A hundred megawatts and a bill to put someone's name on: the House votes, the Senate stalls

On 16 September 2026 the House of Representatives passed H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, under suspension of the rules: 417 in favor, 3 against, all three of them Democrats (figures as given in the Energy and Commerce Committee press release and in Roll Call's coverage of 16 September).

The mechanics are more interesting than the headline. The bill adds a paragraph 22 to section 111(d) of PURPA, the 1978 law through which Washington has spent half a century suggesting rate standards to the states without trespassing on their jurisdiction. The standard defines a ‘large-load customer’ as a non-residential customer requesting service for facilities with a combined peak demand of 100 megawatts or more at a single site or campus, and provides that the utility, before building any generation, transmission or distribution upgrade needed to serve that load, must ask the customer for financial assurances or contributions toward the cost. States have one year from enactment to open the review or set the hearing, and two to complete the determination. They have to consider it; they do not have to adopt it.

That distinction is exactly where the text stopped. On 17 September, a day after the vote, Senator Jon Husted (Republican, Ohio) asked for unanimous consent, and the ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Martin Heinrich (Democrat, New Mexico), objected: ‘It is not enough to tell states to consider making data centers pay for grid upgrades’ (as reported by Roll Call). When Heinrich asked to take up his own alternative, Senator Bernie Moreno (Republican, Ohio) objected. On the principle, agreement is wide and bipartisan — lead sponsor Gabe Evans (Republican, Colorado): ‘We can't fast-track this growth on the backs of hardworking Americans who are paying their electric bills at the end of the month’; and Energy Subcommittee Chairman Bob Latta, in the official release: ‘American families should not be paying higher electricity bills so that Big Tech companies can build and run data centers.’ On binding force, no.

Around all this sits a piece of public opinion lawmakers have in plain sight: Roll Call reports a University of Massachusetts Amherst survey of 1,000 people, conducted in late August 2026, in which 65% of respondents said they would oppose an AI data center in their own community — 52% among Republicans, 71% among independents, 76% among Democrats. I could not find the original methodology sheet, so the figure should be read as the outlet reports it. The poll measures stated opposition, not its reasons: where it comes from, and why it cuts so far across party lines, the survey does not say.

I'm left with the sense that the fight over artificial intelligence has changed rooms without announcing it: no longer which models may be trained, but whose name goes on the transformer invoice. It is less spectacular ground and much harder to dodge, because the bill reaches everyone in the same month. The measure is not law, though: after the 17 September objection it sits in the Senate with no known schedule, and there is no telling whether it moves on as a standalone text or ends up inside a larger vehicle. The roll call record on the Clerk's Office site could not be opened directly (the page offers only the search engine), and the text I read on GovInfo is the introduced version (IH), whose floor amendments, if any, will have to be checked against the ‘engrossed’ version. And even as law, it would ask the states to think about it. Fifty separate decisions, none of them required: how much it actually weighs on bills, today, cannot be quantified.

— Olya