{"id":619682,"date":"2026-10-03T19:28:32","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T19:28:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/619682\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T19:28:32","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T19:28:32","slug":"senate-democrats-block-datacenter-energy-bill-saying-toothless-legislation-misses-the-mark-us-senate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/619682\/","title":{"rendered":"Senate Democrats block datacenter energy bill, saying \u2018toothless\u2019 legislation \u2018misses the mark\u2019 | US Senate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Senate Democrats<\/a> on Wednesday blocked legislation intended to offset the impact of datacenters<\/a> on consumer electricity bills, calling it a \u201ctoothless\u201d attempt to address a top voter concern ahead of November\u2019s midterm elections<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Ratepayer Protection Act failed by a 57-to-43 vote, falling just shy of the 60 votes necessary to advance through the Republican-controlled chamber. Four Democrats \u2013 Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and both Georgia senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock \u2013 joined Republicans<\/a> in support of the measure.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmericans are calling for real solutions, real guardrails, real solutions on AI. Republicans\u2019 toothless datacenter bill completely misses the mark,\u201d the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said in a floor speech before the vote. Schumer assailed Trump for a meeting with top tech executives on Tuesday that the president said yielded<\/a> a \u201cmorally binding\u201d agreement to put controls on artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

\u201cRelying on \u2018self-regulation\u2019 is how we got into this mess,\u201d Schumer added.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives<\/a> had approved the bill by an almost unanimous vote.<\/p>\n

Datacenter construction and electricity consumption has grown in recent years amid advances in AI and other technologies, and with it has come increasing anxiety<\/a> among voters about the facilities\u2019 impacts on their energy bills.<\/p>\n

The bipartisan legislation is an attempt by Congress to address those anxieties, and would have required electric utilities to consider adopting new standards so that datacenters pick up the costs of any necessary upgrades to transmission, generation and distribution, which can otherwise be transferred to households and businesses.<\/p>\n

It was proposed ahead of the 3 November midterm elections in which Democrats are campaigning on lowering the cost of living in their bid to regain control of the Senate and House. Its sponsor in the lower chamber was Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican who is a top target<\/a> of Democrats, while the Ohio Republican Jon Husted championed the bill through the Senate.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s clear that big tech should be paying their own way, not passing the cost on to local communities and states \u2013 and this bill does that,\u201d Husted said in a floor speech on Wednesday, urging Democrats<\/a> to back the bill that the president had indicated he would sign.<\/p>\n

Though Ohio voted for Trump by an 11-point margin two years ago, recent polls<\/a> have shown Husted trailing his opponent, the Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who has accused the incumbent of bowing to the demands of the datacenter industry.<\/p>\n

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While the proposal was seen as an attempt by Republicans Senate leaders to bolster Husted\u2019s re-election chances, it also presented a quandary for the chamber\u2019s Democrats, since voting it down could be seen as running counter to their pledges of lowering electricity bills.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the party\u2019s leaders opted to oppose the measure, saying it would have been ineffective at actually addressing datacenters\u2019 electricity consumption.<\/p>\n

The vote was one of the last the Senate is expected to take before the midterms. The chamber is scheduled to conclude its work on Friday, after which senators will return to their states to campaign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked legislation intended to offset the impact of datacenters on consumer electricity bills, calling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[134,527,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-619682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}