A BILL ON THE HOUSE FLOOR NEXT WEEK WOULD MAKE BIG POWER USERS PAY FOR THEIR OWN GRID UPGRADES AND DEFINES THEM AS DATA CENTERS DRAWING 100 MEGAWATTS — RIOT'S ROCKDALE DRAWS 700 — NO FLOOR AMENDMENTS ARE ALLOWED

The House takes up the Ratepayer Protection Act the week of September 14. It would have state regulators consider a federal standard letting utilities charge their largest customers the cost of the grid upgrades needed to serve them. Build the substation, bill the customer who needed it.

Here is who that customer is, in the bill's own words. A large-load customer is a nonresidential electricity consumer that operates a data center with a peak demand for electricity of at least 100 megawatts at a single facility.

Riot's Rockdale site in Texas has 700 megawatts of developed capacity. Seven times the line. Riot's own page describes what happens there as bitcoin mining and data center operations, and the company is not being loose with the phrase. In its second-quarter results on August 10 it reported leasing 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity at Rockdale to an AI lab, on a contract it values at $9.1 billion over the initial term, with another 50 megawatts contracted to AMD.

Neither the bill nor the CBO estimate mentions bitcoin or mining once. It does not have to. The largest mining site in the country is being converted into a data center by its owner, on purpose, at a price, and the word was already there before the bill needed it.

The procedure is the part to watch. This is going to the floor under suspension of the rules, and the Congressional Budget Office spells out what that means: debate is limited, all floor amendments are prohibited, and passage takes two thirds. So the definition that arrives is the definition that passes. Nobody gets to stand up next week and ask what a data center is.

None of which makes this a bad bill. The argument for it is straightforward: if a single site needs a new substation, the people who did not ask for it should not find it on their bill. A taxpayer group is opposing it for the opposite reason, that it singles out one class of customer, and both of those are honest positions.

Worth knowing which side of a line you are on before the vote rather than after. And notice what the $9.1 billion is actually for: the same power, the same land, the same substations, rented to somebody whose machines do arithmetic nobody can verify. The hash rate was the tenant that published its own electricity bill block by block, which is exactly what makes it the easiest one to write a threshold around.