Representative Eugene Vindman of Virginia in his official House portrait. Image: Ike Hayman, House Creative Services / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain, cropped
The tech giants say they pay their fair share for the power their AI data centres use. A new bill in Congress would turn that promise into law. Representative Eugene Vindman, a Virginia Democrat, introduced the Make Data Centers Pay Act on October 13, which would bar utilities from passing any of the extra cost of powering a big data centre on to other customers’ bills.
The bill, H.R. 10809, is short: one new section added to the Federal Power Act. It was referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Vindman introduced it alone, with no co-sponsors listed.
Who the bill covers
It applies to any data centre or “high-density computing facility” drawing 20 megawatts or more, counted at one site or across several sites with the same owner. Projects built in phases count if they are expected to pass 20 MW once finished, so a developer can’t slip under the line by opening one hall at a time.
The bill text names three kinds of computing: artificial intelligence training or inference, cloud computing or data hosting, and cryptocurrency mining. Computer rooms that merely support a factory or other business are left out.
The new data centre pays, not your bill
The core of the bill is a “ratepayer protection floor”. Utilities would have to work out the incremental cost of each covered data centre: everything they would have avoided if it had never connected, including new power plants, storage, transmission lines and local distribution. The bill says no part of that cost can be “allocated to, or recovered in the rates of, any customer” other than the data centre itself.
Three more rules back that up:
- Money up front. Before building or upgrading any generation, transmission or distribution kit to serve a data centre, the utility must get financial guarantees or payments from the operator big enough to cover the cost.
- No walking away. If a data centre ends its contract or stops buying power before its costs are paid off, it keeps paying until they are.
- Room to charge more. Federal or state regulators can still charge data centres above cost and hand the surplus back to other customers as a rebate or lower rates.
Cost estimates are made by the utility when the data centre comes online and need approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or the state, depending on who has jurisdiction. Otherwise the bill leaves the split between FERC and state regulators as it is. It only applies to data centres that connect after it becomes law; deals already approved stay in place.
‘Data centers must pay their fair share’
Vindman’s office hasn’t published a statement on the bill. The same day it was introduced, he spoke at a Virginia State Corporation Commission hearing in Fairfax against the proposed NextEra takeover of Dominion Energy, Virginia’s biggest utility, and made the same argument:
NextEra sees enormous profits to be made in Virginia, particularly with the explosion of data centers. But I’ve been crystal clear: data centers must pay their fair share. Virginia families should not be subsidizing corporate expansion through higher electricity bills.
Eugene Vindman, US Representative for Virginia’s 7th district
Northern Virginia has the largest cluster of data centres in the world, and Vindman told the hearing that Virginians “are already paying too much to keep the lights on.”
A fight already under way
The bill lands days after a Senate investigation found Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft won’t pay the full cost of the grid upgrades their AI data centres trigger. Vindman’s bill would require exactly that for new sites, with payment secured before work starts.
Local anger over power bills is growing too. Towns and counties are passing moratoriums on new data centres, and Amazon has offered $1 billion to win communities back. We looked at who ends up paying for AI’s strain on the grid in the US and Europe last month.
Why it matters
AI data centres are a big reason US electricity demand is rising again, and the question of who pays for the new plants and power lines is now a political one. The bill is a bare-bones version of what campaigners have asked for, but a single-sponsor bill is a long way from law: it has to clear a committee first, and the industry argues it already pays its way.
Sources: GovInfo: H.R. 10809, Make Data Centers Pay Act; Office of Rep. Eugene Vindman: Vindman takes fight against NextEra-Dominion merger directly to Virginia SCC hearing.
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