Ratepayer Protection Act Stalls in Senate

On September 16, 2026 the House of Representatives passed H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, on a motion to suspend the rules and pass as amended. The Clerk’s roll call 312, taken at 6:53 p.m., records 417 yeas, 3 nays and 12 members not voting: Republicans 210 to 0, Democrats 206 to 3 and one independent in favor. The three nays were Representatives Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, Delia Ramirez and Rashida Tlaib. The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s release credits Representative Gabe Evans of Colorado as the bill’s lead; Senator Jon Husted of Ohio introduced the Senate version in July, with Representatives Evans and Kathy Castor of Florida on the House companion, according to Husted’s office.

The engrossed text is short. It adds a new paragraph (22) to section 111(d) of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. A rate for a large-load customer “shall be designed to recover” the full, incremental cost of any generation, transmission or distribution upgrade needed to serve that customer, including if the customer terminates its contract or stops buying power, and the utility must require financial assurances or contributions before it builds. A large-load customer is a non-residential consumer that requests or enters a power contract on or after enactment for facilities that mainly run information technology infrastructure for data storage and computation and that together draw a peak of 100 megawatts or more at a single site or campus. States would have one year to begin considering the standard and two years to decide, and a state that already implemented, formally considered, or voted on a comparable standard is excused from that process. On September 17 Husted asked the Senate to pass the bill by unanimous consent. Heinrich, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, objected and asked consent instead for his own bill, S. 5199, the GRID Savings Act of 2026; Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio objected to that, according to Heinrich’s office. Neither bill passed.

Read the two bills side by side and the disagreement is narrow. Both put the upgrade bill on the data center. H.R. 9340 does it through PURPA, which obliges a state commission to consider and determine whether to adopt a standard, not to adopt it; the Energy and Commerce release calls this a light touch approach and says it draws on what 24 states are already doing, a committee figure PSV did not verify state by state. Heinrich’s floor remarks attack exactly that point: “it’s not enough for us to tell states to consider making data centers pay.” His S. 5199 would instead give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission jurisdiction over connecting any load of 150 megawatts or more to interstate transmission, require a final rule within a year, assign 100 percent of interconnection and direct assignment facility costs to the customer, require financial security against a load that fails to proceed, measure peak demand without netting out co-located generation or storage, and exclude transmission wholly within ERCOT.

For a CRE operator the useful word in the House text is customer. The obligation lands on the non-residential consumer that contracts for the power. On a self-built hyperscale campus that is the tech company. On a powered shell or a wholesale colocation deal it can be the landlord, a development joint venture or the tenant, depending on who signs the utility agreement, which is PSV’s reading of the definition rather than anything the bill or its sponsors address. The termination language matters for the same reason: a tenant can walk under its lease while the upgrade cost recovery survives under the utility contract. The single site or campus aggregation also means a phased campus cannot stay under 100 megawatts by contracting building by building. None of this is law yet, but the same direction runs through the Wisconsin, Tennessee Valley Authority and PJM large-load actions this desk has covered.

The artifact is one row per data center site a firm owns, is developing, finances or is underwriting. Inputs: the executed or draft electric service agreement and its signature date; the utility’s large-load tariff sheets and any state commission order on large-load rates; the site’s contracted and forecast peak demand, aggregated across the campus; the lease’s utility, pass-through and termination clauses; and the construction loan’s treatment of utility deposits and letters of credit. Output: for each site, who the utility customer of record is, whether the contract predates any enactment, whether the state already has a comparable standard, what security has been posted or will be required, and what happens to unrecovered upgrade cost if the tenant leaves.

The reviewer is the asset manager or development lead with energy counsel on the tariff and contract terms. The approval gate: no letter of intent, lease or loan commitment on a site at or near 100 megawatts goes forward until its register row names who carries upgrade cost after a termination and the lease allocates it. An assistant is well suited to the extraction, pulling definitions, thresholds, dates and termination terms from long tariffs and agreements and flagging where a lease is silent. It should not decide whether a pass-through is enforceable or whether a utility will accept a given form of security.