Delaware’s Public Advocate and Delaware Public Service Commission staff sent a petition to the Public Service Commission to address the potential impact of facilities like data centers.
They jointly asked for a large load tariff to ensure large load facilities – like data centers – do not pass the costs of higher energy use to other ratepayers.
Large load tariffs are a contract between a utility and large energy consumers like data centers to help ensure costs for usage and infrastructure upgrades to handle it are borne by those large consumers.
And Delaware Public Advocate Jameson Tweedie says they’re taking steps to make sure this happens before any large users come online.
"No new large data centers can connect until this large load tariff is in place,” said Tweedie. “So we're proactively making sure that a large load tariff is in place before those impacts would hit other consumers."
The move comes in response to the proposed data center in Delaware City, which would reportedly use 1200 megawatts when it’s in full operation. That’s almost half of the state’s entire current energy use.
That kind of power demand requires major upgrades to transmission lines, transformers, substations, electric lines - all of the equipment to get power to the data center.
"And we did this because the data centers and other large energy users - but particularly data centers - are growing very rapidly, and they can use an extraordinary amount of energy. And the use of that extraordinary amount of energy can require various investments in infrastructure upgrades to distribution, and even the transmission system and so forth. And those can be very expensive. There can be other impacts too," said Tweedie.
Tweedie notes these large load tariffs either have been adopted or are being considered elsewhere including states in the PJM grid region like Delaware.
