The Trump Administration Wants to Protect Electricity Customers while Supporting Data Center Development. Here’s How.
“America needs a better option. 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.
Today’s electricity system forces almost everyone, from homeowners to hyperscale data centers, to depend on the same network. That one-size-fits-all model increasingly does not serve either group well. Large customers may wait a decade or longer for service, while ordinary ratepayers worry that expanding the grid for massive new industrial loads will ultimately increase their own bills.
CRE separates those interests instead of forcing them together. 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.
That distinction is what makes CRE superior to proposals requiring regulators to determine precisely how much of each grid upgrade should be paid for by data centers. Those debates quickly become fights over cost allocation. Utilities, industrial customers, consumer advocates, and regulators end up arguing over who should pay for increasingly complex grid investments.
CRE avoids that fight altogether. 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.”
https://travisfisher.substack.com/p/the-trump-administration-wants-to
