Senate Democrats Block Ratepayer Protection Act Aimed at Shielding Consumers from Datacenter Electricity Costs

Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked legislation intended to offset the impact of datacenters on consumer electricity bills, which has emerged as a top voter concern ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The Ratepayer Protection Act failed by a 57 to 43 vote, falling just shy of the 60-vote margin needed to advance through the Republican-controlled chamber. The House of Representatives had approved the bill by an almost unanimous vote earlier this month September.

Datacenter construction and electricity consumption has grown in recent years amid advances in AI and other technologies, and with it has come increasing anxiety among voters about the facilities’ impacts on their energy bills.

The bipartisan legislation is an attempt by Congress to address those anxieties, and would have required electric utilities to consider adopting new standards so that datacenters pick up the costs of any necessary upgrades to transmission, generation and distribution, which can otherwise be transferred to households and businesses.

It was proposed ahead of the 3 November midterm elections in which Democrats are campaigning on lowering the cost of living in their bid to regain control of the Senate and House. Its sponsor in the lower chamber was Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican who is a top target of Democrats, while the Ohio Republican Jon Husted championed the bill through the Senate.

Though Ohio voted for Trump by an 11-point margin two years ago, recent polls have shown Husted trailing his opponent, the Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who has accused the incumbent of bowing to the demands of the datacenter industry.

While the proposal was seen as a bid by Republicans Senate leaders to bolster Husted’s re-election chances, it also presented a quandary for the chamber’s Democrats, since voting it down could be seen as running counter to their pledges of lowering electricity bills.

Nonetheless, the party’s leaders opted to oppose the measure, saying it would have been ineffective at actually addressing datacenters’ electricity consumption.

The vote was one of the last the Senate is expected to take before the midterms. The chamber is scheduled to conclude its work on Friday, after which senators will return to their states to campaign.