President Donald Trump announced Thursday an expansion of a pledge to protect ratepayers from increasing energy costs as power-hungry AI infrastructure springs up across the country.
Fifty-five utilities including Avangrid, Dominion, Entergy, NextEra and PG&E joined the pledge, along with 106 energy cooperatives, 28 data center developers and 23 governors — all Republicans. Seven AI companies had already signed on in March. Democratic governors Wes Moore of Maryland and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who were involved in a previous White House agreement, were not part of the pledge.
Spokespeople for Shapiro and Moore said they were not invited to sign on to the pledge.
Companies that sign on to the pledge agree to build, bring or buy their own power supply, paying for the full cost of that energy and for the grid upgrades required to serve data centers. They also agree to pay for the power and grid upgrades whether they actually use the electricity or not.
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The pledge, which is non-binding, also pushes companies to invest in local jobs and to contribute to grid resilience, making their backup generation systems available to prevent shortages and blackouts.
“It’s hard to believe, but you need double the electricity that we have right now, maybe even more than that, to really fulfill what you want to do,” Trump said at an EPA event announcing the expanded pledge. “We’re leading China by a lot, and using our old grid would not have worked.”
Republican Govs. Brian Kemp of Georgia, Jeff Landry of Louisiana, Brad Little of Idaho, and Jim Pillen of Nebraska spoke at the event, addressing recent pushback against local data center development across the country and highlighting the benefits to their residents.
Landry described an agreement between Richland Parish, Louisiana, and Meta that generated enough revenue to give teachers in that community five-figure bonuses.
“This is a moment where we get to protect our people, empower our communities and unleash unprecedented economic opportunity,” he said.
The Trump administration has aggressively pushed building data centers as part of its commitment to building the artificial intelligence industry in the United States. But several top officials have acknowledged the political backlash to rising utility rates stemming from their development.
This week at a summit for AI stakeholders both inside and outside the government, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the “noise” around data centers is “not going to slow the progress of artificial intelligence.” Americans overwhelmingly oppose data centers being built in their communities.
The implementation and enforcement of ratepayer protections is overwhelmingly the responsibility of states.
Jeff Dennis, executive director of the Electricity Customer Alliance, said the addition of utilities and governors to the pledge could push protections forward.
“I think it makes a meaningful difference in terms of the ability of the pledge to drive forward progress at the institutions that have the authority to actually give teeth to it,” he said.
Implementing and enforcing ratepayer protections would require state public utilities commissions, which regulate the rates utility companies charge customers, to step in.
Some states have already started to create large load tariffs — special contracts with big customers that can dictate which costs they pay, and whether they’ll pay for the cost of the power and upgrades to the grid built for their needs, even if they don’t use it all.
But the major tenet of the pledge — the push for data centers to bring their own power to the table — has been harder to work out, Dennis said.
“It’s notable that utilities have joined the ratepayer pledge in this regard because utilities take a few different positions on whether their customers can actually participate in the market directly in that way to procure their own power,” he said. “We’ll be interested to see how utilities that have signed this pledge go about implementing that specific piece.”
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