Energy customer protection in place for Floridians

Audio By Carbonatix

(The Center Square) – Utilities companies in Florida are prohibited from making residents pay higher electricity costs caused by data centers.

Second-term Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the legislation related to "hyperscale" data centers on Thursday. Senate Bill 44 also preserves local control over zoning, permitting, and land use.

DeSantis cautioned overzealous communities from giving away too many subsidies to large data centers, saying most are owned by wealthy technology companies and that the number of people employed by data centers will likely be low.

“SB44 also protects data centers from draining our water resources,” the governor said.

Instead of providing property tax breaks for data centers, local residents should be “charging them a lot more” and using the extra revenue to reduce residential property taxes, DeSantis said.

“That’s the way to do it,” the governor said. “Don’t give them the tax breaks."

Construction of data centers does provide jobs, DeSantis acknowledged.

“But once the data center is built, it doesn’t employ very many people,” he said. “You may have a dozen people that work in a hyperscale data center. A lot of times they bring these foreigners in on visas to do the data centers. The idea that you bring a hyper-scale data center to your neck of the woods and oh my gosh, it’s going to transform the area and there’s going to be hundreds of great paying jobs – that’s not really the way it’s working.”

Data centers have the potential to drive up electricity rates by greatly increasing demand for power, the governor said.

“There is a certain amount of demand now,” he said. “If you double the demand or triple the demand, then what’s going to happen to the price? It’s going to go up unless you double or triple the supply. And that’s not so easy to do.”