Sponsors (2)
The bill protects retail electricity customers and increases transparency by making large data centers bear grid upgrade costs and standardizing oversight, but it shifts substantial costs, compliance risks, and federal authority onto data centers and regulators, creating legal, investment, and implementation trade-offs.
Homeowners and small businesses are protected from higher electricity bills because the bill assigns connection, transmission, distribution, and generation upgrade costs to large data centers instead of spreading them to retail customers.
Utilities, developers, and local governments gain a clear federal standard and FERC oversight for data-center interconnection rates, improving regulatory certainty and helping prevent cross-subsidization.
Requiring data centers to pay their share can incentivize more efficient siting and demand management, reducing grid strain and helping planners target upgrades where needed.
Large data centers (especially >50 MW) will face substantial upfront construction and upgrade costs and higher allocated electricity costs, which can raise operating expenses, slow local investment, or be passed to customers of those firms.
Utilities, state regulators, and local governments could confront increased administrative burdens, disputes, and litigation over cost causation and technical definitions, slowing interconnection projects and grid upgrades.
Federalizing approval of retail rates for data centers reduces state and local control over energy pricing for a major customer class, creating potential conflicts with state energy policy and utility regulation.
Based on analysis of 12 sections of legislative text.
Gives FERC authority to set retail electricity rates for large data centers and requires those rates to fully cover data-center-driven grid and generation upgrade costs; bans certain NDAs against public officials and orders a National Academies environmental study.
Official title: To ensure that American families are protected from the impacts of data centers on the electric grid, and for other purposes.
Introduced March 20, 2026 by Greg Landsman · Last progress March 20, 2026
Gives the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) exclusive authority to approve retail electricity rates charged by covered utilities to large data centers and requires those rates to fully cover the costs of any generation, transmission, or distribution upgrades caused by data-center demand so those costs are not shifted to other retail customers. The bill also forbids enforcing predispute nondisclosure clauses against public officials in matters about data center construction, directs the EPA to contract with the National Academies for a 180-day study of data centers' environmental and public-health impacts with mitigation recommendations, and creates a new civil-penalty regime for violations of the new FERC authority. Overall, the law reallocates electricity infrastructure costs onto data centers, increases federal oversight of data-center retail rates, protects certain public officials from NDA enforcement in data-center disputes, and requires a rapid National Academies assessment of environmental impacts and mitigation options.