The summer heat in Chicago and Illinois has dissipated, but the debate around our eye-watering electric bills shows no signs of cooling off.

Virtually all of us paid far more than last year to keep the air conditioners humming over the summer months, a result of spiking power prices as demand for electricity surges due in large part to the high consumption of data centers. Those sprawling hubs — being developed by tech giants like Amazon, Meta and Google — are needed to support the growing needs of artificial intelligence. People whose pocketbooks already are strained by inflation in other areas of their economic lives are fuming, and politicians are responding in kind.

We warned about a year ago that Illinois was facing a looming electricity crisis. We were met at the time with skepti

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