Taxpayers would be held harmless from large electricity users, such as data centers, under legislation backed by Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted, with voting possibly as early as this week. The legislation already received overwhelming support in the U.S. House of Representatives, where just three members of Congress opposed its passage.
Husted’s office said the bill aims to ensure families and small businesses are not left paying for the energy infrastructure needed to support new data centers.
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The Ratepayer Protection Act would require states to consider establishing standards for energy regulators when connecting large electricity users, such as data centers, to their grids. The companies would then pay for the power generation, transmission lines, and other infrastructure needed to serve their facilities and prevent shifting those costs to ratepayers.
“Working families, small businesses and senior citizens should not open up their electric bills and discover the pain for the power infrastructure needed by some large tech company in the world or in their neighborhood,” Husted said in remarks on the Senate floor. “That is the principle behind the Ratepayer Protection Act. In plain language, if you create the cost, you should pay the cost. Most importantly, it will help the American people keep more of what they earn.”
This week’s expected attempt to pass the legislation comes after Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) blocked the proposed unanimous consent on September 18 in the chamber. The New Mexico Democrat said the legislation was “not enough,” despite it passing the House with flying bipartisan colors, Breitbart News reported.
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Heinrich instead wants his bill considered, the GRID Savings Act, which he said would “require large load customers like data centers to pay for the facilities needed to connect them to the grid, not to consider it, not to make pledges, to actually do it, to pay for the upgrades they need.”
Husted’s bill works to codify much of what President Donald Trump has asked energy and technology companies to do with his Ratepayer Protection Pledge.
Trump has said in previous remarks the pledge is how the U.S. will promote economic growth, lower costs, protect consumers, and dominate the global artificial intelligence race all at once.
In March, major companies including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI signed on to the Ratepayer Protection Pledge at an event at the White House.
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