Blocking a Data Center Won't Lower Your Power Bill

A congressional candidate in California's 22nd District wants a one-year pause. Nobody is running on who absorbs the power costs.

Randy Villegas, the Democrat running in California's 22nd Congressional District, wants a moratorium of at least a year on new data centers. About 100 people packed a Hanford church in late August to oppose a possible small facility at the Kings County fairgrounds, the Los Angeles Times reported. I think the pause is the wrong ask, and the people in that room deserve better than the one they're being offered.

Picture the household in South Los Angeles opening a power bill it's already behind on. It gets no vote on a fairgrounds lease in the Central Valley, and no candidate is courting it on the only question that reaches its kitchen table: who pays for the wires and generation a very large new customer needs.

That anxiety is already measurable. In an Economist and YouGov survey taken in late August, 61% of Americans said they wouldn't want a data center going up in their own community, the Times reported. Among Republicans, the figure was 47%. Among 2024 Trump voters, 52% expected a new facility to push their electric bills higher.

So the fear isn't really about a building. It's about a line item. Whether the cost of serving an enormous new load sits with that customer or gets spread across everyone else's rates is settled at the California Public Utilities Commission — in the large-load rulemaking, in special-contract terms, in the exhibits a utility files with its rate case. Those pages don't get yard signs.

Lawmakers in Sacramento have already passed legislation regulating energy use by the data center industry and imposing other requirements, according to the Times. California had 54 new facilities in the works as of April 2026, per a Pew Research Center analysis cited in that reporting. Nationally the figure was more than 1,500.

Here's where my own read turned. The closest thing to my argument in that story came from the Republican. Rep. David Valadao told the Times that construction needs local input and ratepayer protections: "Central Valley families are already facing high electric bills and concerns about our water supply." He also declined to answer questions about the Hanford proposal, the paper reported. A sentence in a statement is not a filed rate exhibit, and the difference is the whole job.

The strongest case against me is the one Hanford is actually making. Water, land use and noise are real harms, and no cost-allocation clause fixes them. Shaolei Ren, a UC Riverside engineering professor who studies AI, told the Times that smaller edge facilities don't consume water the way big ones do but can still draw extra power and produce air and noise pollution. And because fairgrounds are state property, local and county officials have no jurisdiction — the fair board decides. For that town, control is the fight. I'll concede it.

For everyone else, look at what the visible move buys. Governors Kathy Hochul in New York and Greg Abbott in Texas — a Democrat and a Republican — both imposed temporary moratoriums, and a temporary moratorium is a delay, not a rate. The Republican senatorial campaign arm read the issue the same way, warning AI companies in a memo that data centers could decide the Ohio Senate race between Sen. Jon Husted and Sherrod Brown, a memo first obtained by Axios, the Times reported. Both parties are treating a billing question as a turnout question.

Meanwhile President Trump has said the only communities that reject these projects are ones that want to be "backwards and poor," which tells you how much help is coming from the top. Global Stack USA hasn't filed a formal proposal in Kings County. When a candidate knocks between now and November, skip the moratorium question. Ask who pays for the wires.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 6, 2026.