Hey, it's Lizzie O'Leary. You're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined.

One of the things we follow on this show is how tech intersects with real life. And right now, that is being felt in electricity costs, in part because of data centers.

They were a big issue in the 2025 off-year elections in Virginia, and they're likely to come up in the midterms, too.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat from Maryland, just proposed a bill in January to address rising energy costs from data centers, and he is here to talk about it.

Senator, thanks for coming on. It's great to be with you.

So there are a number of bills in the Senate, some from your Democratic colleagues, to curb the

high cost of electricity associated with data centers. Why your bill? What makes it interesting? Well, first, I think

it's important to understand that this is a big and growing problem, right? So I represent the state

of Maryland. We're part of the PJM grid network, which is the largest network in the country,

and we're already having consumers have to pick up the tab for data centers,

those that are expected to come online,

as well as some of the transmission costs for data centers that are already online,

which is nuts, right?

That consumers are having to pick up the bill for data centers and the richest companies on the planet, a lot of these AI companies. So what our bill does, and it's called power for the people, is that we want to make sure that their constituents, consumers, get the power, but without having to pay extra costs

that are associated with data centers. We also want to make sure they don't experience

the brownouts and blackouts that are anticipated in the event that data centers start sucking

up so much electricity on the grid. So this is about consumer reliability and affordability.

I want to talk about the mechanism a little bit because I think it's helpful to explain how some of

this works now. In a lot of areas, utilities charge you one rate if you're residential, one rate

if you're a small business, one rate if you're industrial. So your bill would create a different rate class for data centers in this kind of load queue thing.

Can you explain how that would work and why you need a federal rate as opposed to state ones?

Yes, because right now the normal law and normal practice is that when a company,

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