Congress Split Over Who Pays as AI Data Centers Drive Up Power Bills

On Capitol Hill this week, Republicans tried to advance the Ratepayer Protection Act, sponsored by Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted. The bill would have state utilities consider holding "large-load" customers responsible for increased costs, NPR reported. The House passed it easily in September with strong bipartisan support.

Husted is in a heated reelection campaign against Democrat Sherrod Brown, who lost his Senate seat in 2024. Brown has made Husted's past support of data centers in Ohio a major campaign issue.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer opposes the Husted measure, saying its protections for ratepayers are voluntary. He is promoting the GRID Savings Act, a similar bill authored by New Mexico Democrat Sen. Martin Heinrich, which Schumer says has more teeth. Several other data center and AI-related bills are at various stages in the legislative process, according to NPR.

The cost picture is complicated. Experts told NPR there is no universal answer and the impact varies by utility and state, but residential electricity customers will pay a share of the AI buildout. By one estimate, Maryland customers pay roughly $168 to $216 more per year on their electricity bills primarily because of the data center boom.

"We're talking tens to hundreds of millions of dollars [of infrastructure] that are being built by these local utilities," Connor Waldoch, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Grid Status, told NPR. "In many cases, it is just ultimately going to end up in customers' bills."

Tracking that impact is not easy. Lucy Qiu, a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told NPR that how much of an increase is passed on to residential customers, and when, depends on utilities' power-purchasing contracts, retail rates and regulatory decisions about who pays.

PJM, a regional transmission organization that coordinates the electricity grid and wholesale power market across 13 states and the District of Columbia, supplies power to Northern Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world. PJM's Independent Market Monitor estimates that data centers have cost its 67 million ratepayers about $29 billion over roughly the past two years, NPR reported.

"Everyone pays those costs," Ari Peskoe, director of the Harvard Electricity Law Initiative, told NPR. "They're spread across the region to every business and resident that has an electricity meter."

Data center growth can push up wholesale energy costs by increasing demand, which determines how much generating capacity utilities and regional grid operators need to secure, Qiu said. There are also costs for new power lines, substations and other infrastructure to connect data centers to the grid. Determining how much of that exclusively serves data centers—and how much also benefits other customers—is part of the difficulty in deciding who gets the bill.

"It really depends on the scale of the upgrade and also how utilities are doing the accounting of that different share, whether it's being used solely by the data centers or also being shared by other customers," Qiu told NPR.

Peskoe said a "single, clean number" for the nation is not possible because "a lot of the data about how much particular data centers are paying is hidden behind non-disclosure agreements." Those NDAs have become a local flashpoint, as residents opposed to new data centers criticize officials over secrecy around many deals. A study last year by the University of Mary Washington found NDAs had been signed in 80% of Virginia localities where there were existing, approved or proposed data centers, NPR reported.

In an email to NPR, Jeremy L. Slayton, a spokesman for Dominion Energy, which serves Loudoun County, Va., home to about 250 data centers, said, "We recover costs for distribution and transmission infrastructure from customers." He said those assets are core to the reliable electric service Dominion provides its customers.

Editor's Summary

Congress is weighing the Ratepayer Protection Act and the GRID Savings Act as midterm elections approach, with lawmakers divided over whether protections for residential utility customers should be mandatory. Experts say residential customers are already paying part of the cost of the AI data center buildout, but the exact amount is obscured by varied utility accounting and non-disclosure agreements. PJM's market monitor estimates data centers have cost its 67 million ratepayers about $29 billion over roughly two years.