Portland General Electric filed a 29% electricity-rate rise for large data centres on Thursday 4 June, and at the same moment cut household and small-business bills by 1.3%, so the campuses finally absorb the cost they impose. The increase takes effect Wednesday 10 June, pending review by the Oregon Public Utility Commission (the Oregon PUC, the state body that approves utility tariffs).1
For the first time, a US regulator has answered a question that until now sat unanswered across nearly every American electricity market. Three weeks earlier, PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for thirteen mid-Atlantic and Midwest states, had written to those states' governors warning that the cost of reinforcing the grid for artificial-intelligence compute would default to household bills unless someone intervened. In Oregon, the bill landed on the operators instead.
The figures show how lopsided the old arrangement was. Before Oregon's POWER Act (a 2025 law forcing utilities to charge large loads the full cost of serving them) took hold, PGE's data-centre customers paid roughly 8 cents per kilowatt-hour while households paid around 20 cents. The biggest power users on the system were billed at under half the household rate. The law created a dedicated large-load rate class, a separate billing category for any site drawing 20 megawatts or more, so those costs are no longer pooled into everyone else's, and PGE is the first Oregon utility to write it into a filed tariff.
The counter-case matters. This is one utility's filing, not a settled national rule, and the PUC has yet to confirm it. What the filing changes is the terms of the argument: PGE quantified a cross-subsidy that exists almost everywhere and reversed it in a single document, giving the long-running fight over data-centre costs its first hard number.
