The claim was made at EPA headquarters on July 23. Electricity bills for American families, the president said, 'will actually come down' [1]. The reasoning offered was that data center operators are 'going to have a lot of electricity left over, and they'll put that into the grid' [1].
The instrument is the expanded Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which the White House says covers 80 percent of all power delivered to US homes and businesses - 263 million Americans - with 23 governors and more than 187 companies signed on [3]. Its text says data center growth 'will not raise electricity bills for American households and businesses' and that 'large data center operators - not ratepayers - fund the electricity generation and infrastructure their projects require' [3].
The pledge is nonbinding [1]. No signatory is required to do anything, and Matthew Freedman of The Utility Reform Network noted that 'the same tech companies signing the Ratepayer Protection Pledge are simultaneously opposing efforts at the state level to force them to deliver on their promises' [1].
The accounting, meanwhile, is already being done by the entity whose job it is. PJM's independent market monitor found data centers responsible for $6.3 billion of the $16.4 billion in charges from PJM's just-held capacity auction - 38 percent [2]. Across the last four base capacity auctions, data-center-driven charges totalled $29.4 billion out of $63.6 billion [2].
Joseph Bowring of Monitoring Analytics put the consequence plainly: 'PJM is continuing to act like it's business as usual... failing to do that imposes costs on other customers' [2]. Those other customers are the American families whose bills were promised to come down.
The consultancy ICF projects monthly utility bills rising 15 to 40 percent by 2030 [1].
