Portland General Electric requested regulatory approval Wednesday for a 29% rate increase for heavily loaded data center customers while also proposing rate cuts for residential and commercial customers, implementing the new Oregon POWER Act.
If approved by the Oregon Public Utilities Commission, June 10 is the expected date for the new rates to take effect. Under the proposal, homeowners would pay 1.3% less, small businesses 3.7% less, commercial accounts 2.2% less and industrial customers 1.5% less, according to the company.
Oregon lawmakers passed the POWER Act last year, establishing a separate billing category for data centers and other large energy consumers, and empowering state regulators to hold those customers financially responsible for the generation and transmission infrastructure their expansion requires. The threshold for inclusion under the law is a project that consumes more than 20 megawatts, the company said.
PGE received approval from the Oregon Public Utilities Commission on May 7 to become the first utility in Oregon to implement the POWER Act. In that proceeding, regulators also authorized exit fees, minimum charges and special contracts to support clean energy development, the company said.
Between early 2020 and mid-2025, PGE’s data center electricity consumption rose from an average of 50 megawatts to more than 300, a level of demand comparable to about 240,000 homes, OregonLive reported. PGE’s regulatory filings listed five companies operating 16 facilities within the new rate class, although none were identified by name.
Advocates for the Oregon Citizens Utility Board, which monitors utility practices on behalf of consumers, said the new filing makes clear that ordinary ratepayers had long been shouldering costs that should have been borne by data centers. Bob Jenks, executive director of the Oregon Citizens Utilities Board, said the result validates the group’s long-standing position. “The significant increase in data center rates confirms our belief that data centers were not paying the costs incurred to serve them,” he said. “With the new rate structure, we should see a slowdown in significant increases in residential PGE bills.”
Under the old pricing structure, owners were charged more than double the per-kilowatt-hour rate applied to data centers, OPB reported, citing the Citizens Board of Public Utilities.
Anger over electricity costs tied to data center expansion has been reshaping utility regulation and local politics across the country, with community opposition stalling or halting dozens of projects and states weighing legislation to shift grid connection costs from homes to large industrial users.
“As energy demand from large energy users grows, this approach helps ensure that the costs of new infrastructure are paid by the customers driving that growth,” PGE Chief Customer Officer John McFarland said in a statement.