Robert Garrova
explores the weird and secret bits of SoCal that would excite even the most jaded Angelenos. He also covers mental health.
Published June 12, 2024 5:00 AM
The Yang family questions the LAPD's tactics that led up to the killing of Yong Yang while he was in a mental health crisis.
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Topline:
There have been 14 shootings by LAPD this year, three of which involved people the department said appeared to be dealing with mental illness or were having a mental health crisis at the time of the incident.
The latest involved 40-year-old Yong Yang, whose family said he was in crisis on May 2, when they called the county Department of Mental Health for help. Yang, they said, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
What happened: In this case, Yong Yang's family called county authorities — not city police — on the day of the incident, seeking a type of alternative crisis response that does not necessarily involve police officers. But police were called anyway, because a clinician at the scene said Yang had tried to attack him.
Yang, who was armed with a kitchen knife, was shot and killed.
The backstory: Between January and May of this year, the county dispatched teams to nearly 11,500 calls throughout the region, about 720 of which — about 6% — resulted in a mental health worker calling law enforcement.
A recent LAist investigation found that between 2017 and 2023, 31% of shootings by L.A. city police involved a person perceived by officers to be living with mental illness or experiencing a mental health crisis, according to annual use-of-force reports.
A family mourns: Min Yang told LAist he was sorry that the family's request for help led to his son’s sudden death. He and other family members
“He didn’t know that’s going to happen. I didn’t know. He must have thought that he was well-protected in his parents’ home.”
When a Los Angeles police officer fatally shot a 40-year-old man in his parents’ Koreatown home last month, it was clear to many, including officers at the scene, that he was experiencing a mental health crisis.
Earlier that day, Yong Yang’s mother had called the L.A. County Department of Mental Healthto get help for her son, who had gone to the parents’ home because he was feeling paranoid and unsafe, according to family members. Yang’s family said he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder more than a decade ago.
The situation intensified after a worker with the Department of Mental Health — who had been dispatched to the scene — called 911, claiming Yang had attacked him.
When police arrived, they tried to get Yang to leave the apartment, but he refused, according to police. A short time later, one of the officers shot Yang, who was in his parents’ living room holding a kitchen knife.
Yang died at the scene.
So far, there have been 14 shootings by LAPD this year, three of which involved people the department said appeared to be dealing with mental illness or were having a mental health crisis at the time of the incident.
An important distinction in the Yang case is that his family called county authorities, not city police, on the day of the incident, seeking a type of alternative crisis response that does not necessarily involve police officers.
But police were called anyway.
Yong Yang pictured with his parents Myung Sook and Min Yang.
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Courtesy of the Yang family.
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“Everything went wrong. Mental health people, police, they were not in the mood to help,” Yang’s father Min Yang said in an interview with LAist. “And I was too naive and stupid that I trusted those people and put my son’s life in such a grave danger.”
The Department of Mental Health said it could not comment on the specifics of the May 2 incident because it is still under investigation. But county authorities did provide an emailed statement in which they explained that crisis teams are trained to de-escalate situations without police, but sometimes they need assistance.
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‘Everything Went Wrong’: LA Family Called County Clinicians, Not Police, During A Mental Health Crisis. It Still Ended Tragically
“In instances where de-escalation through clinical means is not possible, and the person in crisis remains an imminent threat to themselves or others, despite DMH’s efforts, law enforcement will be contacted to maintain safety and attempt to keep the peace,” the department said.
Between January and May of this year, the county dispatched teams to nearly 8,870 calls throughout the region, about 550 of which — about 6% — resulted in a mental health worker calling law enforcement.
A recent LAist investigation found that between 2017 and 2023, 31% of shootings by L.A. city police involved a person perceived by officers to be living with mental illness or experiencing a mental health crisis, according to annual use-of-force reports.
The shooting in Koreatown
Yang’s family members said they knew he was having a bipolar episode when they called for help on May 2. The night before the incident, they said, Yang was not sleeping, he spoke erratically in conversations and was possibly hearing voices.
At some point that night, the parents left and went to Min Yang’s office and later slept in their car to give their son some space to calm down, the father said.
The next day, Yong Yang’s mother, Myung Sook Yang, called the Department of Mental Health. She said she and Yang’s father were worried because Yang's condition did not seem to have improved and he seemed to not recognize her when she came to the apartment door.
Myung Sook Yang regrets calling the Department of Mental Health and believes her son was treated like a suspect rather than a patient who needed care. "There are so many mentally ill people who need help," she said. "So now, where they can get help?"
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A baby photo of twin brothers Yin and Yong Yang shortly after they arrived to the United States from South Korea.
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A clinician and a medical case worker with a Psychiatric Mobile Response Team went to the family’s home, according to the county.
According to audio released by LAPD, the clinician called 911, claiming that Yang was “very violent” and tried to attack him and Yang’s father.
Yang’s father told LAist he disputes that claim.
It’s not clear from the audio what behaviors the clinician reported to police, and no video was released that shows what happened at the Yangs’ home before police arrived.
Body-worn camera footage shows two police officers arriving on scene and speaking with Yang’s father. He tells the officers that his son needs to go to a hospital.
Myung Sook Yang and Min Yang walk into their apartment where their son Yong was killed by an LAPD officer during a mental health crisis.
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One officer asks Yong Yang to open the door to the apartment. He can be heard in the video saying, “I do not invite you.” He does not open the door.
About 20 minutes later, a supervising officer arrives and explains to Yang’s father that Yang “might get hurt” if police have to go into the apartment and forcibly detain him.
The supervisor talks to Yang through the front door. A voice responds: ”I’ve already been killed multiple times.”
Moments later, the officer says, “All right, we’re gonna have a use of force.”
Later, an officer uses a key to unlock the door. The officer pushes it open, but someone appears to be pushing the door from the other side.
Two officers eventually push the door open. They find Yang in the living room, holding a knife.
“You’re gonna get shot!” one of the officers yells, according to the video. Officers tell Yang to drop the knife.
He initially steps away from the officers but then takes a few steps toward them.
Yong Yang with his father, Min.
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Courtesy of the Yang family.
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Within 10 seconds of opening the door, an officer opens fire, hitting Yang. Police said they found narcotics at the scene, but did not provide details.
The officer was identified as Andres Lopez. It wasn’t his first shooting while on-duty. According to the county District Attorney’s Office, Lopez shot and wounded 35-year-old Nakiea Brown in 2021 outside LAPD’s Olympic station. Brown was holding a BB pellet gun at the time of the incident.
The shooting was not fatal. According to the D.A.’s Office, Brown had one prior contact with the LAPD’s Mental Evaluation Unit in May 2020.
After reviewing the incident, the District Attorney's Office determined the shooting was justified.
‘It could have been avoided’
In the interview with LAist, Yang’s family questioned why the officers did not use a bean-bag rifle, Taser or other tool to help them detain Yang without fatally shooting him.
Based on the video footage, it does not appear that police used any less-lethal weapons to try to take Yang into custody. At least one officer appears to be holding a foam projectile gun.
The LAPD has said its Mental Evaluation Unit was notified before the shooting, but it’s unclear whether a SMART unit, one of the department’s specially trained mental health crisis teams, arrived on scene. When asked for that information, the department said LAist would have to file a public records request to obtain it.
LAist has submitted that request.
Retired police Lt. Jeffrey Wenninger reviewed the LAPD’s video of the Yang shooting at the LAist’s request. He spent 30 years with the LAPD and said he has investigated hundreds of use-of-force incidents.
Wenninger commended the officers for requesting backup soon after they arrived at the scene, but he said dispatchers and officers could have asked better questions about Yang’s mental health background and what might have worked to calm him down.
Wenninger also questioned why officers decided to forcibly enter the apartment, especially because Yang was alone inside the home.
“I would say in this case, a lack of planning certainly influenced the outcome here,” he said. “It was pretty predictable to a trained eye what was going to happen.
“I 100% believe it could have been avoided.”
Ed Obayashi, a Modoc County sheriff’s deputy and use-of-force expert who advises law enforcement agencies, also reviewed the video. He told LAist he believed lethal force was justified in this case because Yang was armed with a knife. He said the allegation that the clinician was attacked also changed the scenario.
“In this situation there was an actual threat in the use of physical force, assault by the individual against innocent civilians, and at that point, yes, we need to address the situation,” Obayashi said.
The Yang family questions the LAPD's tactics that led up to the killing of Yong Yang while he was experiencing a mental health crisis.
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‘I would just suffer’
In his parent’s dining room, steps away from the living room where Yang was shot, a photo of Yong Yang and his twin brother, Yin Yang, hangs on the wall. The photo shows the two young boys sitting together in the sunlight.
“In Korean culture, they’re really big on the older brother, younger brother thing,” Yin Yang said. “They always said I’m older, because I’m two minutes [older], but in recent years he was the more respectable one.”
Yong Yang studied music production at the Musician's Institute – College of Contemporary Music in Hollywood.
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Courtesy of the Yang family.
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One of Yong Yang’s goals in life, according to his brother, was to make it as a musician and producer. He was a good singer, who loved electronic dance music. As a kid growing up in the ‘90s, he loved R&B singers, like Boyz II Men.
He attended the Musician's Institute – College of Contemporary Music in Hollywood, where he studied music production, his brother said.
Yang first started showing symptoms of mental illness about 15 years ago. His father said Yang was diagnosed with bipolar disorder around 2012.
Over the years Yang managed his bipolar diagnosis with meditation, exercise and his Christian faith, according to his family.
Yin Yang said he thinks mental health professionals and the police could have done much more to try and calm his brother down before he was shot, and he is critical of the mental health care system, which he said doesn’t offer the support people need.
Twin brothers Yong and Yin Yang as teenagers.
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"As a twin brother, it's hard. Becasue I feel like he's my other half. And it's gone, it's just taken from me," said Yin Yang.
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The brother said he thinks law enforcement too often escapes any consequences for fatally shooting someone. “And it’s usually these mentally ill people because they don’t have the ability to stand up for themselves and there’s not a lot of, like, sympathy for them in the public,” he said.
Earlier this month, Yin Yang organized a rally to call attention to the case. He also started an Instagram account to get the word out about his brother. He said many members of the Korean community in L.A. have been supportive of the family and their calls for answers from the city and county.
“As his twin brother, it’s hard. Because I feel like he’s my other half. And it’s gone, it’s just taken from me,” he said.
Yang’s father said he was sorry that his request for help led to his son’s sudden death. “He didn’t know that’s going to happen. I didn’t know. He must have thought that he was well-protected in his parents’ home,” the father said.
Yang’s mother said she thought she was doing the right thing when she called for a mental health crisis team instead of calling 911. If she had another chance, she said, he would not have called anybody for help.
“I would just suffer,” she said. “There are so many mentally ill people who need help. So now, where they can get help?”
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.
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A handcrafted wooden statue of Jackie flying with a fish in her talons next to the memorial in Fawnskin Freedom Park.
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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.
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A plane drew a "J" and a heart in the sky over the crowd watching the ceremony.
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About 2,000 people RSVP'd to the commemoration ceremony Saturday at Bear Mountain Ski Resort, according to organizers.
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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.
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Audience members were invited to dance along to celebration of life songs led by the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation.
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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.
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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.
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Rachel Mulpas and Randy Mulpas, a father-daughter duo, drove up from Ladera Ranch in Orange County.
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Carmina Chun and John Chun wearing "Fly High, Jackie" shirts from the Ontario Tower Buzzers' August event honoring the eagle.
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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
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Mariner Books
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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.
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Harper
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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.
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Scholastic Press
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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.
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Little, Brown and Company
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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.
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New Directions
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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
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Drawn and Quarterly
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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.
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New Directions
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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."
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Simon Six
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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.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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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.
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Penguin Press
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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
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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.
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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.
