Cantwell Votes Against Weak Data Center Costs Bill, Calls On Utility Commissioners To Protect Families & Small Businesses From Rate Hikes

Cantwell Votes Against Weak Data Center Costs Bill, Calls On Utility Commissioners To Protect Families & Small Businesses From Rate Hikes

WASHINGTON, DC - Today, the Senate voted against advancing a bill that purports to lower Americans' energy bills but would not actually have had any practical effect. The bill's claimed intent was to allow individual states to charge data center operators for the cost of large scale electrical grid updates, rather than individual ratepayers through their utility bills - but in fact, the directive was voluntary and states can already do this if they want to.

U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and a senior member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, voted against the bill.

She also joined her colleagues in sending a letter to Ann Rendahl and Jehmal Hudson, President and First Vice President of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), calling on NARUC to and its member commissions to take action to protect residential and small-business ratepayers from the cost of serving large data centers. Specifically, the senators urged state utility commissions to adopt a dedicated mechanism that applies to large data centers in its jurisdiction, so that data centers pay the full cost of the generation, transmission, and distribution built to serve them.

"We write to ask NARUC and its member commissions to act now to protect residential and small business ratepayers from the cost of serving large data centers. Specifically, we ask that every state utility commission adopt a dedicated rate rider - a separate tariff mechanism - that applies to every large data center in its jurisdiction, so that data centers pay the full cost of the generation, transmission, and distribution built to serve them, as well as the cost of their use of existing generation, transmission and distribution," wrote the senators.

"The authority to set retail rates was delegated by Congress to the states. That is why we are writing to you. It is clear that unless states implement data center rate riders, consumers and small businesses will experience rate increases," concluded the senators.

In addition to Sen. Cantwell, the letter was sent by U.S. Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Mark Kelly (D-AZ). The letter can be read in full HERE.