Florida's new law regulating hyperscale artificial intelligence data centers requires electric companies to ensure the cost of building or operating these massive facilities won't fall onto residents.
Walt Trierweiler heads Florida's Office of Public Counsel, which represents customers of investor-owned utilities.
His office says Duke Energy’s proposed tariff for data centers doesn't comply with the new law.
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It's important to note that while public counsel contests Duke's plan, it's ultimately up to the Florida Public Service Commission to determine if it complies. Duke Energy did not respond to a request to comment for this story.
WUSF's Jessica Meszaros interviewed Trierweiler about the new law and the issues with Duke’s plan. Below is an edited version of their conversation.
SB 484 was signed into law, and how does that protect customers from increased costs if data centers were to arrive in your backyard?
Well, first of all, I just have to say I'm really proud of the Florida Legislature for coming together and agreeing on the first customer protection statute in the United States that protects customers from subsidizing data center costs.
And the way it does is, it puts requirements on the utilities to come up with tariffs that are designed so that data centers will pay their full costs of building and then operating data centers, and that those costs are not going to be passed on to Florida's customers.
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And of course, the threat that the legislature was reacting to was looking around at other states who had been early embracers of data centers, and then the resulting impact on customer bills in many of those states.
Now, Duke Energy sent in a plan that all of the utilities are supposed to send out regarding data centers, right? Can you talk about that, and then your reaction to the plan that Duke put out?
This is Duke's second proposed tariff. They proposed a tariff, and we had an expert criticize it, and then SB 484 passed the House and the Senate, and they withdrew their data center tariff, and then filed another one with the stated intent that it was supposed to comply with the customer protection requirements of SB 484. However, it doesn't do that.
In our opinion, it sidestepped the requirements there under a legal defense that because they're under a settlement agreement, they can't raise customer costs at this time, because customers are protected by a settlement agreement until January 1, 2028.
However, we disagree with that. We believe that the statute was intended to protect customers now and going forward from bearing any costs associated with building or operating data centers.
What happens now that you and that your office contest this plan?
Well, we contest the plan. We filed a joint motion to dismiss because we don't feel that their tariff addresses the protections that were provided in SB 484 and I understand their legal argument that customers are protected.
What Duke did is it simply wants to place data centers under the same tariffs that the other large load companies have operated under for the past two years. However, if that had been sufficient, then there would have been no need for the legislature to craft this important legislation and for the governor to sign it into law.
