The House voted 417-3 to stop your electric bill from covering the grid upgrades a data center forces onto the grid.
Congress rarely agrees on much these days. It agreed on this. On September 16, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act by a vote of 417 to 3, sending the first concrete legislative response to America's AI power crunch to the Senate. The bill would force data centers and hyperscalers that draw more than 100 megawatts of power to cover the full cost of the grid upgrades and new generation they require, instead of letting utilities spread those costs across everyone else's monthly bill.
Only three members voted no: Reps. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, Delia Ramirez of Illinois, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, all Democrats who argued the bill doesn't go far enough. Everyone else, 210 House Republicans and all but a handful of Democrats, backed it. That kind of near-unanimous vote almost never happens on anything touching AI infrastructure, and it tells you how fast the politics around data centers have shifted this year.
The bill's sponsors, Rep. Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican, and Rep. Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, built it around a simple premise: if a hyperscaler needs a new substation or transmission line to run its AI cluster, the hyperscaler pays for it, not the retiree down the road on a fixed income. The legislation sets a federal standard requiring utilities to recover the full, incremental cost of any generation, transmission, or distribution upgrade necessary to serve a large-load customer. It does not override state power. Public utility commissions get final say on whether to adopt the standard, and they have up to two years to decide. Evans and Castor wrote the bill to nudge states, not command them.
Voters are furious about their power bills, and they increasingly blame data centers for it. According to a Gallup poll conducted in March, 70% of Americans oppose building a data center in their own area, with 48% strongly opposed. More Americans, Gallup found, would rather live next to a nuclear plant than next to a data center. That's a striking number. That opposition cuts across party lines: 56% of Democrats say they strongly oppose a nearby data center, compared with 39% of Republicans, according to the same survey.
AI Data Centers Become a $130 Billion Political Liability in 2026 AI data center opposition has blocked or delayed $130 billion in projects in the first quarter of 2026 alone, matching all of 2025's disruption in three months. The fight has spilled into the midterms, with Sherrod Brown branding Jon Husted "the face of data centers" in Ohio and governors in New York and Pennsylvania signing moratoriums. - why are communities blocking AI data centers locally - political opposition to AI data center construction projects
That backlash has been building all year, driven by monthly bills padded with the cost of new substations and transmission lines that mostly benefit tech companies, not the households paying for them. That's an easy villain to find. The Ratepayer Protection Act is the first bill addressing it that both parties in the House could actually agree on. It builds on a Ratepayer Protection Pledge the White House floated earlier this year, and it was the only AI-related bill to get a House floor vote this week at all.
The bill isn't radical. It doesn't cap data center growth or slow the AI buildout. It just says the company drawing 100 megawatts off the grid should pay to expand that grid, the same logic a factory or a stadium would face if it needed its own substation.
What happens in the Senate #
The companion bill, S. 5028, is sponsored in the Senate by Jon Husted, the Ohio Republican running in a competitive 2026 race against former Sen. Sherrod Brown. Brown has already made Husted's past support for data center projects, from his time as Ohio's lieutenant governor, a line of attack. Passing the Ratepayer Protection Act before voters go to the polls would hand Husted a rare piece of evidence that he's done something about the bills constituents are angry about.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said the bill could clear the chamber before the midterms, but only through unanimous consent, since the floor calendar is packed this month. One senator objecting is enough to sink that timeline. If it slips into a normal floor process, the bill competes with everything else Congress wants to do before an election, and those fights rarely move fast.
Here's the thing worth watching: this bill doesn't ban or even slow a single data center. It just decides who writes the check for the power lines. That's a much narrower fight than the one raging in state legislatures and city council meetings across the country, where residents are asking whether they want these buildings near them at all. Congress picked the fight it could actually win. Whether the Senate can finish that fight before November is still an open question.
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