Ratepayer Protection Act

This bill amends the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 to set a federal cost-recovery standard for very large electricity customers, primarily data centers. It requires that rates charged to a large-load customer, defined as a non-residential customer with at least 100 megawatts of peak demand at a single site or campus running data-storage and computing infrastructure, be designed to recover the full incremental cost of any generation, transmission, or distribution upgrade needed to serve that customer, including costs triggered if the customer later cancels its contract or stops buying power. Before making the upgrade, the utility must require the large-load customer to provide financial assurances or contributions covering its cost. State regulatory authorities and non-regulated utilities must begin considering the new standard within 1 year of enactment and complete a determination within 2 years. Those deadlines do not apply to a utility in a state that, before enactment, already implemented the standard or a comparable one, already held a proceeding to consider it, or already had its legislature vote on it.

At least 90 organizations named this measure in a lobbying filing. A floor, not a total: they were counted by the client name on 149 quarterly reports filed by 20 lobbying firms and by 72 organizations lobbying for themselves in 2026 Q2 and 2026 Q3. An organization that lobbied this measure without naming it is not counted here.

6 of those filings did not cite this bill by number. They named a short title it shares with its Senate companion, S 5028, so the reference belongs to the pair rather than to one chamber’s vehicle.

The filings record that lobbying was reported on the measure. The form has no per-bill dollar figure and no field for a position, so nothing here says how much was spent or which side an organization took.

5 of them, in no ranking: Domtar Corporation; Hill East Group on Behalf of Airports Council International - North America; Ameren Services; Basf Corporation; Firstenergy Corp. Listed as filed, in the order the filings were read, and 85 others are not shown. These are not the largest, the earliest or the most active: we keep five names per measure, and the filings give no ranking.

From the LD-2 quarterly lobbying filings published at lda.gov by the Senate Office of Public Records. Read for 2025 Q1, 2025 Q2, 2025 Q3, 2025 Q4, 2026 Q1, 2026 Q2 and 2026 Q3. Our copy holds 25 fewer filings for 2025 Q1, 41 fewer filings for 2025 Q2, 43 fewer filings for 2025 Q3, 34 fewer filings for 2025 Q4, 29 fewer filings for 2026 Q1, 50 fewer filings for 2026 Q2 and 228 fewer filings for 2026 Q3 than the Senate's register counts, so those quarters are the filings we could read rather than every one filed. 2026 Q4 is still inside its filing window, so that quarter is only the filings posted so far.