US Senate blocks datacenter energy bill as Texas judges fault Meta gas plant

The Ratepayer Protection Act failed 57-43 on Wednesday, three votes short of the 60 needed to advance in the Republican-controlled chamber. Four Democrats, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and both Georgia senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, voted with Republicans, according to The Guardian. The bill had passed the House earlier this month by an almost unanimous vote.

It would have required electric utilities to consider adopting standards so that datacenters pick up the costs of transmission, generation and distribution upgrades that can otherwise be transferred to households and businesses. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called it a "toothless" bill that "completely misses the mark," and criticized a meeting between President Trump and tech executives on Tuesday that he said yielded a "morally binding" agreement on AI controls. "Relying on 'self-regulation' is how we got into this mess," Schumer said on the floor.

The vote landed the same week that administrative law judges at the Public Utilities Commission of Texas issued a proposed decision on the power supply for Meta's $10 billion, 1-gigawatt data center in northeast El Paso.

El Paso Electric wants to build a 366-megawatt natural gas facility, called McCloud, made up of 813 modular generators supplied by Enchanted Rock, each rated at 450 kilowatts. The total estimated cost is $499 million, Inside Climate News reported on Wednesday. The judges found the utility failed to adequately consider alternatives to the gas plant and failed to issue a request for proposals to contractors.

They also wrote that Wurldwide, a Meta subsidiary named in the application, drove the process. "The selection of the Project was driven by Wurldwide's prescribed timeline and preferences, and its agreement to pay the capital and operating costs," the judges wrote. They recommended approval only on the condition that El Paso Electric does not pass capital and operating costs on to ratepayers; without that condition, they recommended denial.

The final decision rests with the five PUCT commissioners. The application has not been scheduled for a vote.

Verónica Carbajal, an organizer with the Sembrando Esperanza Coalition in El Paso, which submitted comments from over 1,000 people opposing the application, told Inside Climate News: "We're disappointed. If the state was really serious about this, the commission would be denying everything related to data centers."

El Paso Electric initially claimed solar power would supply the Meta data center. In December it instead applied to build the gas plant. The facility would supply Meta exclusively for the first five years and then connect to the broader transmission system, with Meta assuming the costs for those first five years, after which ratepayers could be asked to shoulder them.

The case is unusual because Far West Texas is one of the few regions of the state outside the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas grid. Utilities are barred from owning power plants in ERCOT, but the rules differ outside the grid's territory, which is why El Paso Electric could make the proposal. Krysti Shallenberger, a research and communications manager at the Energy & Policy Institute, told Inside Climate News: "What we're seeing with El Paso Electric, we haven't necessarily seen in the competitive market. Which is the utility proposing to build an expensive gas plant [for a data center] that it will rate base. It can make a profit off this."

The numbers behind the buildout

The financial scale of the projects feeding these power and cooling debates is the subject of a Bain & Company report published on Tuesday. The consultancy estimates the AI industry must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to justify surging capital investment in data center infrastructure, with annual AI infrastructure spending potentially reaching $1.5 trillion by 2031. New product development, including search, advertising, autonomy and physical AI, is projected to contribute about $4.2 trillion, while enterprise productivity would require $1 trillion to $1.4 trillion. Consumer-focused services are seen contributing $200 billion to $400 billion. "The economics of AI infrastructure demand trillions in new revenue beyond productivity gains," said David Crawford, chairman of Bain's global technology practice and lead author of the report.

Bain also noted that data center sizes and costs are doubling roughly every 12 to 16 months. It cited research firm Epoch AI's figures for Meta's Prometheus facility in Ohio: 600MW at an estimated $24 billion in 2025, projected to reach as much as 2GW and $80 billion by 2027, 5GW at up to $175 billion by 2029, and 9GW at $200 billion by 2030.

Power is not the only constraint. Google is set to launch an experimental satellite named MVP aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California to test running an AI data center in orbit, Tom's Hardware reported on 26 September. The satellite carries four Tensor Processing Units and solar panels providing a single kilowatt of power.

Overheating limits the chips to runs of about 15 minutes before they must be shut down to cool, though the orbital server is expected to handle AI requests for up to a year and remain in orbit up to six years. Google's answer to radiation-induced bit flips, for now, is to restart the chips periodically, and it has devised a cooling system that vents heat directly into space. James Manyika, Google's senior vice president of research, told the New York Times: "We don't expect, to be perfectly frank, that we'll have anything usefully operational in the next few years."

Regulators and residents push back

In Europe, Lighthouse Reports filed a formal complaint on Monday against the European Commission, first reported by POLITICO, accusing the EU executive of shielding how much energy and water individual data centers use. The complaint was lodged under the Aarhus Convention, a legally binding treaty giving the public rights to information and participation in environmental decision-making. It faces a first test in November, when the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee meets to decide whether it is admissible. The Commission did not respond to POLITICO's request for comment.

According to the Commission's figures, Europe's data centers used 20.7 terawatt-hours of electricity, about as much as Croatia consumes, and more than 8 million cubic meters of water in 2025. That is a 26% increase in electricity use and 52% in water use from 2024. The totals come from incomplete data and have only been published in aggregate, following a 2024 law that barred Brussels and EU capitals from disclosing information about individual data centers after lobbying by tech companies. A new transparency label presented last week will require operators to grade energy efficiency, water usage and clean power uptake from A to G starting next summer, but Lighthouse Reports argued the rules still conceal total energy consumption.

In Australia, Goodman Group confirmed on Monday it had told the NSW Department of Planning it would no longer proceed with its A$1.2 billion Project Mars data center in Lane Cove, citing "changes in regulatory environment," ABC News reported. The three-storey project sat about 20 metres from the nearest house and 160 metres from Lane Cove West Public School. Goodman said the policy and regulatory environment for large-scale data center development had "evolved significantly" and that it had considered feedback from the planning process, including the views of the local community.

Sweltering Cities senior campaigner Sanaa Shah told the ABC: "It's a clear sign of the large scale community resistance that's forming to data centres. It's something we're observing across the country."

Transmission remains the other half of the power problem. The US Senate energy permitting bill unveiled on Wednesday could streamline the buildout of high-voltage power lines, according to Canary Media. Analysis commissioned by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions found that by 2035 the reforms could enable a grid buildout reducing the cost of delivering electricity by roughly $7 billion compared with a business-as-usual scenario, a net savings after accounting for $1.9 billion in new transmission investment, and could cut residential electricity bills by about $1.1 billion.

Ashna Aggarwal, director of analysis at Greenline Insights, which conducted the study, said the modeling indicated the reforms could enable almost 100 gigawatts more wind, solar and battery storage, as well as nearly 40 GW of increased interregional transmission capacity. Rob Gramlich, president of consultancy Grid Strategies, said: "If Congress wanted to expand and de-congest the nation's transmission grid, these are the policy changes that can get that done."

Whether any of it reaches the statute book is another matter. The House has been adjourned by Speaker Mike Johnson until after the November midterms, and the Senate is scheduled to conclude its work on Friday, after which senators return to their states to campaign. The datacenter energy bill that failed on Wednesday was one of the last votes the chamber is expected to take before then.