President Donald Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge has in recent weeks gained the support of about 200 utilities, electric cooperatives and data center developers.
In Kentucky, that includes Kentucky Power, Louisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilities, and Duke Energy, as well as East Kentucky Power Cooperative and Big Rivers Electric Corporation.
Elisa Owen, Kentucky senior organizer for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said protecting electricity customers is more complicated than signing a pledge.
“Without a marginal cost study, I don't know how you make sure of who should be paying for what,” she said.
Stephanie McCombs, a spokeswoman for Big Rivers, said the cooperative and all three of its component member-owners signed the pledge.
"Rate structures must fully protect existing member-consumers," she said. "Big Rivers and its members will not bear any associated generation or transmission costs."
Drew Gardner, a spokesman for LG&E and KU, said parent company PPL signed the pledge, "which reflects our commitment to support economic growth while protecting all customers in the communities we’re proud to serve."
Data center proposals are multiplying across the Bluegrass State, and several local governments have reacted to public concern by enacting limits on or stalling their development.
At the state level, lawmakers in the House of Representatives approved a bill to protect electricity customers in the last session, but it never got a vote in the Kentucky Senate.
The state Public Service Commission needs to require a cost-allocation study, Owen said.
“Cost allocation is something that people with a lot more knowledge about it than you and me spend weeks talking about and arguing about how costs should be allocated,” she said.
The Kentucky PSC held a public hearing in Hancock County earlier this week on one such data center proposal there. Residents who attended voiced concern about rising electricity costs.
The same developer looking at a site in Hancock County, TeraWulf, also proposed to build a data center in Eastern Kentucky, near the border between Greenup and Boyd counties.
If built as proposed, TeraWulf’s two Kentucky projects would consume 1,500 megawatts of electricity – as large as the generation of the region’s largest power plants.
The PSC has the power to approve or reject data center contracts with electric utilities.
The federal government, including the Trump administration, has very little jurisdiction over data center projects in different states, Owen said, leaving the ratepayer pledge largely toothless.
Owen explained that the evaluation of a cost study would work like almost any other case.
“The utilities would probably do the cost allocation study in house,” Owen said. “Then the utilities would testify in a hearing, and the interveners would try to argue that the costs weren't allocated fairly, and they would say why. And the utilities would argue that they were, and they would say why. And then the PSC would be the arbiter.”
