Here’s some good news:

This House Energy and Commerce Committee bill isn’t perfect but it’s similar to what we’ve been urging for many months. It pushes states to establish new billing standards to ensure data centers pay their own way on utility costs and share in the payment of fixed costs of power plants.

This ensures that homeowners and local businesses will see a reduction, not an increase in their utility bills when a data center is built. It also is a critical step to getting scores of  critically-needed data centers built quickly.

The bill passed 52-0.

Is that bipartisan enough for you?

Here is the official summary from the committee:

This legislation would require each state regulatory authority to CONSIDER establishing a large-load standard to provide that a rate charged by an electric utility for providing electric service to a large-load customer shall recover the full, incremental cost of any generation, transmission, or distribution upgrade necessary to serve the load of such customer and to provide for financial assurances to cover such upgrades.

The legislation would define “large-load customers” (read Data Centers) as non-residential electric consumers requesting electric energy for one or more facilities at a site or campus with peak demand of 100 megawatts or more. That means data centers have to pay their fair share or in some cases more.