The Senate failed to advance a bill aimed at protecting electricity customers from new costs associated with data centers on Wednesday.
The bill, a largely symbolic effort that received near-unanimous support in the House earlier this month, would have required state regulators to “consider” a strategy to force data centers to pay for their own power and avoid passing costs on to local residents.
Democrats blocked the vote, though Sens. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Raphael Warnock ofGeorgia voted with Republicans in support of the bill. Ossoff and Klobuchar are both on the ballot this November.
Republicans saw the vote as a way to boost their campaign message across the country, as voters increasingly express frustration over AI and its associated infrastructure.
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Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), who is up for reelection, led the legislation. His Democratic challenger, former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, has labeled Husted “the face of data centers” in campaign ads.
On the Senate floor Wednesday morning, Husted said the bill was about lowering electricity prices, as Americans are “increasingly relying on the computing power of data centers.”
“We have to make sure that the growth of these data centers does not mean higher electric bills for working families, for senior citizens or for small businesses,” he said.
But Democrats said that Husted’s proposal would fail to actually require state regulators to act.
“This is being designed by one Republican senator” who is facing a tough election, said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illlinois).
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) called the bill “all message and no substance.”
Data centers have become a political flash point over the course of just a few months, with anger over their development and associated potential impacts on energy costs and environmental quality growing quickly between spring and summer. By August, three-quarters of Americans said they’d oppose a local data center, according to polling from Heatmap.
While the massive energy-hungry buildings have driven a surge in power prices in some places, research shows large customers like data centers can push down costs by spreading the costs of managing the grid across a larger base of demand.
The Ratepayer Protection Act would not have mandated any standards around energy cost sharing for data centers, but instead put the issue to state Public Utilities Commissions – a move that could present a step forward in some states, but that advocates for data center regulation said would not be sufficient to address the issue
President Donald Trump, a vocal supporter of data centers, has proposed a similar stance with his Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which commits developers to building, bringing or buying their own power.
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