As electric accounts rise, the evidence assembles that data centers have the debt. States feel pressure to act

Harrisburg, father-in midst of rising electric accounts, are states under pressure to isolate regular domestic and business rate payers from the cost of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers. It is not clear that any condition has a solution and that the actual effect of electricity account data centers is difficult to determine. Some critics question whether states have the backbone to take a hard line against technical behavior such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta. But more than a dozen states have started to take steps as data centers drive a rapid expansion of power plants and transmission lines. This meant that the country’s largest power network operator has pushed to combat price increases, study the effect of data centers on electricity bills or to print the data center owners to pay a larger part of the local transmission costs. Rising power bills are ‘something that lawmakers have heard a lot about. This is something we have heard a lot about. More people have been talking to the Public Utility Commission over the past year than I have seen before, ‘said Charlotte Shuff of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer group group. “There is a massive cry.” Some data centers may need more electricity than cities in the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans, and make large factories look small. It forces policymakers to reconsider a system that has historically distributed transmission costs among class consumers proportional to electricity use. “Much of this infrastructure, billions of dollars of it, is built only for a few customers and some facilities, and it happens to be the richest businesses in the world,” says Ari Pskoe, which directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University. “I think some of the fundamental assumptions behind all of this just break down.” A fix, Pskoe said, is a ‘can of worms’ that place the taxpayer classes against each other. Some officials play the role of data centers to boost electric accounts. Tricia Pridemore, which sits on the Public Service Commission in Georgia and is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, pointed out an already tightened electricity supply and increased costs for power lines, utility poles, transformers and generators, as helping programs replace aging equipment. The data centers needed to accommodate the boom in artificial intelligence are still in the regulatory planning stages, Pridemore said, and the data center coalition, which represents large technical firms and developers of the data center, said its members were committed to paying their reasonable share. But growing evidence indicates that the electricity bills of some Americans are increasing to subsidize the massive energy needs of major technology, as the US competes in a race against China for superior intelligence superiority. Data and analytical firm Wood Mackenzie has published a report over the past few weeks in which 20 proposed or effective specialized rates for data centers in 16 states that have studied it is not nearly enough to cover the cost of a new natural gas power plant. In other words, unless aid programs negotiate over higher specialized rates, other taxpayers – residential, commercial and industrial – probably pay for the power needs of the data center. Meanwhile, Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the Mid-Atlantic network, conducted research in June showing that 70%or $ 9.3 billion of the increased electricity costs of last year was the result of the data center’s demand. Last year, five governors led by Josh Shapiro, Josh Shapiro, of Pennsylvania began to push back against power prices set by the mid-Atlantic grid operator, PJM minders, after the amount rose almost seven-fold. They warned that customers “pay billions more than needed.” PJM has not yet suggested ways to guarantee that data centers pay their load, but the monitoring of analysis drives the idea that data centers should be needed to obtain their own power. In a filing last month, it said it would avoid a ‘massive wealth transfer’ from average people to technical enterprises. At least a dozen states look at ways to pay data centers higher local transmission costs. In Oregon, a data center’s hotspot, legislators in June approved legislation to order the regulators of the state’s aid programs to develop new – presumably higher – data centers power rates. The Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board says there is clear evidence that costs to serve data centers are spreading across all clients – at a time when some electric accounts have risen by 50% over the past four years and utilities disconnect more people than ever before. New Jersey Governor signed legislation last month that commissioned the regulators of the state’s aid programs to study or taxpayers with “unreasonable rate hikes” to join data centers and to develop a specialized rate to charge data centers. In some other countries, such as Texas and Utah, governors and legislators try to avoid an offer-and-demand crisis that taxpayers are on the hook or in the dark. In Indiana, the regulators of the state’s aid programs approved a settlement between Indiana Michigan Power Co., Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Consumer Advocates that provide parameters for the datas center payments for service. Kerwin Olsen, of the Citizens Action Council of Indiana, a consumer advocacy group, signed the settlement and called it a ‘fairly good deal’ containing more consumer protection than state laws approved. But, he said, the state law does not force great power users such as data centers to publicly reveal their electrical use, and it will be a challenge to give a challenge. In a March report, the environmental and energy law program at Harvard University questioned the motivation of aid programs and regulators to protect taxpayers from the cost of electricity for data centers. Both aid programs and states have incentives to attract large customers such as data centers, it reads. In order to do this, aid programs – which need to get their rates approved by regulators – can offer ‘special offers to beneficiary customers’ such as a data center and shift the cost of the discount to ordinary taxpayers effectively, the authors wrote. Many state laws can protect the disclosure of the rates, they said. In Pennsylvania, an upcoming data center, the State Commission was drafted to set up a model rate structure for aid programs to adopt it. An overarching goal is to get developers of data centers to put their money where their mouths are. “We are talking about real transmission upgrades, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Stephen Dern Commission, chairman of the commission. “And that’s what you don’t want the taxpayer to be stuck.” Follow Marc Levy on X at https://x.com/timelywriter. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without edits to text.