Two things happened a week apart that, read together, show where the fight over AI’s electricity bill actually stands.
On September 30, the Senate blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bill meant to keep the cost of new power infrastructure for data centers off household electric bills. The vote was 57 to 43, short of the 60 needed to advance, CBS News reported, even though the bill had passed the House 417 to 3. On October 6, Alphabet signed a 20-year agreement with Constellation Energy that will add 890 megawatts of new nuclear output to the largest grid in the country, backed by more than $4.3 billion in upgrades that Constellation will fund.
Washington could not agree on who pays. One of the biggest buyers wrote its own answer.
What the Senate fight was about
Nearly everyone in the debate agreed on the principle that data centers should pay their own way. The disagreement was over whether the bill would make them. The Ratepayer Protection Act, led in the Senate by Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, would require state utility regulators to consider standards holding large data centers responsible for the costs of the infrastructure they need. It would not require regulators to adopt them.
That word, consider, is why all but four Democrats voted against advancing it. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called it a toothless messaging bill and said Democrats want it mandatory, according to CBS. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico had objected earlier in the month when Husted tried to pass it by unanimous consent:
Sen. Heinrich objected to Sen. Husted’s attempt to pass the data center-focused Ratepayer Protection Act, argued it didn’t do enough because it was voluntary
— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) September 17, 2026
Republicans saw it differently. They argued the vote put Democrats on record opposing protection for ratepayers, and Husted said in a post on X that Democrats blocked a bill to keep families and small businesses from footing the bill for Big Tech’s energy needs. Heinrich offered his own bill, which Democrats said would require large data centers to cover specified grid costs, and Republicans objected to that one. The result is that neither version has passed.
Why the bill mattered
The costs at stake are real. As we reported in August, the price paid in PJM’s capacity auction, the market that keeps enough power available for peak demand across 13 states, rose roughly tenfold over two years, and the market’s independent monitor attributed most of that increase to data centers. Those costs are recovered from everyone on the grid, not just the companies building the data centers.
Without a federal standard, the question goes back to the states and their utility commissions, where it is being decided one rate case at a time.
What Google bought
Alphabet’s deal points to a different kind of answer. The 890 megawatts will come from upgrades to 11 existing Constellation reactors in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with the first increment due by 2028 and all of it online by the end of 2032, according to Big Energy News. Constellation said the added output equals that of several small modular reactors. The capacity feeds PJM, the same grid where data center demand has pushed prices up. A separate 15-year agreement covers another 2,700 megawatts from Constellation’s existing plants.
The distinction matters. When a data center simply plugs into the grid, it competes with everyone else for existing power and, as PJM’s auctions show, can raise prices for all. When a company contracts for new supply that would not otherwise exist, it adds to the pool instead of only drawing from it. Uprates, which squeeze more output from existing reactors, are one of the fastest ways to do that, because the plants and their grid connections are already in place.
Google is not alone. Amazon signed a similar deal with Constellation the week before for 690 megawatts, including upgrades at Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs plant, Bloomberg reported, and Microsoft previously agreed to buy power from the Three Mile Island plant that Constellation plans to restart.
The limits of buying your way out
It would be a mistake to treat these deals as solving the problem. The new nuclear output arrives between 2028 and 2032, while data center demand is rising now. Deals like these are signed by the largest companies with the deepest pockets, and on their own they do not address the costs of transmission lines and grid upgrades that other data center projects trigger. And a voluntary corporate contract is, by definition, voluntary, the same objection Democrats raised about the Senate bill.
Still, the contrast is instructive. The policy question everyone claims to agree on, that data centers should pay for the power they need, has stalled in Congress over whether to make it a requirement. In the meantime, some of the companies driving the demand are contracting for new supply on their own terms. Whether that becomes the norm, or stays the exception for a handful of giants, will decide how much of AI’s power bill lands on everyone else.
Related reading: AI’s Energy Use Is Both Wildly Overblown and Seriously Underrated. · 57% of Texas Voters Don’t Want a Data Center Next Door. · A Startup Wants 456 Nuclear Reactors in Utah.
