By Jarrett Renshaw and Tim McLaughlin
WASHINGTON, Jan 15 (Reuters) – Governors from U.S. states seeing a rapid expansion in data center construction will visit the White House on Friday to sign an agreement with the Trump administration intended to curb rising electricity costs, said two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
The agreement includes price caps for two years on future auctions in the PJM grid covering 67 million people in mid-Atlantic and inland states and forcing new data center operators like Amazon and Google to take on a greater share of the cost of expanding the grid.
The White House event comes as President Donald Trump seeks to combat consumer price inflation that risks undermining support for Republicans ahead of November’s mid-term elections.
The governors will be from among the 13 states within the PJM grid, which is experiencing a rapid increase in data center construction, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
The list includes Democrats Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Wes Moore of Maryland, along with Republicans Mike DeWine of Ohio and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, the sources added.
Representatives from the governors’ offices and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. A PJM spokesperson said representatives from the grid operator did not have plans to attend.
RISING POWER BILLS HAVE LED TO BACKLASH
Data centers are major consumers of electricity and are being built due to rising demand for artificial intelligence.
Several guiding principles on how PJM should operate will be unveiled at the event, including expediting the interconnection of power plants to ensure PJM has enough capacity to meet the surging demand for power, according to the sources. It will also call for triggering PJM’s reliability backstop option to create a separate auction for new generation, the sources added.
Rising power bills in PJM’s region have led to a political backlash over the last year and threats by some governors to abandon the regional grid. Last summer, nine state governors wrote an open letter to the PJM board of managers criticizing the grid operator for not doing enough to address an escalating electricity affordability crisis.
On Thursday, U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, introduced a bill called the “Power for the People Act” to rein in rising electricity costs Americans are facing from the huge amounts of energy required by data centers.
“Americans are already struggling to make ends meet – they shouldn’t have to foot the bill for big corporations’ massive expansion of data centers,” Van Hollen said in a press release.
(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw in Washington and Tim McLaughlin in Boston; Editing by Jamie Freed)
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