A single hyperscale data center campus can request more power than an entire utility’s service territory uses today, on a timeline measured in months rather than decades. Elizabeth K. Whitney points to what that does to a consumer-owned utility specifically. A conventional utility treats a giant new customer as growth. A utility that exists to serve its members at cost faces a customer that can be larger than the entire membership it was built for.
“For consumer-owned utilities built around serving members at cost, that changes almost everything about how you plan,” she says. Whitney, Managing Principal at Meguire Whitney, LLC, has spent more than 20 years advising community-focused utilities on federal policy. Her three disciplines share one purpose: each protects the members from being displaced by their own opportunity.
Verify the Load Before Building Around It
The first risk is committing to demand that never materializes. Developers routinely shop the same project across several utilities at once, so the megawatts in an interconnection queue may be counted twice, three times, or more. Whitney makes the developer prove the project is real first. Ask for site control, financial commitments, and phased milestones. A genuine project meets those requests, but a speculative one disappears quickly. A utility that builds generation and transmission for a load that walks away has spent its members’ money on a customer that never existed.
Design Rates for the People Who Actually Own the System
A consumer-owned utility’s customers are its members, homeowners, farmers, small businesses, and local employers. They should benefit from new demand and be shielded from its risk, and neither happens by default. It takes large-load tariffs with real terms, minimum take provisions, collateral requirements, and clear treatment if a project abandons its commitment. Whitney advises getting them approved before the first serious conversation with a developer. Negotiating protections after the community is already excited about the project is far harder than having them in hand. Rate design is where a utility decides, in advance, whether its members capture the upside or absorb the downside.
Tell Your Story in Washington Early
Decisions on permitting, transmission build-out, generation availability, and tax treatment are being made now, and they will shape a utility’s options for the next 20 years. Consumer-owned utilities carry an advantage in those rooms they consistently underuse. Answering to communities rather than shareholders gives them a credibility investor-owned utilities cannot claim, and it is worth spending while the rules are still being written. A utility that stays quiet now will spend two decades inside policies shaped entirely by parties with different interests.
Hyperscaling is a real opportunity, in Whitney’s account, but the reputation these utilities hold in their communities is an asset to be leveraged and protected at once. Approached with diligence, sound rate design, and an active federal voice, these projects become growth the members can feel good about. If approached carelessly, they become a customer that reorders who the utility serves. To learn more, connect with Elizabeth K. Whitney on LinkedIn.
