House votes 417-3 to make data centers pay grid costs, months after being told to embrace them or go broke

…(cont) Two days after telling those towns they'd go backwards and poor for saying no, the administration's commerce secretary went on CNBC and called their water complaints "propaganda," laughing off the same grid and water math the Nevada panel had just taken seriously enough to freeze a permit over. The line and the ruling didn't agree, and only one of them had jurisdiction.

The tinkerer went to the parts bin next. On September 3, Microsoft came out backing the Water Cost Accountability Act, a bill that would direct states to block water utilities from billing data center hookups to everyone else's water rates. A company running some of the largest data centers in the country endorsing a law to stop passing its water bill to the neighbors — the part already existed, somebody just had to bolt it on.

By September 4, the Washington Examiner was reporting a Gallup finding that Americans would rather live next to a nuclear power plant than a data center, by more than 20 points. Voters had already done the math the commerce secretary called propaganda.

That's the pressure the Ratepayer Protection Act rolled in on. The House took it up September 12, and it passed September 16, 417 to 3 — a number that means the "backwards and poor" line couldn't find three dozen votes, let alone a majority, once it reached a floor with a bill attached. The Ratepayer Protection Act directs state regulators to consider rules that would make data centers cover their own grid upgrade costs instead of the household next door.

Consider is the word in the bill, not require — the tool sits in the toolbox, and every state regulator now has to decide out loud whether to pick it up. The crew didn't build that part. They just cleared the wreckage off it and pointed to where it was sitting the whole time.