Beware the coming artificial-intelligence boom, says Gov. Kathy Hochul: The new tech will spawn “massive data centers” poised to scarf up electricity “faster than the grid can keep up,” boosting residential bills in the process.

If you’re getting déjà vu, it’s because Hochul pulled from this same playbook a year ago when she blamed “institutional investors” for local families’ inability to buy their own homes.

Only a microscopic share of single-family housing stock is owned by large firms, and Hochul never produced evidence that they were affecting home prices in New York.

But it provided a handy PowerPoint slide about “affordability”; now data-processing facilities are letting her swing at another populist piñata.

The downside here, as with housing, is that every press conference and X video treating data centers as the boogeyman distracts from the far more complicated, but fixable, problems that are driving state electricity costs into the stratosphere.

Residential electricity rates have been surging across New York since........

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