Ratepayer Protection Act: 204 Big Data Centers Still Need the Grid, and AEP Already Sells Both Answers
The House bill only asks states to consider making 100 MW data centers pay for their grid upgrades, and Ohio already shows what happens to the queue when one does.
The House wants states to make 100 MW data centers pay for their own grid upgrades. Ohio already does, and the utility behind its tariff just bought a gigawatt of fuel cells.
The House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act on Wednesday, and nuclear stocks spent two days celebrating. The vote was 417-3, which is about as close to unanimous as this Congress gets. The bill covers any data center that draws 100 MW or more at one site. The goal is to decide who pays for the power lines a data center needs.
I'd read the bill before buying the nuclear stock rally. It asks state utility regulators to "consider" rules where a big data center covers the full cost of its grid upgrades. States get a year to start and two years to decide. On Thursday Ohio senator Jon Husted tried to pass it by unanimous consent (a shortcut with no recorded vote), and Martin Heinrich (the top Democrat on the Senate energy committee) blocked it. He wants a bill that makes data centers pay instead of asking states to think about it.
Which data centers the Ratepayer Protection Act hits
A grid upgrade gets billed to the site that still needs one, so the campuses to count are the big ones that haven't switched on yet. We track 483 US campuses in the Data Center Index, and 275 of them are 100 MW or bigger. Of those, 204 aren't operational yet. (Some of those MW figures are our estimates, and each project page specifies which.)
Texas has the most by a distance, with 34 big campuses still to come online. Georgia and Kentucky are the ones that jumped out at me, because between them they have 18 big campuses and not one is running yet. Every megawatt in those two states is a hookup somebody still has to pay for.
Ohio already ran the data center tariff test
You don't have to guess what happens when a state makes data centers pay, because Ohio did it last year. Regulators approved AEP Ohio's data center tariff in July 2025. A new data center there pays for at least 85% of the power it signs up for, whether it uses it or not, for up to 12 years.
AEP Ohio then cut its large-load forecast from 30 GW to 13 GW. So more than half of the requests went away once a minimum bill came attached. (Ohio's manufacturers still say 13 GW is inflated.) But the big sites kept coming, and Ohio has 16 campuses of 100 MW or more in our directory with 10 of them still under way.
I read that as good news for the buildout. Cost rules clear out developers who can't post a deposit, and the campuses left have tenants who can.
AEP and Bloom Energy get paid on both sides
$AEP wrote the Ohio tariff. In January an unregulated AEP subsidiary also signed an unconditional agreement to buy about $2.65 billion of Bloom Energy fuel cells, up to 1 GW, for a site near Cheyenne, Wyoming. (A fuel cell makes electricity from natural gas on site without burning it.) One customer with a high investment-grade rating takes all of that output for 20 years.
So AEP collects the minimum bill when a data center uses its grid, and it sells fuel cell power on a 20-year contract when a customer wants to skip the grid. I like that position a lot.
For $BE the mechanism is purchase orders. Every state that copies Ohio makes the grid route more expensive for a 100 MW campus, while a row of fuel cells next to the building doesn't wait on a transmission upgrade. Bloom's AEP order was a gigawatt at a single site.
The nuclear rally got ahead of the bill
$OKLO and $SMR rallied on the idea that big data centers will build their own reactors to dodge grid costs. Utility Dive's write-up of the bill doesn't mention on-site generation, and the bill is stuck in the Senate anyway. Friday's selloff looks right to me.
The view
The Ratepayer Protection Act is a suggestion with 417 votes behind it, and states were moving before Congress got there. Ohio showed what happens next, with the forecast cut by more than half and the big campuses still coming. The 204 big campuses still waiting on a hookup will pay more for it than the ones already running.
I'm more interested in the companies selling those 204 an alternative than in the reactor names. AEP gets paid through the tariff or the fuel cell contract, and Bloom gets the order.