Should data centers pay their own power bills, and can Washington even make them?
Congress just passed a bipartisan bill asking states to consider making large data centers pay the full cost of the plants and wires built to serve them, but it orders nothing. Is a nonbinding request the right way to handle AI’s electricity bill, or does it prove that the real decisions belong to state regulators, utilities, and voters rather than Washington?
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Today’s episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, dated September 16, 2026, dug into the Ratepayer Protection Act, the one AI bill both parties could wave through seven weeks before an election. The catch, as the show put it, is the verb: the bill tells state utility commissions to consider making 100-megawatt data centers pay their own way, hold a hearing within two years, and then adopt it or not. The hosts argued the vote is less a policy than a thermometer, measuring how hot the electric bill has become while the President calls the backlash a conspiracy and utilities call it a misunderstanding. Under a 1978 law your rate is set by your state, so the fight over who pays for AI’s power is really fifty fights, not one. Listen to the full episode and tell us where you think the bill for abundance should land.
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