CAMERON, Ariz. – Living on one of the largest swaths of land in America without electric power, Thomasina Nez’s entire life is a scramble to complete basic tasks.
To take a hot shower, she must wait for buckets of water to come to a boil on a small propane stove outside her wood-framed roundhouse. To make meals, she relies mostly on canned goods because unrefrigerated produce rots quickly in the Arizona heat. It’s a struggle to stay warm at night, because she refuses to use her coal-powered heater after its fumes killed her two dogs.
A fierce battle for electric power is being waged across the nation, and Nez is one of thousands of people who have wound up on the losing end. Amid a boom in data centers, the energy-intensive warehouses that run supercomputers for Big Tech companies, Arizona is racing to increase electricity production. In February, the state utility board approved an 8 percent rate hike to bolster power infrastructure throughout the state, where data centers are popping up faster than almost anywhere in the United States. But it rejected a plan to bring electricity to parts of the Navajo Nation land, concluding that electric customers should not be asked to foot the nearly $4 million bill…