The Trump Administration Wants to Protect Electricity Customers and Support Data Center Development. Here’s How.
“The Trump administration should champion reforms that accomplish both goals at once: accelerate AI infrastructure while ensuring American families never have to subsidize development. Consumer-Regulated Electricity (CRE) offers exactly that solution by allowing developers to build and operate entirely private electricity networks outside the traditional regulated grid.
…Under this model, developers who need enormous amounts of electricity would finance, build, and operate new systems. And these new networks could serve any number of new customers. Developers would assume the investment risk and negotiate private contracts with new customers, who would receive electricity without waiting years for approval through the existing regulatory process. Just as important, households connected to the public grid would not be asked to finance infrastructure built for someone else’s business.
…Instead of asking regulators to divide costs after the fact, it allows private investors to build separate infrastructure with their own capital from the beginning. The result is greater certainty for consumers, developers, utilities, and policymakers alike.
Perhaps more importantly, CRE begins to move the electricity industry toward something it has lacked for nearly a century: meaningful institutional competition.
…Most American industries improve because entrepreneurs are free to experiment. Companies develop new technologies, business models, and production methods using private capital while bearing the consequences of success or failure. Electricity, by contrast, remains organized around regulatory structures designed when monopolies were thought to be the only practical way to provide power.
CRE creates space for that kind of experimentation again. Companies could test new approaches to generation, reliability, storage, and network design without imposing risks on captive ratepayers. Failed ideas would remain isolated. Successful ones could spread throughout the industry.
The benefits extend beyond economics. America’s electrical grid has become increasingly interconnected, allowing disruptions to cascade across wide geographic regions. As cyber threats grow more sophisticated, concentrating critical infrastructure on a handful of massive, synchronized networks creates vulnerabilities. A future with multiple privately financed electricity networks would be more diverse, more adaptable, and ultimately more resilient.
Data centers may be the first beneficiaries of CRE, but they will not be the last. The greater opportunity is an electricity sector that becomes faster, more innovative, and more competitive because entrepreneurs are once again free to build new kinds of networks with their own capital at their own risk. That’s how America built many of its most successful industries, and it’s how we can ensure that the next generation of energy infrastructure protects consumers while powering the technologies of the future.”
