Californian Senator Proposes Bill to Create New Rate Class

A new bill has been introduced in the California Senate aimed at regulating the expansion of large load data centers across the state and protecting ratepayers from footing the bill for the generation and transmission infrastructure needed to power them.

Introduced by Senator Sasha Renée Pérez (Democrat-Pasadena) SB 978 would require the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to establish a special rate structure for large-scale energy users, with a capacity of at least 75MW.
 
This would aim to protect other customers of electrical corporations, prevent cost shifts to those other customers, and require large-scale energy users to pay for the electrical corporations’ upfront costs of transmission or distribution infrastructure upgrades necessary for the provision of electrical service to those users.

The bill would also address environmental, community, and workforce concerns by banning diesel backup generation and mandating clean technologies for backup. In addition, it would direct the California Energy Commission to commission a report on the impact of large data center loads on the state’s decarbonization goals.