renewables

Trump gets data center companies to pledge to pay for power generation

Biz & IT, coal, data centers, Energy, natural gas, nuclear, Policy, renewables, trump administration / Kris Guyer / March 5, 2026

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that a large collection of tech companies had signed on to what it’s calling the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. By agreeing, the initial signatories—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI—are saying they will pay for the new generation and transmission capacities needed for any additional data centers they build. But the agreement has no enforcement mechanism, and it will likely run into issues with hardware supplies. It also ignores basic economics.

Other than that, it seems like a great idea.

What’s being agreed to

The agreement is quite simple, laying out five points. The key ones are the first three: that the companies building data centers pledge to pay for new generating capacity, either building it themselves or paying for it as part of a new or expanded power plant. They’ll also pay for any transmission infrastructure needed to connect their data centers and the new supply to the grid and will cover these costs whether or not the power ultimately gets used by their facilities.

The companies also pledge to consider allowing the local grid to use on-site backup generators to handle emergency power shortages affecting the community. They will also hire and train locally when they build new data centers.

The agreement suggests that these promises will protect American consumers from price hikes due to the expansion of data centers and will somehow “lower electricity costs for consumers in the long term.” How that will happen is not specified.

Also missing from the agreement is any sort of enforcement mechanism. If a company decides to ignore the agreement, the worst it is guaranteed to suffer is bad publicity, something these companies already have experience handling. That said, Trump has been known to resort to blatantly illegal tactics to pressure companies to conform to his wishes, so ignoring the agreement carries risks.

That’s important because the companies will struggle to live up to the agreement. (Though Google, for its part, told Ars that it has typically followed the guidelines as a normal part of its process for building new data centers.)

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Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

On Tuesday, the US Energy Information Administration released full-year data on how the country generated electricity in 2025. It’s a bit of a good news/bad news situation. The bad news is that overall demand rose appreciably, and a fair chunk of that was met by additional coal use. On the good side, solar continued its run of astonishing growth, generating 35 percent more power than a year earlier and surpassing hydroelectric power for the first time.

Shifting markets

Overall, electrical consumption in the US rose by 2.8 percent, or about 121 terawatt-hours. Consumption had been largely flat for several decades, with efficiency and the decline of industry offsetting the effects of population and economic growth. There were plenty of year-to-year changes, however, driven by factors ranging from heating and cooling demand to a global pandemic. Given that history, the growth in demand in 2025 is a bit concerning, but it’s not yet a clear signal that the factors that will inevitably drive growth have kicked in.

(These factors include things like the switch to heat pumps, the electrification of transportation, and the growth in data centers. While the first two of those involve a more efficient use of energy overall, they involve electricity replacing direct use of fossil fuels, and so will increase demand on the grid.)

The story of the year is how that demand was met. If demand grows more slowly, the additional 85 terawatt-hours generated by expanded utility-scale and small solar installations would have easily met it. As it was, the growth of utility-scale solar was only sufficient to cover about two-thirds of the rising demand (or 73 percent if you include wind power). With no new nuclear plants on the horizon, the alternative was to meet it with fossil fuels.