recover costs for distribution and transmission infrastructure from customers."
"These assets are core to the reliable electric service we provide our customers. All costs we recover from customers are reviewed and approved by the Virginia State Corporation Commission," he said, referring to the independent state agency that regulates public utilities.
Added costs of building out in a hurry
There is still another factor at play, University of Maryland's Qiu says. The data center industry is in a hurry and waiting for new power-generation technologies doesn't seem to be in the cards. As a result, to meet the demand, utility companies will likely need to opt for less efficient power plants and those costs will be passed onto consumers over time, as well.
One other consideration is optics, Waldoch of Grid Status says. Big customers like AI data centers pay less per kilowatt hour for power than residential customers do. Think of it as a volume discount. In the current environment where 70% of Americans are worried that data centers will increase their electricity bills, Waldoch says, "If you're saying, hey, this data center is actually paying a lot less for electricity than you are, even though it matters much less to them ... it's not like that's palatable for a lot of people at this point."
Benefits of the AI buildout
But not all price increases in recent years are linked to data centers, Qiu says.
"The fuel cost ... is a very important factor," she says and some of those new substations and power lines were going to need to be replaced anyway due to things like extreme weather events.
Qiu also notes that the U.S. power grid needs upgrades to accommodate higher demand for things like electric vehicles. The AI boom "can accelerate the upgrade of the grid infrastructure," she says.
There's also evidence, Qui says, that resiliency — the ability to survive high-impact events such as extreme heat and to recover from outages — is better for people living near data centers due to the robust infrastructure those facilities require. "So if there's a data center, it actually helps … improve the local grid reliability [and] reduce the power outages," says Qui.
