Over the last few weeks, the State House has passed six bills to put families’ budgets ahead of utility profits, regulate artificial intelligence data centers and protect our communities from high electric bills, pollution, and unchecked development.
- HB 2650: Requires data center developers seeking state tax benefits to meet strict standards protecting energy affordability, supporting local communities, creating jobs, and strengthening environmental protections
- HB 2359: Ends the practice of NDAs between data centers and municipalities and requires that residents have a say in where and whether data centers are built
- HB 2224: Fixes the way utility rates are set to end windfall profits for utilities and lower electricity bills for families and small businesses
- HB 2496: Allows local municipalities to put a pause on data center applications in order to update their zoning so that they have a say on where and how data centers should be built
- HB 2264: Creates a Virtual Power Plant program, which connects household technologies, such as smart thermostats into a coordinated network, which can then feed power back into the grid to lower demand and costs
- HB 2198: Reapeals state sales tax incentives for data centers which would save the state over $500 million by 2030
This didn’t happen by chance.
State representatives are hearing from constituents every day. They're seeing packed public meetings, reading comments online, and getting calls and emails demanding action on rising electric bills, data centers, and utility company profits.
We have a chance to put protections in place and lower our bills so that families and the communities we’ve worked so hard to build don’t get changed completely by this new revolution.
But it will only happen if our lawmakers hear from us. Please join us in thanking state representatives for voting to do better for our communities by regulating data centers and putting families’ budgets ahead of utility profits.
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