States act while electricity bills increase in the middle of the boom of data centers. “ There is a massive outcry ”

It is not clear that a state has a solution and that the real effect of data centers on electricity bills is difficult to identify. Some criticisms wonder if states have the spine to take a hard line against technology giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.

But more than a dozen states have started to take measures because the data centers cause rapid construction of power plants and transmission lines.

This meant put pressure on the largest operator of the country’s electricity network to repress price increases, study the effect of data centers on electricity bills or push owners of data centers to pay a larger share of local transmission costs.

The rise in bills on electricity is “something that legislators have heard a lot about. This is something that we have heard a lot about. More people are expressed at the Public Services Commission in the past year I have never seen before, “said Charlotte Shuff of Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer defense group. “There is a massive outcry.”

Not the typical electric customer

Certain data centers may require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans, and make the factories of huge tiny factories in comparison. This pushes decision -makers to rethink a system which, historically, has distributed the costs of transmission among the classes of consumers proportional to the consumption of electricity.

“A large part of this infrastructure, billions of dollars, is under construction just for a few customers and some facilities and these are the richest companies in the world,” said Ari Peskoe, who heads the electricity law initiative at Harvard University. “I think some of the fundamental hypotheses behind all of this decompose.”

A corrective, said Peskoe, is a “box of worms” which associates classes of taxpayers against each other.

Some officials minimize the role of data centers in the implementation of electricity bills.

Tricia Pridemore, which sits on the Georgia Commission of the Public Service and is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, underlined an already tightened electricity supply and increasing costs for power lines, public service posts, processors and generators, because public services replace the aging equipment or harden it against extreme weather conditions.

The data centers necessary to adapt to the boom of artificial intelligence are still in the stages of regulatory planning, said Pridemore, and the coalition of the data center, which represents companies of large technologies and developers of the data center, said that its members have committed to paying their fair share.

But growing evidence suggests that the electricity bills of certain Americans increase to subsidize the massive energy needs of major technologies while the United States participates in a race against China for the superiority of artificial intelligence.

The Wood Mackenzie data and analysis company has published a report in the past few weeks that suggested 20 specialized or effective rates for data centers in 16 states it has studied are not sufficient to cover the cost of a new natural gas power plant.

In other words, unless public services are negotiating higher specialized rates, other taxpayer, residential, commercial and industrial classes – probably pay for the power of the data center.

Meanwhile, monitoring the analysis, the independent guard dog of the Middle Atlantic network, has produced research in June showing that 70% – or 9.3 billion dollars – increased cost of electricity from last year were the result of demand from the data center.

States respond

Last year, five governors led by Josh Shapiro de Pennsylvania began to postpone the prices of electricity set by the operator of the Middle Atlantic network, PJM Interconnection, after this amount was nearly seven. They warned against customers “by paying billions more than necessary”.

PJM has not yet proposed any ways to guarantee that data centers pay their freight, but the monitoring of the analysis floated the idea that the data centers should be necessary to obtain their own power.

In a file last month, he said that this would avoid a “massive wealth transfer” of medium -sized persons to technological companies.

At least a dozen states are considering means to charge higher local costs.

In Oregon, a hot spot in the data center, legislators adopted legislation in June, ordering regulators of public state services to develop new power rates – probably higher – for data centers.

Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board indicates that there is clear evidence that the costs to serve data centers are distributed to all customers – at a time when certain electricity bills are up 50% in the past four years and public services disconnect more people than ever.

The governor of New Jersey signed the legislation last month, the commissioning of regulators of public state services to study whether taxpayers are struck by “unreasonable rate increases” to connect data centers and develop a specialized rate to charge data centers.

In some other states, such as Texas and Utah, governors and legislators try to avoid a crisis of supply and demand that leaves taxpayers on hook – or in darkness.

Doubts about states protecting taxpayers

In Indiana, regulators of public state services have approved a settlement between Indiana Michigan Power Co., Amazon, Google, Microsoft and consumer defenders who define the parameters for the payments of the data center for the service.

Kerwin Olsen, from the Citizens Action Council of Indiana, a consumer defense group, signed the regulations and described it as a “fairly good deal” which contained more consumer protection than what state legislators have adopted.

But, he said, the law of the State does not force major energy users such as data centers to be revealed publicly their electrical use, so pinch if they pay their fair share of transmission costs “will be a challenge”.

In a March report, the Harvard University of the Environment and Energy Law Program questioned the motivation of public services and regulators to protect taxpayers from the implementation of the cost of electricity for data centers.

Public services and states have incentives to attract large customers such as data centers, he said.

To do this, public services – which must have their prices approved by regulators – can offer “special offers to favored customers” as a data center and effectively move the costs of these discounts to regular taxpayers, the authors wrote. Many laws of states can protect the disclosure of these rates, they said.

In Pennsylvania, a hot spot in the emerging data center, the Commission of Public State Services writes a model rate structure for public services to plan to adopt. A primordial objective is to bring developers of data centers to put their money where their mouths are located.

“We are talking about real transmission improvements, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars,” said committee president Stephen Defrank. “And that’s what you don’t want the taxpayer to be stuck to pay.”