Making ratepayer protection real in WV
President Donald Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge says data centers should build, bring or buy their own power. Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s microgrid law already lets them do exactly that.
On paper, West Virginia is ahead of the game. But a $2.5 billion utility filing now before the state Public Service Commission threatens to take the state in exactly the wrong direction — and West Virginia families would pay the price.
On Feb. 13, Mon Power and Potomac Edison asked the PSC to approve construction of a 1,200 megawatt gas plant at the Fort Martin site in Monongalia County. The plant is needed, the companies say, primarily because of growing data center demand in their service territory. To pay for it, they want to add a surcharge to every customer’s bill, starting as soon as the PSC says yes — years before the plant generates any electricity. The company’s own filing estimates this surcharge will raise a typical residential bill by about 2.3% over five years of construction. That hits hard in a state where PSC Chairwoman Charlotte Lane recently told lawmakers that West Virginia has an affordability problem.
The core issue is risk. Mon Power wants to put $2.5 billion in new generation on its regulated books to serve data center customers who haven’t arrived yet. If the projected demand materializes on schedule, maybe everyone benefits. But if it doesn’t — if new data centers build more slowly than forecast, or scale back or locate elsewhere — the plant and its costs stay on the books. Other utility ratepayers would be left holding the bag for the data center bet the utility made.
The Trump administration developed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge to protect consumers from such costs. The pledge, signed at the White House on March 4 by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI, commits these companies to pay the full cost of the generation and infrastructure needed to serve their data centers. They agreed to negotiate separate rate structures, so their costs don’t flow to households. They agreed to pay whether they use the electricity or not. The pledge is voluntary, but its principle is sound: The businesses driving new demand should bear the cost and risk of serving it.
Morrisey had the same instinct. The microgrid law he championed last year created a framework for new data centers to generate their own power within certified districts, outside the regulated utility system. That law keeps data-center-driven generation assets off the utility’s books entirely — which means residential ratepayers are not exposed to the risk if a project underperforms or a customer walks away. It is, in effect, the Ratepayer Protection Pledge put into state law before the pledge existed.
Mon Power filed its application a few weeks before the White House signing ceremony. The company should withdraw the filing and come back with a plan compatible with the pledge. That means, at a minimum, dropping the construction-period surcharge and structuring the project so that data center customers — not residential households — bear the development costs and demand risk for generation built to serve them.
But fixing one filing isn’t enough. The microgrid law protects ratepayers from new data center load that arrives through certified districts. It does not protect them from the data centers seeking utility power supplies, as the Mon Power filing illustrates. It also does not offer existing big industrial and commercial power users the same opportunity microgrids are granted under the law. The logical next step is to extend the self-supply principle to existing large business customers. Let them procure their own power, if they choose. This would reduce the pressure on utilities to invest in new speculative generation projects at customer risk. That idea, introduced this session as Senate Bill 733, did not advance. It should be a priority for the state energy office as it develops the comprehensive energy policy plan required under the newly passed House Bill 5381.
West Virginia has a real opportunity. Data center investment is coming. The governor’s 50-by50 goal envisions dramatic growth in generating capacity. The microgrid law proves the state already knows how to do this right. And no state in the country gave Trump a wider margin of victory than West Virginia. His Ratepayer Protection Pledge calls for exactly the kind of consumer protection West Virginia families need. The state should take that pledge seriously — not as a voluntary gesture signed by a handful of companies at the White House, but as an active, enforceable principle to be built into state energy policy. Mon Power’s filing is the first test. The answer should be clear.