Opinion: The AI boom has a power bill, and voters just started sending it back

The AI boom has a power bill, and for the first time this year, voters and regulators started sending it back. The right response to the data-center backlash playing out across the country is not to ban the facilities outright, as grassroots campaigns in Ohio and Wisconsin are trying to do, but to finish what Virginia regulators began this year: force the companies that cause the grid strain to pay for it, rather than spreading the cost across every residential ratepayer in the region.

The numbers explain the anger. PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for 67 million people from Illinois to Virginia, reported that its 2026/2027 capacity auction cleared at $329.17 per megawatt-day, the maximum price regulators allow and a 22 percent jump from the prior year, with PJM itself attributing the surge in forecasted demand largely to data-center expansion. Wholesale capacity is only one line on a power bill, but it is the line most directly tied to new load, and data centers are overwhelmingly where that new load is coming from.

Regulators moved before voters did

Virginia got there first, because it had to: Dominion Energy's territory hosts the densest concentration of data centers on Earth. State Senator Louise Lucas pushed Senate Bill 253, which lets the State Corporation Commission shift capacity and distribution costs onto a new rate class built for large, steady loads like data centers; supporters projected it would cut residential bills by roughly $5.50 a month. The commission followed up this summer by ordering Dominion to build a tariff that directly assigns the cost of transmission lines built solely to serve new data centers to those customers. Governor Abigail Spanberger called the order a guarantee that data centers are paying the full cost of the infrastructure their developments require.

"Upgrades triggered only by a large-load customer should be assigned directly to that customer," Virginia Deputy Chief Energy Officer Louise White told the commission.

Where regulators have not acted fast enough, residents are reaching for blunter tools. In Port Washington, Wisconsin, voters approved a referendum by roughly a 2-to-1 margin requiring city council approval before any future tax break for a data center, a direct response to a $15 billion OpenAI and Oracle project already under construction there. In Ohio, a committee of residents won certification from Attorney General Dave Yost for a constitutional amendment that would prohibit construction of any data center drawing more than 25 megawatts, a threshold that would sweep in nearly every hyperscale facility now being built.

Bans are the wrong tool for a pricing problem

The industry's defenders have a real point buried in their lobbying: the causal link between any single data center and a specific household's bill increase is messy, since transmission, fuel costs and years of underinvestment in generation all feed into the same rate case. A flat ban also throws away billions in tax revenue and construction jobs over a grievance that is fundamentally about who pays, not whether the facilities should exist. Ohio's proposed 25-megawatt ceiling would not distinguish between a reckless developer and one willing to build its own power plant.

But that objection argues for better pricing, not for leaving the current allocation in place. Virginia's approach answers the industry's own argument: when a hyperscaler pays the full, traceable cost of the substation and transmission line built only for it, the fairness complaint about causation disappears, and so does most of the political energy behind prohibition. States and PJM's other member utilities that drag their feet on large-load tariffs should expect more Ohio-style ballot amendments, not fewer, because a ban is what residents reach for when regulators will not make the obvious fix. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the other twelve PJM states have the template sitting in front of them; the question now is only how many election cycles it takes them to use it.