By Jacob Bogage and Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON, Sept 18 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Friday he is engaging with Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune about bringing to the floor a bill aimed at protecting households from electricity cost increases tied to the expansion of data centers.
“Well, I’m talking to him about it. We’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters on Friday.
Lawmakers from both parties have faced growing constituent concerns over rising electricity costs associated with the industry’s surging power demand.
Earlier this week, the Republican-majority House of Representatives voted 417 to 3 in favor of the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would require state utility regulators to consider whether large electricity users, including data centers, should bear the incremental costs of power infrastructure built to serve them.
An attempt by Senate Republicans to get the bill quickly passed failed on Thursday.
Senator Martin Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, blocked the proposal, after its sponsor, Republican Senator Jon Husted, requested unanimous consent for a vote without a roll call.
Heinrich said the bill did not go far enough by relying on voluntary commitments from states and data center developers.
Trump strongly backs data center development as critical to leadership in artificial intelligence. Trump said this week data centers make people and states wealthy, calling them the “oil of the next 20, 25 years.”
Just 11% of Americans would support construction of an AI data center in their community, according to a recent poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
(Reporting by Jacob Bogage and Kanishka Singh in Washington; editing by David Gaffen)
