Oregon Puts Data Center Grid Costs on the Campuses

Portland General Electric began charging data centers 29.7% more on July 8, the first rates issued under Oregon’s POWER Act. Typical households got a 1.3% cut, about $1.91 a month, and other shops and factories got cuts of their own.

The percentage is the easy headline. The order also put server campuses on contracts of 10 years or more, added a surcharge at 100 megawatts, and set penalties if a hall overshoots its allotted power. Pacific Power then struck a broader cost deal in September, while Hillsboro froze new applications 19 days after the PGE rates started.

A $12,000 Monthly Fee Hits the Server Class

The Oregon Public Utility Commission voted unanimously on July 7 to approve the new prices, and they took effect the next day as Order No. 26-239. PGE had filed the compliance papers on June 3 as Advice No. 26-24, after a May 7 order that set the large-load design and a one-month delay so staff could check the math.

PGE’s Schedule 96 data center tariff is a demand-heavy bill, not a simple per-kilowatt-hour price. The monthly basic charge is $12,000 at both primary and subtransmission voltage. Generation demand runs $19.04 per kilowatt of monthly peak on primary service and $18.70 on subtransmission, and those peaks are measured Monday through Saturday from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

SCHEDULE 96 MONTHLY CHARGES

Angelica Espinosa, PGE’s senior vice president on the filing, signed the sheets for service on and after July 8. The energy line is the small number. The bill is built to collect for capacity PGE has to stand up whether the servers are full or idle, which is the point of moving this group off the old industrial schedules.

The New Class Is Data Centers, Not Factories

The July coverage often lumped in “large industrial” users over 20 megawatts. The tariff is narrower. It applies to large nonresidential customers at or above 20,000 kW, or with a contract at that size, whose end use is a data center under code 518210 of the 2022 North American Industry Classification System, the federal bucket for data processing, hosting, and related services.

Landlords with data-center tenants are in the class. Tenants on a campus who are metered on their own still land on Schedule 96 when the site as a whole meets or exceeds 20,000 kW or has contracted for that much, even if one suite is smaller on day one. That closes the obvious dodge of slicing a hall into smaller accounts.

Other factories did not get the hike. The commission’s later write-up of the same order says industrial customers who are not in the data-center class saw average rates fall 1.4%, with commercial accounts down 2.1%. A paper mill over 20 megawatts and a server campus over 20 megawatts are no longer treated as the same kind of load.

House Bill 3546 as enrolled wrote that line into statute. The Act, Chapter 323 of the 2025 laws, took effect June 16, 2025, and tells the commission to keep this class “separate and distinct” from other commercial or industrial service. Crypto mining is not named. If a site is not primarily in 518210, it does not belong on Schedule 96.

Ten-Year Contracts Lock In Who Pays for Wires

The rate sheets are the public-facing half. The contract rules are the half that decides whether a canceled or delayed campus leaves a substation on everyone else’s bill. New service after June 16, 2025, and older sites that still force PGE to spend after that date, must sign. The commission can review special contracts.

WHAT THE NEW CONTRACTS REQUIRE

• Term: The POWER Act sets a minimum of 10 years, and the commission said the term scales up with the facility’s expected demand so a short stay cannot dump a long-lived line on other customers.
• Unused buildout: Future agreements include predictable charges if a data center does not use the infrastructure PGE built to serve it, plus a requirement that enough clean resources exist before the load can take service.
• 100 MW adder: Schedule 96 customers with 100 megawatts or more of allocated system capacity pay a 1-cent surcharge on 100-megawatt loads per kilowatt-hour, with the money aimed at programs that offset home bills, including help for low-income households.
• Exceedance: If actual demand tops allocated system capacity, the campus pays four times the transmission rate and one and a half times the generation rate, per hour and per megawatt over the line, and can face curtailment or shutoff under the contract.

Chair Letha Tawney tied the package to cost causation, not to a household rebate.

These changes ensure that costs created by data centers in PGE’s territory are more accurately reflected in their rates. By putting this structure in place now, we are getting ahead of a bigger issue, enabling responsible data centers to pay their own way, and protecting customers from higher costs in the future.

Letha Tawney, chair, Oregon Public Utility Commission

PGE said it will keep working with the commission as more large loads ask to connect. The Data Center Coalition, the industry group, already sought rehearing on how PGE assigns growth costs. The commission turned that down. The Citizens’ Utility Board expects the fight to move to the Oregon Court of Appeals.

Pacific Power Would Bill Campuses for New Plants

Pacific Power is the second investor-owned utility under the Act, and it is not copying PGE line for line. In September the company reached an agreement with commission staff, the Citizens’ Utility Board, and several environmental and community groups. Charlotte Shuff, a CUB spokesperson, called it “the strongest from a for-profit electric utility yet” under the POWER Act, and said the three-member commission is expected to vote on Nov. 13.

The Pacific Power plan would make new data centers cover the cost of new generation and storage built to serve them, including plants and batteries that also help other customers, plus the upgrades needed to connect them. They would pay for the wires and poles built for their service and for market power bought to run them. CUB’s example is blunt: if a 100-megawatt line is needed for a 50-megawatt campus and for other users, the campus pays 50% of the line, matching its share of demand.

That is a different theory than PGE’s. PGE’s July design leans on how much each class is adding to peak growth. Pacific Power’s deal leans on who is driving overall demand. Bob Jenks, CUB’s executive director, said the difference matches the systems. PGE serves a denser mix of smaller halls in the Portland area, where a new line can look like a shared upgrade. Pacific Power’s halls sit in more rural country.

“If you build a data center in Madras, it’s pretty clear whether or not new energy investments and infrastructure costs associated with that are for the data center or not,” Jenks said.

Drew Hanson, a PGE spokesperson, made the same geographic point from the other side of the fence. Pacific Power’s territory is larger and more spread out, he said, so a single campus may need a line, a substation, or a resource built for that customer, and the costs can be tied more directly to the need.

The two tariffs also treat time differently. PGE’s Schedule 96 covers existing data centers and new ones. Pacific Power’s September deal applies to future campuses first. Costs tied to the handful of data centers already on Pacific Power’s system are slated for a later case in spring, even as Jenks said dozens want onto that system and some of the asks are huge. Pacific Power serves more than 650,000 Oregon customers.

Hillsboro Halted New Halls 19 Days After the Rates

The rate order did not settle the local fight over where halls can be built. Hillsboro, the first Oregon city to stop new data-center applications, passed a 120-day moratorium unanimously at a special meeting on Monday, July 27, 19 days after PGE’s new prices took effect. Salem’s council followed. Governor Tina Kotek’s Data Center Advisory Committee is due to publish preliminary findings in fall 2026 on water, land use, jobs, and energy, a wider brief than the commission’s rate case.

HOW THE POWER ACT REACHED PGE BILLS

1. June 16, 2025: House Bill 3546 takes effect and orders a separate class, with contracts of 10 years or more, for large energy-use facilities in NAICS 518210.
2. May 7, 2026: The commission approves PGE’s large-load design in docket UM 2377 and tells the company to file compliance tariffs.
3. June 3, 2026: PGE files Advice No. 26-24, including Schedule 96, after regulators push the start date past an earlier June 10 target.
4. July 7, 2026: Commissioners vote unanimously to approve the rates; Order No. 26-239 is entered July 10.
5. July 8, 2026: Schedule 96 takes effect, with data-center rates up 29.7% and other classes down.
6. July 27, 2026: Hillsboro imposes a 120-day pause on new data-center applications; Salem later follows.
7. November 13, 2026: The commission is scheduled to vote on Pacific Power’s POWER Act deal in docket UE 463.

The PUC’s 2026 POWER Act legislative report, the first of the biennial reviews the statute requires, estimates data-center load at roughly 15 percent of investor-owned utility load now and about 25 percent by 2030. The Electric Power Research Institute, as cited in that report, still places Oregon among the top seven state hosts in the country, far ahead of the rest of the Northwest. The Northwest Power and Conservation Council expects regional data-center load to roughly double by 2030, with most of that growth served by consumer-owned utilities and the Bonneville Power Administration, not by PGE or Pacific Power.

That is the hole the Act does not fill. Idaho Power is subject to the law but hosts no large-load data centers, as the Act defines them, in its Oregon territory. Public utilities are outside the statute. The commission wrote that it cannot see data-center effects beyond investor-owned territory, even as those effects raise the cost of clean power Oregon’s private utilities must still buy to meet state carbon limits.

What the $1.91 Cut Leaves on the Table

A 1.3% residential cut is real, and so is the 2.1% commercial cut. On a typical PGE home bill it is about $1.91 a month. That is a reallocation, not a reset of the last several years of utility increases, and it will not read as relief to anyone whose bill climbed a lot faster than that before July 8.

The louder question is leakage. If a campus signs for 80 megawatts, takes 40, and walks after year six, the 10-year term and the unused-capacity charges are supposed to keep the leftover steel off household rates. If those tools fail, the next general rate case will put the same wires back into the shared pot. Pacific Power’s pending deal tries to close that gap by assigning new plants, batteries, and lines more directly. PGE’s deal tries to close it by charging for growth at the peak and by keeping existing halls in the new class, not only the next campus through the door.

Industry pushback is already in the file, and CUB expects an appeal. Cities are using a different tool, time. Hillsboro’s pause and Salem’s follow-on do not change Schedule 96, but they change how many new 20-megawatt asks show up while the advisory committee writes. The commission’s next scheduled move is the Pacific Power vote on Nov. 13.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Oregon Utilities Does the POWER Act Cover?

The Act binds Oregon’s investor-owned electric companies: PGE, Pacific Power, and Idaho Power. Idaho Power currently has no large-load data centers, as the statute defines them, in its Oregon territory, so there is no Idaho Power Schedule 96 analog yet. Consumer-owned utilities and loads served by the Bonneville Power Administration are not under the Act, even though regional planners expect those systems to take most of the Northwest’s added data-center demand by 2030.

Can a Schedule 96 Customer Buy Wholesale Power Instead?

Yes. Cost of service is the default, but a customer can elect PGE’s Daily Price Option, which uses the Intercontinental Exchange Mid-Columbia electricity firm index plus 0.319¢ per kilowatt-hour for wheeling, plus losses, with loss factors of 1.0530 at primary voltage and 1.0416 at subtransmission. Direct access is also available in set election windows, and a customer that leaves cost of service cannot return until the next service year with timely notice.

What Is the Reactive Demand Charge on Schedule 96?

On top of the monthly demand and energy charges, the customer pays 50¢ for each kilovolt-ampere of reactive demand above 40% of maximum demand. That charge is separate from the schedule’s minimum charge and is meant to recover the extra grid burden from poor power factor, a common issue on large, densely packed computing loads.

What Are the Minimum Capacity Levels on Schedule 96?

Unless a customer service contract sets higher floors, the minimum facility capacity and demand are 200 kW for primary-voltage service and 4,000 kW for subtransmission. PGE may also require a written agreement with a higher monthly minimum when a customer has dedicated substation capacity or redundant distribution facilities, so a lightly loaded redundant feed still pays as if it were being used.

The three-member commission is scheduled to vote on Pacific Power’s deal on Nov. 13.