Tech’s Commitments to Protect Ratepayers
By 2035, energy demand is expected to triple in the United States as new and expanding sectors of the economy become increasingly reliant on electrical power, including advanced manufacturing and broad digitization across households, transportation, businesses, and factories. As these converging trends put additional pressure on U.S. power generation, transmission infrastructure, and long-term energy planning, the technology sector is working to reduce the impact on local communities while ensuring the U.S. remains competitive in the global AI race.
Several ITI member companies recently joined President Trump to build on that effort and commit to protecting consumers from increased energy costs and community impacts. The Ratepayer Protection Pledge reflects a thoughtful and responsible approach to balancing U.S. leadership in technology with the fundamental imperative of affordable energy access for all Americans. This initiative reinforces a shared commitment and expands on industry’s ongoing efforts to modernize and strengthen the energy grid, protect ratepayers, create jobs, and build the infrastructure America needs to compete and win in the 21st century.
ITI’s President and CEO Jason Oxman had the opportunity to attend the Rate Payer Protection Pledge event at the White House and support our members making these commitments to Americans:
Build, Bring, or Buy New Generation Resources and Electricity Needed. Companies committed to building, bringing, or paying for new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their energy demands to ensure their development of infrastructure projects does not negatively impact American consumers. This continues the work many ITI members are pursuing on advancing new generation resources, including Vantage Data Centers’ partnership with Liberty Energy to develop and operate one gigawatt of power solutions for data centers and Iron Mountain Data Centers’ development of on-site battery energy storage.
Pay For All New Power Delivery Infrastructure Upgrades. Signatories have committed to fully covering the costs when companies need to upgrade grid infrastructure to deliver power to their data centers. This can also benefit communities by delivering new, more reliable grid infrastructure. For example, Equinix fully funded infrastructure upgrades in San Jose, which provided enough net revenue for San Jose to hire 12 new police officers.
Negotiate Separate Rate Structures with Utility Companies. Companies committed to voluntarily negotiate new rate structures with their utility companies and relevant state governments, whether they use the electricity or not. This ensures that local communities are not left footing the bill for new infrastructure projects. This assurance will add to the ongoing economic benefits energy infrastructure projects are already delivering in areas across the country. In fact, areas with data centers have seen a decrease in taxes, like Loudoun County, VA, which was able to lower tax rates because of the revenue growth from data centers, all while improving local community assets. Further, several ITI member companies, like Microsoft, have asked utilities and public commissions to set their rates high enough to cover electricity and infrastructure costs for their data centers.
Invest in Local Communities to Provide Jobs and Training. Companies committed to investing in their local communities by hiring local residents, providing new workforce training opportunities, and being good neighbors. It will ensure that workforce training is central to the transitioning AI economy and that the positive economic impact of these projects is broadly shared by all, as demonstrated by efforts including Google’s STARS workforce training program, Amazon’s apprenticeships for careers in technical maintenance, and CoreWeave creating hundreds of high-skilled jobs from a single data center.
Coordinate Backup Generation Resources with Communities. Companies have pledged to coordinate with grid operators to make backup generation resources available during times of scarcity to make sure essential services stay online. This continues ITI members’ work to add considerable amounts of available power to the grid and ensure communities maintain access to power in critical times, as with Meta’s support for the addition of nearly 28 gigawatts of power across 27 U.S. states.
As the technology sector continues to support local communities while leading the world in the AI race, these important commitments will create more partnerships, improve communication, and provide more stability for all Americans.
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