When It Comes to Power, Taxes and Jobs, Data Centers are Not Winners for Oregonians

On the last day of 2025, the Oregon Public Utilities Commission sent out a press release announcing a welcome event: Customers of Pacific Power would see their power bills reduced in the new year. With recent rate increases making our power bills 50% more now than they were in 2020, hearing about a rate decrease is welcome news.

But don’t get too excited, because the rate decrease announced by the PUC amounted to… wait for it… an estimated decrease of 96 cents on the average household bill. You read that right — 96 cents per bill. Was that even worth the negotiations that were required between the utility, the PUC and consumer advocates?

The 12 dollars or so less we’re likely to pay in 2026 compared to 2025 is not unwelcome — if nothing else, it signals a move in the right direction. Our power bills are going down, ever so slightly, and not going up this year. Supply and demand seem to be tipping in consumers’ favor. That’s great.

But when it comes to demand, all is not as rosy. Data centers, of which Oregon has the fifth-most among the states, continue to create demand that thus far, consumers have paid for dearly. The issue of passing increased rates onto households due to data center demand is a problem that came clearly into focus in last year’s legislative session, when lawmakers passed the POWER Act. HB 3546 aimed to have large industrial users of energy pay their fair share. Before the bill, data centers and other large industrial customers of Portland General Electric paid about 8 cents per kilowatt hour, while residential customers paid 20 cents. The bill created a new classification for users using more than 20 megawatts of power to pay for their share.

But thus far, utility companies appear to be creating workarounds that ultimately will continue to pass the costs on to average customers. The citizen-created utility watchdog, the Citizens Utility Board, said last month that PGE is already working to skirt the new laws by only charging data centers for the first three years of costs associated with building out new electric infrastructure, according to reporting from the Oregon Capital Chronicle. Under that plan, consumers would pay for the remaining costs over the other 47 years of a typical infrastructure investment.

Oregon has at least 120 data centers operating in the state, according to the data center research site, Data Center Map. The state attracts these facilities due to a mild climate, water resources and tax incentives, according to reporting from OPB. During the construction phases, data centers bring lots of jobs to an area, as we’ve seen in Prineville. But following construction, the jobs slow to a trickle, while the tax breaks remain longer. Crook County Schools saw a net loss of $29 million from tax abatement programs in 2024, according to the policy resource center Good Jobs First.

If we combine the use of natural resources, dwindling jobs and the tax abatement — not to mention increases in our electric bills that don’t seem to be negligibly decreasing anytime soon, it is obvious that data centers are not winners for communities. And, the cost of our electricity is just the beginning of the problem.

This article appears in the Source January 8, 2026.