Let the Machines Pay Their Own Light Bill

On Monday a company that sells thought by the word was valued at $1.7 trillion, and a reactor on Lake Erie was cleared to wake from seven years’ sleep so that the company might have something to think with. These are large events, and large events are paid for, sooner or later, by someone. The question before the nation’s utility regulators is whether that someone will be the companies that need the power or the households that happen to share their wires.

The benefits of the build-out are real, and this page will not sneer at them. In Mercy, Tex., where Aleph is the anchor tenant of a campus that will draw 4.5 gigawatts, taxable value in Caprock County has risen from $410 million to $11.6 billion. Teachers have had a 30 percent raise. About 1,100 permanent jobs are expected to remain when the cranes leave. A café that used to close at 2 p.m. now never closes at all.

But a data center is not a household, and the cost of the grid it requires should not be billed to households. Under the rules that govern most American grids, much of the cost of a new high-voltage line is pooled and recovered from all customers through their rates. That arrangement suited an age when new demand meant new subdivisions, each adding a little load and a little benefit. It suits less well an age in which a single customer arrives needing as much power as a large city, and 1,900 miles of new transmission line must be strung across the plains to serve Mercy.

The remedy is simple to state: whoever requires the wire should pay for the wire — the line, the substation, the transformer and the reserve power held for the weeks a reactor is down for refueling — through a charge fixed before construction begins rather than folded into everyone’s rates. A company that can raise $62 billion in a single evening can afford its own extension cord.

The industry will answer that new lines serve everyone in time, that the plants it finances will lower prices for all, and that heavy charges will drive the building to friendlier states. Some of this is true. Where an upgrade plainly benefits the public, the public may fairly pay its share. Regulators can draw that line; they should be made to draw it in the open, with the arithmetic published.

The household at the far end of the wire is a ratepayer, not a shareholder. Most households will see none of the profits of the build-out; they should not be asked to carry its costs. It is said that the new machines can do almost anything. Paying their own light bill should not be beyond them.