Senate Democrats Block House-Passed Bill on Data Center Power Costs

The Senate on Wednesday failed to advance a bill meant to keep the cost of new data centers off household electric bills. The Ratepayer Protection Act won 57 votes to 43, three short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.

The House passed the measure 417 to 3 earlier this month. It would set a federal standard that state utility regulators would have to consider, under which data centers and other very large power users would pay for the transmission, generation and distribution upgrades needed to serve them. Without such rules, those costs can be spread across every customer on a utility’s books.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called the bill a toothless messaging exercise. He argued that because it only asks states to consider the standard, no company would ever have to pay. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the senior Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, pressed instead for his own bill, which he said would put binding cost rules on data center developers.

Four Democrats broke with their leadership and voted to advance the bill: Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and both Georgia senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

Republicans’ strongest argument was that a bill nearly every House Democrat supported was ready to become law now. Majority Leader John Thune made that case on the floor, and The Guardian reported that the president had indicated he would sign it. Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, who led the Senate effort, said the day before the vote that the bill would make data centers pay for their own power, Spectrum News reported.

The vote carries obvious campaign stakes. Husted, who was appointed to his seat, is running for a full term against former Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who has made Husted’s past support for new data center projects a central theme of the campaign, according to Spectrum News. Democrats said the timing, weeks before the November election, showed the vote was meant to put them on the spot rather than to solve the problem. Republicans said the vote put Democrats on record on an issue voters care about.

That issue is real. Construction of data centers and their electricity use have grown with advances in artificial intelligence, and so has worry among voters about what the facilities will do to their monthly bills. The fight in the Senate was less about whether data centers should pay their share than about whether Washington should require that outcome or merely encourage states to consider it.

Wednesday’s vote leaves that decision where it already sat, with state utility commissions. Democrats said they would keep pushing for a binding version, and Republicans said the bill Democrats rejected was the one that could have reached the president’s desk. For households watching their electric bills, neither argument changes anything until one side has the votes.