Ok, that's a long-ish interview, and it really does cut to your point.
I think this is the most relevant portion of the interview. I recommend reading the whole thing.
We’re also seeing significant growth. But importantly, while we’re looking at these increased capital needs on our system, we’re also deploying strategies to keep customer costs as low as possible. So when we talk about infrastructure growth on our system, we have a philosophy now that growth has to pay for growth. And thanks to the work that the Citizens’ Utility Board and other advocates did two legislative sessions ago with the passage of the Power Act, we now have tools at our disposal to make sure that as we are building out infrastructure to support large energy users like data centers, we can allocate the cost of that growth to that user group.
For example, we have a filing right now at the PUC which would increase rates, if adopted, for data centers, by 20%. By shifting costs off of our small business and residential customers, residential customers could see a decrease of about 2%, if that particular proposal was adopted. As we look to the future where more of that growth may be associated with those large energy users, we would see more and more of those infrastructure costs being allocated to those large users.
Miller: How much is that happening now? Why not already say if data centers or other heavy industrial users are, by far, responsible for a bigger – I don’t know about the overall energy use – but in terms of the percentage change. Data centers, their demand is growing way faster than residential demand. So are you already taking that into account as you make these prices? Are you already saying, “hey data centers, we’re gonna give you a bigger piece of our overall cost increases, because you are demanding more and more every year?”
Sheeran: Well, because of the way that rates are set and regulated by law, we weren’t able to do that for data centers, as a specific class of customers, until the Power Act was passed a couple of years ago. And that’s what makes that legislation so important. It basically cleared the path for the Public Utility Commission to work with utilities and work with CUB to establish a different set of rate-making tools for data centers as a whole that could allow them to shoulder more of the growth that they are directly bringing to the system.