How much do you know about your Public Utilities Commission?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

The AI boom is propelling a once obscure group of state regulators into key decision-making

roles for the economy.

AI needs data centers.

Data centers need power.

And power is generally regulated in some way, depending on the state, by public utilities

commissions. That's the topic of a new

report from the Center on Technology Policy at NYU. Director Scott Brennan says these commissions

often make decisions on planning and permitting for new infrastructure and decide the rates,

utilities charge consumers. In order to protect the grid, protect consumers from

having to pay extra costs to build out the infrastructure to support data centers. So in those

rates, you can see all sorts of provisions, such as, you know, like direct payments to cover the

costs of the infrastructure upgrades to, you know, connect direct payments to cover the costs of the infrastructure upgrades to,

you know, connect a data center, or you see things like mandatory contract lengths to ensure

that, you know, the utility can plan to recoup certain costs over a 10 or 15 or 20 year period.

Some of the other kind of key powers that they have concern permitting. In certain states, PUCs have to approve major

infrastructure upgrades that the utilities will make in order to serve data centers. But because we're talking

about connecting a new city the size of Pennsylvania, utilities have to do a lot of sort of infrastructure

upgrades. And so that means that PUCs basically have a sort of approval over the ability of these

data centers to exist at all.

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