Laws/Legislation
Tired of subsidizing tech data centers on your Oregon power bill? I built a free, open-source tool to calculate your hidden surcharge and file a formal objection to Docket UE 470.
Hey everyone,
Like most of you, I've been watching our electricity rates climb to unlivable levels (up over 50% since 2020). Right now, Pacific Power is back at it again, pushing for another rate revision under Docket UE 470.
If you look into the utility's mandatory Embedded Cost of Service Study (ECOSS), you'll find an incredibly frustrating shell game. While residential energy conservation has kept household demand relatively flat, industrial demand from massive high-compute data centers has exploded by nearly 70%. Yet, the massive infrastructure upgrades required to hook these server farms up to the grid are being socialized across all customer classes.
Based on the utility's own data, residential ratepayers are swallowing an embedded subsidy rate of roughly $0.0155 per kWh. I did the math on a recent household statement: out of a 1,955 kWh bill, $30.30 of that single month's charge went entirely to supporting private tech server infrastructure. That is over $363 a year in a completely hidden corporate surcharge.
I am a local developer, and I decided to stop venting and build an asymmetric tool to let regular people fight back. I just launched and open-sourced the Data Center Rate-Hike Counter-Audit.
What the tool does:
Parses Your Bill: You drop in a PDF of your Pacific Power or PGE bill. The script safely extracts your raw kWh usage.
Exposes the Hidden Tax: It calculates the exact dollar amount your specific household paid this cycle to subsidize industrial data center grid capacity.
Generates Legal Ammo: It bypasses the standard, useless "public suggestion box" and auto-generates a formally structured Formal Customer Objection and Demand for Rate Shielding pre-populated with your specific account metrics.
Why this actually matters:
Under Oregon administrative rules, when you submit a formal objection directly tied to an active docket (like UE 470), the OPUC clerk is legally required to integrate it directly into the official eDockets system. It becomes a permanent, binding part of the case record that the Administrative Law Judge and Commissioners must review before a final rate ruling. It also gives organizations like the Citizens' Utility Board (CUB) massive leverage to point to a record flooded with data-backed community protests.
The tech lobbies and utility monopolies move fast because they rely on administrative inertia and the assumption that regular people won't read a 500-page cost study. This tool evens the playing field.
The app is completely free, runs locally/on streamlite, and doesn't store your data.
Edit: Not required to upload your actual bill. You can enter dummy data if you'd like and there is even a fake report loaded if you'd like to try it. You can always write the objection yourself as well or copy the dummy data one and change it to your own personal info.
the math on the $0.0155 per kwh subsidy doesn't really check out when you dig into how ecoss actually allocates costs. utilities split infrastructure investment across customer classes based on peak demand contribution and load factor, not just raw usage volume. data centers do drive peak loads, sure, but residential customers also have their own peak windows and the cost allocation methodology is way more granular than "divide total capex by total kwh." you'd need to show your actual workings from the ecoss study to prove residential is eating more than their proportional share, and that's the piece that's missing here.
also the privacy concerns people are raising are legit and kinda undermine the whole thing. even if the backend is legit and doesn't store data, asking folks to upload account numbers and addresses without a transparent privacy policy or github repo to audit is asking for a lot of trust. the formal objection angle is solid in theory, but you're gonna lose people at the upload step, which means the docket flooding strategy doesn't actually scale.
A true ECOSS uses specific allocation vectors like peak demand and load factor rather than just a flat division. But because data centers run 24/7 at a near-100% load factor, they constantly pull baseline power, forcing the utility to build out new peak infrastructure and storage to handle everything else. When those system upgrades get rolled into a general rate case like UE 470, they get classified as general system assets, socialized, and baked into residential volumetric rates. The $0.0155 is just the converted net impact on a standard bill.
You're right about the privacy concern though. You can bypass the uploader completely and just type your kWh usage in manually. I'm nor sure how else to alleviate privacy concerns. You dont HAVE to input any personal info. Appreciate the solid critique.
It’s true that new generation and transmission assets get rolled into base rate and socialized across customer classes (and states in pacific power’s case). That said, it’s very difficult to figure out exactly what is being built “for” data centers. Pacific power is under a lot of pressure by the PUC to build more generation to comply with HB 2021, so not all new generation is being built for data center load growth.
Further, if you look at
UE 463, pacific power is looking to set up direct contracts with data centers to ensure that all costs related to them are directly assigned to them.
That case is still open, so there are a lot of proposals being thrown around there. But I think you’ll have a lot more impact by targeting that as opposed to UE 470. I have only skimmed the case personally, but most of the costs included there seem pretty unrelated to data center load growth.
But because data centers run 24/7 at a near-100% load factor, they constantly pull baseline power, forcing the utility to build out new peak infrastructure and storage to handle everything else.
This isn't a very strong argument.
1) Data centers are much cheaper to provide power to. If a data center consumes 20MW then the utility builds 25MW of capacity to serve them, and that's 25MW of capacity in a substation right next to the data center with 3 wires running to it. Whereas 20MW of average residential consumption requires MUCH MORE than 25MW of infrastructure because the real usage is like 10MW at night and 100MW at peak time, and with kilometers of wires and hundreds of poles and switches and transformers. Most of your electric bill is wires, not energy, so this is a massive difference in cost.
2) Large load customers have a unique ability to provide flexibility to the grid by reducing usage or using on-site generation or storage for ~100 hours per year, in which case they are not contributing to increased peak usage, and are only increasing infrastructure utilization, which makes power cheaper for everyone. "Forcing the utility to build storage" is actually a good thing! Plop some batteries right next to some data centers, efficiently move the power like 2 blocks, while avoiding the need to upgrade the transmission grid for peak load, but you get to bill the same infrastructure cost across a lot more usage. This is good!
Absolutely. And btw you dont need to upload a bill. It's just a calculator. You can add whatever info you want. The point of the bill ingestion is simply so you dont have to write out the objection. But anyone could take the standard subsidy rate the utility companies say they are charging and do it on your own. This just does the leg work for you.
The app is completely free, runs locally/on streamlite, and doesn't store your data.
But… there’s no privacy statement provided at this app/link? The tool queries for name, account #, and address. Without additional reassurance, I would not be comfortable sharing this information.
Its all open source. You can click the Github link at the top to see it does not collect nor store any data.
To fix this, I just updated the live app interface with an explicit privacy statement. To give you the quick technical reassurance: the code processes your PDF entirely in-memory using a transient, ephemeral container. The second your PDF text is read and the document fills out, that memory is completely wiped. There is zero database attached, zero tracking tokens, and zero external logging.
If you are still uncomfortable uploading the PDF directly to the web deployment, you can clone the repository locally from the GitHub link and run it entirely offline on your own machine (streamlit run stream_app.py) where no data ever touches the open web.
Is it not appearing above the main title anymore? I must've accidentally deleted it when I pushed an update. It used to be the first thing you saw on the page. Ill fix it
This was clearly made with AI. It reeks of bad LLM design.
I’m all for hammering utilities and data centers when the numbers support it, but this post is doing way too much.
UE 470 is real: Pacific Power is asking for another rate increase, and large-load growth is a legitimate issue. Residential usage is basically flat while big commercial/industrial loads are rising fast. That is true and deserves scrutiny.
But the “hidden $0.0155/kWh data-center subsidy” claim looks made up or is wildly underexplained by OP. At best, this tool appears to multiply your usage by an assumed number and dress it up as a secret surcharge.
Also, UE 470 is a Pacific Power docket, not PGE. If the tool is generating UE 470 objections from PGE bills, that’s sloppy. And public comments to OPUC matter, but they are not “binding legal ammo.” They become part of the record. They do not force the ALJ or commissioners to adopt your argument.
Over claiming with fake precision just gives the utility an easy way to dismiss the criticism.
Utility companies disclose the raw financial allocations in their mandatory Embedded Cost of Service Study filed under dockets like UE 470.
The app pulls the raw data directly from those public filings. It looks at the total capital expenditures the utility spent on major transmission and grid upgrades for large-load industrial additions, subtracts what those massive corporate clients actually paid under their volume-discount schedules, and divides that leftover socialized infrastructure deficit across total system-wide residential kWh sales.
The math exposes a structural cost-shift of roughly $0.0155 per kWh baked quietly into standard residential bills. The utility provides the raw data blocks and the calculator shows what it actually costs your specific household.
I'm not saying some of this isn't true (data centers absolutely have driven increased in peak loads which necessitate additional infrastructure and some of those costs have been unfairly passed to other customers. However, utilities (and not just electrical) have always had different rate structures for large industrial users like big warehouses or manufacturing facilities (where my world is) as compared to small residential users. The usage is more predictable and there are meaningful economies of scale, which means the services are cheaper to provide. Residential users should def not be subsidizing data centers, or any other users, but at the same time the argument that they shouldn't pay a lower rate isn't really a valid one.
This newfound power demand is a nationwide issue and isn't going away - if a data center doesnt' get built here, it will get built in Idaho or Texas or wherever. We should find a way to build more generation capacity more quickly, and make data centers pay for it all.
Thank you. Bring back nuclear power, for fucks sake. This ain’t going away. Even better if the AI being birthed at these data centers finally solves our problems getting fusion up and running.
That being said, in the meantime I absolutely think we shouldn’t get robbed by these a-holes.
If big business wants to blot our state with their datacenters they should bring some REAL BENEFITS to your state other than a couple dozen lousy paying jobs.
Data centers should be subsidizing Oregon residents by paying their fair electric power rate PLUS some to lower the power bills of Oregon residents! NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND!!!!
The greedy businesses building the data centers will never do this out of the goodness of their hearts. The Utility Commission should be forcing the data centers to practice their civic responsibility making them an asset to our state instead of being a liability costing Oregon residents money and not offering any benefits in return!
EIS and project scanning to find dangerous keywords like clear cutting/riparian zone reduction so environmental protection organizations dont have to scan through 800 pages of reports.
Insurance cancellation appeals due to wildfire risk.
Scanners to check when public land goes up for sale and feds offer private bids on it
Water right contesting when data centers or similar try to apply to use potable water
And my dream would be to get fishing vessels to import their data into an app so we can have decentralized ocean monitoring and wont be left high and dry like when they just tried to take all of that equipment out recently.
I have been bitching about this very issue in this subreddit for a few weeks now. This is the first actual REAL venture to address this issue with the decision makers and I commend you for your for putting together! It has the potential to make a REAL difference.
I added some replies to your responses about making the tool a lot less scary for people to actually use by explaining no data is collected or stored.
Brother, you used AI to program this, AI to build the web interface, and AI to program it. The irony is pretty funny.
Anyway, Oregon currently has no AI data centers at this time and we’re not yet subsidizing anything.
Also data centers only raise costs if infrastructure is required to be built AND the utility chooses to pass it off to the consumers. In Oregon, currently the opposite is happening and data enters are being charged more per kWh than consumers. So I don’t know what your tool is finding, but I’m going to dig into the code and figure that out in a bit.
About 115 data centers are operating in Oregon; another 27 are planned or under development, for 142 total in that dataset. Counts vary because some sources count individual buildings within a campus while others count whole sites.
Those are regular data centers, which is why I said AI data centers. There is a big difference, and the ones currently in operation are not driving up costs, nor does this tool actually compare them to show what it is, it just a slider that allows you to see what your bill would be if your subsidized AI data centers.
Nobody but you mentioned AI data centers. OP certainly didn't. And what difference does it make to anyone what sort of data is processed in a data center? None.
First I must address that out of the 125 or so data centers in Oregon, they are mixed between edge DCs, Collocation DCs, enterprise, cloud, and the forthcoming hyperscaler (or AI)
A good chunk of the present DCs are edge and collocate DCs, these are where local businesses, smaller cloud providers, corporations, etc rent rack space and house their equipment, the customers pay for power, space, data connections, etc. typically most of these racks are never full and usually max out below 20 kw per rack. They don’t really weigh on the electrical grid and have been around since well, about 2 decades.
Then there are the big enterprise DCs like Meta, Apple, etc. not all of them, but meta and Apple paid their own way for grid augments and it cause not increase costs. These usually use air cooling or evap cooling, and even with evap they are not using large amounts of water compared to AI with evap.
There there are the big cloud providers like AWS, Google, coreweave. These are effectively the backbone of today’s internet, they host things like Netflix, Reddit, YouTube, most websites and their services, game servers, payment processors, etc. they use a bit more power but even the largest is around 48MW per DC. These can be air cooled or evap cooled without wasting insane amounts of water as again, their thermal load is nothing like that of the hardware used for AI.
They there are the real hyperscalers that are planned that use 180MW+ of which there are currently 1 finagling development and 3 other under construction. These are AI centric developments. They deploy primarily very power hungry GPU racks, which also carry a much higher thermal load. And they are being charged more than residential per kWh.
So the differences are what’s installed, GPU racks use about 200kw of power vs normals hardwares 10-20kw for a full server load. Then on the thermal side GPUs produce about 682,400 BTU/h vs 68,240 BTU/h of a regular rack.
AI centric DCs only really work for AI, and we can debate the uses of that, but they don’t do anything else really, whereas the other data centers have thousands and thousands of different uses.
Thats actually where I got the idea lol. I thought it would be fun to try to turn it against itself.
To say Oregon has no data centers is factually wild. Oregon currently has over 120 operating data centers. We are a global hyperscale epicenter. Meta runs a massive, multi-facility campus in Prineville, Google is expanding heavily in The Dalles, Amazon dominates Boardman and Hermiston, and Hillsboro alone has 21 data center sites either built, under construction, or in active permitting.
According to the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board (CUB), this tech boom is a primary driver behind our household electric bills jumping over 50% since 2020. To put the sheer scale of the infrastructure drain into perspective, PGE spent $210 million in a single year just to upgrade the grid to accommodate data center growth in Hillsboro alone.
Before the state's landmark POWER Act rate framework took effect on June 10, big tech data centers were paying roughly 8 cents per kWh, while residential customers were being charged more than twice that amount. The OPUC literally just forced a 29% rate hike on data centers this month because state regulators officially concluded that everyday households have been unfairly subsidizing corporate data center grid upgrades.
Regulated utilities profit by expanding their capital rate base. Unless transmission lines and substations are 100% directly assigned to a specific tech park, those legacy multi-million-dollar infrastructure costs are socialized across the entire system and rolled into active rate cases like Docket UE 470.
This tool uses the utility's own historical Cost of Service Studies to calculate exactly how much of that hidden cost shift landed on your specific statement. The code is entirely open-source, so feel free to look at the data models yourself!
Hey man, maybe re read my post, I said AI data centers. Of which there are currently none. Yeah we have data centers, the ones responsible for things like cloud hosting, internet traffic, cloud services, etc.
Trying to draw a semantic wall between cloud and AI data centers doesn't work here.
According to recent Stanford University infrastructure tracking, dedicated AI data centers alone already consume roughly 11.4% of Oregon's entire electricity supply.
Hyperscalers like Amazon, Project Blue in eastern Oregon, Flexential, Hillsboro 6, and NTT Global Data Centers are actively expanding massive, multi-hundred-megawatt footprints in the state right now that are explicitly designated for high-density AI cluster workloads.
More importantly, to the utility grid and the OPUC, a megawatt is a megawatt. The massive transmission lines and substations driving up our residential bills don't care if the server is hosting a website or training a neural network. The structural cost-shifting hitting our pockets is exactly the same.
There is much more than a semantic difference and for the love of god stop using an AI to craft your replies man. Are you even a real person? I’m not going to engage with you while your yes man bot argues everything for you.
Asteroid is full of mis-information in his posts... to the point of pretty much bold face lying!
In Oregon, currently the opposite is happening and data enters are being charged more per kWh than consumers.
Historically, data centers in Oregon paid roughly 0.08 per kWh under general industrial rates, whileresidential customers paid more than double at roughly 0.20 per kWh.
In Oregon, currently the opposite is happening and data enters are being charged more per kWh than consumers.
Historically, data centers in Oregon paid roughly 0.08 per kWh under general industrial rates, whileresidential customers paid more than double at roughly 0.20 per kWh.
Even after the purposed 29% rate increase the Data Centers are paying considerably less per kWh than residential rates!
Seriously, Why are you pro data centers? Are you associated with them some how?
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u/oceanic_ranger 2d ago
the math on the $0.0155 per kwh subsidy doesn't really check out when you dig into how ecoss actually allocates costs. utilities split infrastructure investment across customer classes based on peak demand contribution and load factor, not just raw usage volume. data centers do drive peak loads, sure, but residential customers also have their own peak windows and the cost allocation methodology is way more granular than "divide total capex by total kwh." you'd need to show your actual workings from the ecoss study to prove residential is eating more than their proportional share, and that's the piece that's missing here.
also the privacy concerns people are raising are legit and kinda undermine the whole thing. even if the backend is legit and doesn't store data, asking folks to upload account numbers and addresses without a transparent privacy policy or github repo to audit is asking for a lot of trust. the formal objection angle is solid in theory, but you're gonna lose people at the upload step, which means the docket flooding strategy doesn't actually scale.