The Louisville Power Promise

If a data center plugs into Louisville, Louisville families’ lights get cheaper — not more expensive.

The Problem: The AI Boom Is Coming for Your Electric Bill

Data centers — the warehouse-sized computer farms that power AI — use staggering amounts of electricity. And they’re coming to Kentucky in force.

It’s already happening here. Louisville’s first hyperscale data center campus is under construction right now on Camp Ground Road in southwest Louisville, next to Rubbertown: 153 acres, up to six buildings, and a maximum power draw of 402 megawatts — with the first 130 MW phase slated to come online in October 2026 (Kentucky Lantern, Data Center Dynamics). At full build-out, running near-continuously, that single campus would use roughly as much electricity in a year as 220,000 Kentucky homes — about two-thirds of all the households in Jefferson County.^*

It was approved in March 2026 over the objections of the West Louisville neighbors who will live beside it (LPM News).

And it’s just the beginning. LG&E/KU told state regulators that 11 data centers totaling roughly 3.5 gigawatts are more likely than not to land in their territory, out of 29 in the pipeline — and their parent company’s CEO has floated total prospective demand of around 12 gigawatts (Kentucky Lantern). For scale: that ceiling exceeds the utility’s entire existing generating fleet. One proposed Kentucky facility alone would use as much power as 800,000 homes (Planetizen, Kentucky Lantern).

Who pays to power all that? So far, the pattern is: everyone.

• The power plants are already approved. In October 2025, the Kentucky Public Service Commission approved LG&E/KU’s roughly $3 billion plan to build 1.29 GW of new gas-fired generation — Mill Creek 6 right here in Jefferson County, plus Brown 12 in Mercer County — justified almost entirely by forecast data-center demand that has not yet materialized (Kentucky Lantern, Sierra Club). The utility says its contract structure will protect ratepayers; independent observers are not convinced (LPM News).
• The rate hikes have started. In February 2026, the PSC approved LG&E’s first rate increase since 2020: the average residential electric bill rose 4.73% — from $108.76 to $113.90 a month — with residential gas up 11% on top (Spectrum News, Kentucky Lantern).
• It’s a national pattern. Data centers consumed 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and are projected to hit 6.7–12% by 2028 (U.S. DOE, via EESI). In the PJM market next door, the independent market monitor called data-center load growth the primary reason for the capacity-price spikes now hitting household bills (E3 whitepaper, 2026). Louisville isn’t in PJM — LG&E/KU runs its own system — so our exposure comes through a different door: the multi-billion-dollar power plants our utility builds for data centers, recovered from every ratepayer over decades if the contracts aren’t airtight.
• Frankfort walked away. Kentucky’s General Assembly had the chance to guarantee data centers “pay their own way.” In the 2026 session, those ratepayer protections were stripped out of Senate Bill 197 on the final day (LPM News, Kentucky Lantern). The University of Kentucky’s own energy-policy center concluded data centers could bring billions to Kentucky — but only if the state protects ratepayers, which it has so far declined to do (EPIC Report 2026-001, WKYT).
• The subsidies are already guaranteed. A 2024 state law — expanded statewide in 2025 after lobbying by Google and Meta — exempts big data centers from sales tax on their equipment for up to 50 years (Stites & Harbison, WDRB).

So here’s where Louisville stands: the subsidies are guaranteed, the power plants are approved, the rate hikes have started — and the protections died in Frankfort.

Nobody is standing between the data centers and your electric bill. As Mayor, I will.

^* Illustrative estimate: 402 MW at ~85% load factor ≈ 3.0 million MWh/year; average Kentucky home ≈ 13.5 MWh/year (EIA); Jefferson County has ~330,000 households (U.S. Census). Data-center load is near-constant; household load is not — this compares annual energy, not peak demand.

The Plan: The Louisville Power Promise

It’s simple: every data center that wants to operate in Louisville Metro — any size, no threshold — signs a binding Host Community Energy Agreement (HCEA) before it gets its permits and incentives. The agreement requires the operator to pay into the Louisville Power Promise Fund, sized to its power draw: the bigger the facility, the bigger the payment.

This is a citywide program — every Louisville resident is eligible. And it distributes the way fairness demands: the households closest to each facility — the ones bearing the siting, the noise, the construction, and the grid strain — get the deepest relief first, and the benefit ripples outward across Louisville, reaching further every year as the fund grows with each new facility that signs. Every household that receives a benefit picks the one that fits its life:

Your Choice #1 — Free Solar (yours to keep)

The fund pays for rooftop solar, free to the homeowner — a fully installed system that wipes out most of your electric bill for 25+ years, starting with the neighborhoods nearest each facility. Own your roof? This is the deepest benefit on the menu, and it keeps paying long after any data center is gone. Where a rooftop doesn’t work (shaded lots, older roofs), the same dollars buy community solar shares that show up as credits on your LG&E bill.

Your Choice #2 — Bill Credits (up to full coverage)

The fund pays a monthly credit applied directly to your LG&E bill — at the top tier, for the households closest to a facility, covering the entire average residential electric bill, with credits rippling outward from there. You keep your normal meter and normal service; the credit appears on the bill the way a solar or economic-development credit does today. Renters, condos, apartments — this one works for every household with a meter. Businesses keep paying their normal rate — this relief goes to households, full stop.

Every data center funds the Louisville Power Promise. Every Louisville resident is eligible — citywide, no size loophole. Those nearest each facility get the most, and the benefit ripples outward. You choose: free solar, or credits toward your bill — up to full coverage closest to the fence line. The fund covers families as far as it reaches each year, and it grows with every new data center that plugs in. The more they build, the further the relief reaches.

What it’s worth — the honest math

Our opening ask: $25,000 per megawatt of contracted capacity per year — roughly 5% of what a campus that size likely spends on power annually^† — escalating with inflation, for the life of the facility. For the 402 MW Camp Ground Road campus, that’s about $10 million a year into the fund. We state the number in public because that’s how an honest negotiation starts: it’s an opening position, the final figure gets negotiated per project, and every dollar of wherever it lands is published. Here’s what ~$10M a year buys, every single year:

Let’s be straight about the scale: one campus funds real relief for thousands of families a year — not every bill in the city. Covering every residential electric bill in Jefferson County would take roughly $451 million a year — about $540 million for all ~395,000 LG&E residential customers across Louisville and 16 surrounding counties (computed from the PSC-approved average residential bill of $113.90/month; KY PSC Case No. 2025-00114, final electric order, Feb. 16, 2026, pp. 173 & 177 — rates locked until Aug. 1, 2028). No honest per-project contribution gets there. That’s exactly why the fund starts where the burden is greatest — the households nearest each facility — and ripples outward, covering more of Louisville with every new data center that plugs in.

^† Estimate: 402 MW × 85% load factor ≈ 3.0M MWh/yr × ~$65/MWh all-in ≈ ~$195M/yr power spend; $10.05M ≈ 5.2%. Bill figures from the PSC-approved 2026 average residential bill of $113.90/mo. Exact contribution levels and program tiers get set in each negotiated agreement — and published for everyone to see.

This isn’t a fantasy mechanism — it’s the direction the country is moving

New York’s legislature has proposed requiring every large data center (20 MW+) to fund exactly this choice: direct utility bill credits for host-community residents, or investment in residential rooftop solar, batteries, and heat pumps (NY S10546). New York’s utility regulator already runs a Host Community Benefit program that delivers developer-funded bill credits to residents living near large energy facilities. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a data-center developer signed a community benefits agreement worth $20.25 million with binding water, noise, and clean-energy terms (Columbia Climate Law Blog). Brookings calls community benefit agreements “necessary” for data-center development (Brookings). And at least 38 special large-load tariffs have been created nationally since 2018 — 30 of them in 2025–26 alone — as regulators scramble to wall off data-center costs from family bills (E3 whitepaper, 2026).

Louisville goes further than all of them on one point: no size threshold — if it plugs in here, it pays in here. And our distribution rule says the quiet part out loud: relief starts with the people who live closest to the impact. Louisville shouldn’t be the last city to protect its residents. It should be the first in Kentucky — with the strongest version in the country.

Solar or credits — which should you pick?

Dave’s guidance: if you own your roof, take the solar — it’s the benefit that keeps paying for a generation. If you rent, take the credits — they work for every meter in the city. Either way, you make the call, and the resident-led fund board publishes the ripple tiers and allocation rules for everyone to see. That’s what participatory governance means.

Why businesses stay at their normal rate

This program is funded by the data-center operator — not by shifting costs onto Louisville’s shops, restaurants, and manufacturers. Small businesses are ratepayers too, and they’re already carrying rate increases. Nothing in this plan raises any business’s rate by one cent. Residential customers get the relief because residents are the ones with no lobbyist in the PSC hearing room, no seat in the tariff negotiation, and no way to relocate their kitchen table to a cheaper grid.

Who Pays, Who’s Protected

The Benefits

1. Ratepayer relief you can see on your bill. Full-bill coverage for thousands of households nearest each facility, smaller credits rippling outward, or free solar that cuts a family’s bill for a generation — against a backdrop where the average LG&E bill just rose to $113.90 a month and two new billion-dollar power plants are headed into the rate base.
2. Clean-energy buildout where the burden lands first. The solar option puts megawatts of resident-owned panels on rooftops beginning in the neighborhoods nearest each facility — for Camp Ground Road, that means West and Southwest Louisville, which have carried Rubbertown’s pollution for decades and fought the campus’s approval (LPM News) — and expands citywide as the fund grows.
3. Accountability for the biggest power users in city history. One campus will use roughly the annual electricity of more than 200,000 homes. Scale of impact should mean scale of responsibility — and under this plan, even the smallest facility carries its share.
4. Jobs — real ones, counted honestly. The Camp Ground Road project promises ~1,700 construction jobs but only ~200–500 permanent positions (WDRB). The solar side of the Promise adds a durable local installation workforce on top — hundreds of installs a year, every year, that can’t be automated away or offshored.
5. A better business climate, not a worse one. Operators get what they actually want most: speed and certainty — a published, predictable framework instead of moratorium fights, hostile hearings, and neighborhood opposition at every site. Ask the developers who just spent 14 months fighting through hearings and neighborhood opposition to get Louisville’s first campus approved whether predictability has value.
6. Revenue still flows. An independent report projects the Camp Ground Road project alone could generate ~$68M per year in tax revenue (WHAS11) — none of which this policy touches.

How We’d Actually Do It (The Honest Version)

Straight talk: a mayor cannot set electric rates. Retail rates for LG&E are set by the Kentucky Public Service Commission under state law — not by Metro Government. Any candidate who tells you the city can just order up a special tariff is selling you something. Here’s what a mayor genuinely controls — and how each piece delivers the Power Promise.

Lever 1 — Zoning and permitting (the front door)

Louisville is amending its Land Development Code for data centers right now: the June 2026 draft requires conditional use permits for large facilities, caps them at 500,000 square feet, sets 200-foot residential setbacks, and includes a 30% local-workforce expectation (Metro draft amendments, LPM News). A temporary-moratorium ordinance has already been introduced in Metro Council — tabled for now, but the leverage is real (LouisvilleKY.gov). The energy piece is the missing chapter. As Mayor, I’ll work with Metro Council to add utility-impact review to data-center permitting — every facility, no size loophole — so a signed Host Community Energy Agreement is part of demonstrating that a project’s impacts are mitigated, the same way traffic, noise, and drainage impacts are today.

Lever 2 — The negotiated agreement (the strong door)

The legally safest structure isn’t a unilateral city fee — courts require permit conditions to closely match a project’s actual impacts, and Kentucky gives cities little impact-fee authority. So the HCEA is structured as a negotiated development and community-benefits agreement, signed in exchange for things only the city can give: expedited review, infrastructure coordination, and local incentive participation. Data centers want Louisville’s industrial land, water, fiber, and workforce; Metro controls local property-tax abatements, TIF participation, and its side of state incentive deals. No HCEA, no local incentives, no expedited path. This is exactly how Lancaster, PA secured $20.25M in binding community benefits, and it’s the model documented nationwide by Brookings and Columbia’s Sabin Center (CBA database).

Lever 3 — Delivery rails for the money (two options, both real)

• Rail 1 — Metro-administered fund (no PSC needed): HCEA payments flow into the escrowed Louisville Power Promise Fund; Metro — with a resident-led board, run like participatory budgeting — administers the solar installs and bill-credit payments under published, impact-weighted allocation tiers. Fully within city authority. This is the default rail.
• Rail 2 — LG&E bill-credit rider (cleaner, needs PSC): Metro, the operator, and LG&E jointly petition the PSC to approve a Host Community Bill Credit rider — the operator funds it, LG&E applies the monthly credit to enrolled residential accounts. No special hardware; it’s a billing-system line item, the same mechanics New York already uses for its host-community credits. If the PSC says yes, relief shows up automatically on every enrolled bill. If it stalls, Rail 1 keeps the promise anyway.

Lever 4 — Louisville’s voice at the PSC and in Frankfort

Metro Government can — and under my administration will — intervene as a party in every PSC case that touches data-center costs: the Mill Creek 6 construction reviews, the large-load tariff terms (today: 15-year contracts, 80% minimum payment — good, not good enough (Kentucky Lantern)), and the next rate case. And Louisville’s mayor will lead the fight to pass what Frankfort stripped from SB 197: statewide data-center ratepayer protection, including a dedicated rate class so data-center generation costs never land in the residential rate base (DCD).

Lever 5 — The franchise relationship

LG&E operates in Louisville’s rights-of-way under franchise. Franchise terms are periodically renegotiated — and data-center-era grid fairness, transparency on large-load contracts, and cooperation on the bill-credit rider belong on that table.

Camp Ground Road: the proof point — starting now

The Camp Ground Road campus is lawfully approved, and I won’t pretend a mayor can tear up a lawful approval. But approval was the beginning of that project’s relationship with this city, not the end. Five more buildings beyond Phase 1 still need permits, utility coordination, water, and incentive decisions — and every one of those touchpoints is leverage. As Mayor, I will put a Host Community Benefit Agreement on the table with the Camp Ground Road operators on day one — a citywide agreement: every Louisville resident eligible, with the deepest relief starting in West and Southwest Louisville, the neighborhoods closest to the campus, and rippling out across the city from there. The first data center in Kentucky’s biggest city should be the first to sign the Power Promise. That’s the flagship, and we’ll treat it like one. Every project after it starts under the new rules from day one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will this raise my taxes or touch the city budget?
No. The Power Promise draws $0 from the Metro budget — same $1.2B budget, no new taxes. It’s funded entirely by data-center operators, and it only activates when a data center actually plugs in.

Why do the households nearest a data center get the most?
Because they carry the most. The siting, the construction, the noise, the water draw, and the grid strain land on the host neighborhood first — long before anyone else feels a thing. Impact-weighted relief is what fairness looks like when the fund is finite: everyone in Louisville is eligible, the deepest benefits start at the fence line, and the tiers ripple outward as the fund grows with each new facility. Meanwhile, for every ratepayer everywhere in the city, PSC intervention and the fight for state law is how we protect the rates themselves. Both matter; they’re different tools.

Can this really cover every household’s bill in Louisville?
No — and we won’t pretend it can. Covering every residential electric bill in Jefferson County would take roughly $451 million a year — about $540 million for all ~395,000 LG&E residential customers across Louisville and 16 surrounding counties (per the PSC-approved $113.90/mo average bill; KY PSC Case No. 2025-00114, final electric order, Feb. 16, 2026, pp. 173 & 177). No honest per-project contribution gets there. Here’s the honest deal: every resident is eligible, the deepest relief starts nearest each facility, the resident-led board publishes the tiers, and the fund reaches further every year as new data centers plug in. Eleven are already likely headed for LG&E territory. The more they build, the further the relief reaches.

Won’t this scare data centers away from Louisville?
Then why are there 29 in LG&E/KU’s pipeline while counties across Kentucky debate moratoriums? Data centers site on power availability, fiber, water, land, and tax treatment — Kentucky just handed them up to 50 years of sales-tax exemption, and Louisville has the land and the grid. Our opening ask — $25,000 per megawatt, about $10M a year from a campus like Camp Ground Road — is roughly 5% of one campus’s annual power spend: a rounding error against a multi-billion-dollar build, in exchange for the thing money can’t easily buy: a community that says yes. The alternative isn’t “free”; it’s the growing list of cities and Kentucky counties slamming the door entirely (Kentucky Lantern).

Why no size threshold? Isn’t a small data center different from a 402 MW campus?
It is — and the payment scales with the power draw, so a small facility pays a small share and a giant campus pays a giant one. What we won’t do is draw a line that invites every developer to build just under it. No size loophole: if it plugs in here, it pays in here.

Can the city even do this? Cities can’t regulate electricity rates.
Correct on the premise — and this plan doesn’t set a rate. The city uses its actual powers: zoning, permitting, incentives, contracts, and PSC intervention. The bill-credit rail runs through the PSC exactly as the law requires. New York’s regulator already administers developer-funded host-community bill credits; there is nothing exotic about a credit line on a utility bill.

Don’t permit conditions like this get struck down in court?
Which is why the backbone is a negotiated agreement tied to discretionary incentives, not a unilateral fee — the structure used in community benefits agreements nationwide. A company is always free to build without local incentives and without expedited treatment; none has ever wanted to. And the utility-impact review standard is grounded in a documented impact — a 402 MW facility’s effect on the grid is not speculative — the same way we review traffic from a stadium.

Doesn’t the PSC’s new large-load tariff already protect ratepayers?
It helps — 15-year terms and 80% minimum payments are real protections against stranded-asset risk. But utilities grade their own homework here, the protections are utility policy rather than law (Kentucky Lantern), and none of it delivers a single dollar back to the family paying the bill. Preventing harm is the floor. Sharing benefit is the promise.

Won’t the data centers just pass the cost back through LG&E?
No. The HCEA is a contract with the operator, outside the utility’s rate base. Money paid under a private agreement is not a utility cost of service and cannot lawfully be recovered from other ratepayers. That’s precisely why it’s structured this way instead of as a utility surcharge.

What if the operator stops paying?
The HCEA is a recorded covenant with escrowed advance payments, a letter of credit or bond, and stipulated remedies — including suspension of local incentive benefits and permit enforcement. Lancaster’s agreement collected installments before construction. Ours will too.

What if the data centers never come?
Fair question — the PSC itself conditioned the new gas plants on demand actually materializing (Kentucky Lantern). That’s the beauty of this policy: it costs Louisville nothing if no one builds. It only activates when a data center actually plugs in. There is no scenario where residents pay and get nothing — the current trajectory is the only plan with that flaw.

The Promise, in Plain Words

Right now, on Camp Ground Road, they’re building a computer warehouse that will use as much electricity as two hundred thousand Kentucky homes — and your electric bill just went up. Frankfort gave the data centers fifty years of tax breaks, then stripped the ratepayer protections out of the bill on the last day of the session. I think Louisville families deserve a better deal than that, and as your Mayor I’m going to get it.

It’s called the Louisville Power Promise, and it’s simple: every data center that plugs into our grid, uses our water, and takes our tax breaks — big or small, no exceptions — signs a binding agreement to give back, starting with the neighborhood it lands in and rippling out across Louisville. Every resident of this city is eligible, and you pick your benefit: free solar on your roof, or credits on your electric bill — up to full coverage for the families living closest. The fund reaches as far as it reaches — honestly counted, openly run — and it grows with every new data center that plugs in. Not one cent from the city budget. Not one cent from small businesses. Paid for by the richest companies on Earth, who can afford five percent of their power bill to keep the lights affordable for the people who were here first.

A mayor that listens. A government that responds. And a power bill that finally goes down instead of up.

— Dave Biggers

All figures cited to their sources inline. Estimates marked “illustrative” use stated assumptions: 402 MW at ~85% load factor ≈ 3.0M MWh/yr; average Kentucky home ≈ 13.5 MWh/yr (EIA); average LG&E residential bill $113.90/mo per KY PSC Case No. 2025-00114 (final electric order, Feb. 16, 2026 — rates locked until Aug. 1, 2028); ~$65/MWh all-in industrial power cost. The $25,000/MW/year figure is the city’s stated opening position for negotiation. Final contribution levels and program tiers are set in each negotiated agreement and published in full.