Powerstack: Congress takes on data center costs

Before we jump in this week, I want to give a shout to our new and improved Data Centers & Power product – or, for how we cover it, it’s really the Power & Data Centers product.

This new iteration tracks the critical questions across the power value chain, like how each data centers plans to get power, who’s supplying it, and whether the data center and power projects are going to make it to the finish line.

These gametime questions are answerable with the dataset we’ve built that includes gobs more data for each data center, supply and offtake contracts, generation and storage projects, large load tariffs, and more. This enables a more granular view on what’s getting built, and who’s winning in this new power era.

Take a look here. Talk to sales. Or Currence clients, get going here.

Also, looking forward to seeing so many of you in a few days at our flagship event, Future Currence on 21 September in NYC! Or if you’re in Houston for GRC on 22 September, join us for our Currence Geothermal Breakfast!

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What happened

The House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act 417-3 on 16 September, which would push state utility commissions to make data centers over 100MW cover the full cost of the grid upgrades they trigger. It still has to clear the Senate, but the vote count alone marks a boiling point in the political heat around data centers this election season.

The act has little bite, though. It runs through Section 111(d) of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, which makes state commissions hold a hearing and rule on the standard, nothing more. The same section did add energy efficiency and smart grid standards in 2005 and 2007, but states have a long history of holding the hearing and declining anyway. And several states, like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, and Oklahoma, already have their own versions of ratepayer protection on the books.

The one provision with real teeth is cost obligation. If a data center walks away from its interconnection agreement after a utility has already built the upgrades, it would still have to pay, closing off the stranded-asset risk that residential ratepayers would otherwise absorb.

The three no votes, Summer Lee (D-PA), Delia Ramirez (D-IL), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), wanted an outright moratorium instead. The bill now sits with the Senate, where a companion from Jon Husted (R-OH) has waited since July, and the Senate breaks for campaign season within weeks.

At Currence, we've been watching how the data center backlash would show up on the ballot come November. Our new analysis tracks 114 dated actions by state utility regulators and challengers this cycle, including votes, dissents, formal orders, and public statements on data center matters. Just eight pushed back against data centers outright, and only three were actual votes that got outvoted by the rest of the commission. 

Congress shows the same pattern. The Ratepayer Protection Act has 41 bipartisan cosponsors, while the only proposed moratorium at the federal level, the AI Data Center Moratorium Act, has eight, with Bernie Sanders as its lone Senate sponsor. The fight everyone's actually having is over cost allocation, not whether data centers get built at all.

And that fight is indeed coming for ballot boxes. Ten states elect utility commissioners directly this November, nine of them with races this cycle, and 26 governors' races will collectively seat 75 more commissioners through 2030. Georgia is the only state that clears all three conditions at once this cycle: a commission race where the seat can flip, a commission with real authority over large load, and something live for that commission to decide.

Mark’s take

Vote all you want, Congress.

While I’m absolutely all for ratepayer protection, as a ratepayer myself, this vote is symbolic. It puts members on the record in the election cycle as being for the people and protecting pocketbooks. And it’s smart that cost allocation is where this landed. A moratorium is a local issue. It’s about construction, traffic, noise, and it really only reaches people who live near a site – like my parents and their friends, in Data Center Alley. But the spread-out cost of grid upgrades and data center construction reaches everyone, on their utility bill. It’s safe to run on, hence the 417-3 vote.

But even if it did pass and get to the president’s desk, it wouldn’t change much with the power buildout.

Moratoria, voted on in Congress or in local jurisdictions, won’t do it either. If you read the moratoria, most projects already in play tend to get grandfathered-in rather than clawed-back, so the pipeline today is really for the most part, the pipeline tomorrow.

But still, the power market is going to change enormously, and this election matters hugely, but it’s not because of these.

It’s because of the commissioners. 

They decide what gets built and who pays for it. Of course there are some exceptions, but in most cases, they set the tariffs, approve the certificate, the siting permit, and the interconnection agreement. In this election, 15 seats are on the ballot, 10 with no incumbent. And in the 34 states where the governor appoints the commission (typically 3-5 members) 26 have a gubernatorial race in November. And given commissioner term lengths, this will mean about 75 commissioners will be seated over the next few years.

This turnover is where the change will happen.

Currence clients, see the full analysis, dataset with the roster of all commissioners, governors, and Congress, and key race match-up cards here.

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

5 // Nuclear developers with construction permit applications in front of the NRC. Blue Energy has filed the first part of its NRC construction permit application for a BWRX-300 reactor at its gas-to-nuclear project in Port of Victoria, Texas, joining four others. With five applications in the queue, near-term SMR builds are starting to take shape. Pairing the reactor with existing gas generation gives Blue Energy revenue early while construction runs in parallel.

$47m // Alpha Compute bought the gas under its Pennsylvania campus instead of buying power or turbines, financing $47m of a $55m land deal to fuel a 200MW data center, with a 1GW path, entirely off its own gas. Owning the fuel source lets a developer skip both the turbine backlog and the interconnection queue at once, and the note's structure, non-recourse, secured only by land and mineral rights, keeps that risk off the data center business entirely.

100% // UK PM Andy Burnham rejected a national data center moratorium. Instead, Burnham pointed to AI Growth Zones, where local authorities retain 100% of business rate growth from hosting data centers. It's a revenue-share answer to a siting question, a different tack than the cost-internalization tariffs several US states have leaned on.

Explore more Signals on Currence here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

EPA finalizes repeal of power plant carbon standards. The move overturns the 2024 Biden-era rule requiring power plants to control emissions and aims to make the standards harder for a future administration to reinstate. It came days after the D.C. Circuit unanimously vacated DOE's Federal Power Act Section 202(c) order that had kept Michigan's Campbell coal plant running past retirement, ruling the agency's reading of "emergency" invites interventions the statute does not support.

Pennsylvania's PUC opens a data center cost fight. The Commission voted 5-0 to direct staff toward updated emergency curtailment rules and a fall technical conference on data center cost allocation within PJM, alongside a new working group on ratemaking and ROE treatment. Pennsylvania is starting to draw lines on who pays for the capacity data centers pull onto the grid.

AI big names form a flexibility trade group. Google, Nvidia, and Emerald AI announced the AI Energy Management Alliance, with Anthropic, NRG, and Constellation Energy also on board. It aims to make load flexibility the industry's answer to mounting pushback on data center grid costs. Watch whether the alliance turns that case into actual utility tariffs and FERC rules.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Currence platform.

Data Centers & Power: 2026 US Election Guide. Mapping every governor, utility commissioner, and member of Congress on the ballot this November against their data center positions. Fifteen elected commission seats are in play this cycle, ten with no incumbent, and governors in 26 states with live races will appoint 75 more commissioners through 2030. Get the full database.

Sector Compass: Space. Currence's new sector compass covers the space tech landscape, including two power-relevant plays: orbital data centers pitched as a way around terrestrial permitting queues, and space-based solar power pitched as grid-free baseload. Check out the market map.

Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅 Future Currence // New York, 21 September // Currence’s flagship New York Climate Week event brings the leading utilities, hyperscalers, developers, financiers, and innovators into one room to build a vision for how the AI buildout can create a better grid future. Attendance subject to approval.

📅 Currence Geothermal Breakfast // Houston, 22 September // We're hosting a breakfast September 22nd during Geothermal Rising's 2026 conference to dive into the state of commercialization of advanced geothermal. Register here.

📅 Yotta 2026 // Las Vegas, 28-30 September // Network and learn at the biggest AI infrastructure conference of the year. With 6,000+ leaders across data centers, energy, compute, and capital, the conference is bringing industry leaders together to solve the cross-stack challenge of sustainable, scalable growth in the age of AI. Use code CURRENCE20 for 20% off passes

For those who made it this far – the B-side! This week it’s for all the 90’s kids. We’re going to keep going with covers. Brandi Carlisle did this cover of Alanis Morissette’s Uninvited at Newport Folk this year. Chills.

Full Powerstack B-Sides on Spotify.

Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and learn how the teams that finance and build the energy system use Currence to stay ahead in the energy and AI buildout, including Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital, and others.