Oregon PUC Unanimously Approves PGE Large-Load Rates: Data Centers Up 29.7%, All Other Classes Down

The Oregon Public Utility Commission voted unanimously on July 7, 2026 to approve Portland General Electric’s updated rates under docket UM 2377, raising rates for the utility’s data-center customers by an average of 29.7 percent while lowering them for every other customer class: residential down 1.3 percent, commercial down 2.1 percent, and other industrial down 1.4 percent. The changes took effect July 8 across roughly 963,000 customers in PGE’s territory; a typical residential customer using 780 kilowatt-hours saves about $1.91 a month. The increase falls on a new rate class created under House Bill 3546 (2025), the POWER Act, covering loads over 20 megawatts — a threshold that in practice means data centers and crypto mining and almost nothing else. PGE filed the implementing rates on June 3 with supplemental filings June 30 and July 2; PUC staff verified them against the Commission’s earlier large-load order before the vote.

The isolation is the point, and it is what distinguishes this from an ordinary industrial rate case. The order does not raise rates on large users generally — other industrial customers got a cut alongside households and small businesses. It carves data centers out of the industrial class they used to sit inside and prices them separately, so that the grid-expansion costs their load creates land on the load that created them rather than being socialized across the base. Commission Chair Letha Tawney framed it as getting “ahead of a bigger issue, enabling responsible data centers to pay their own way, and protecting customers from higher costs in the future.” That design — a statutorily authorized class boundary drawn around a single category of demand, producing a measurable rate cut for everyone outside it — is why other states are likely to copy it: it converts an abstract cost-shift argument into a number on a residential bill.

This resolves the sequence the timeline had left open. The Commission’s Schedule 96 framework order arrived May 7 (2026-05-07–oregon-puc-order-26-154-schedule-96-datacenter-tariff), the Commission then delayed the implementing rate ruling to July (2026-06-10–oregon-puc-delays-pge-data-center-large-load-rate-ruling), and this July 7 vote is where the delayed decision actually landed — the framework set the structure, this set the rates. It gives the cost-shift fight a completed regulatory model to point at, in contrast to the states where the question is still contested: Michigan, where AG Dana Nessel is appealing the MPSC’s expedited approval of DTE’s Stargate contracts alongside a $474 million rate case (2026-08-10–nessel-earthjustice-appeal-mpsc-dte-stargate-contracts-474m-rate-case); Wisconsin, where Oracle sued the PSC over a rule designed to keep data-center risk off ratepayers before dropping the suit (2026-06-19–oracle-sues-wisconsin-psc-data-center-ratepayer-cost-shift); Louisiana, where the PSC let Meta withhold its Hyperion electricity-demand data (2026-08-12–louisiana-psc-meta-hyperion-hides-electricity-demand-data); and Texas, where Abbott directed the PUCT and ERCOT toward data-center infrastructure cost reform (2026-06-10–abbott-directive-puct-ercot-data-center-infrastructure-costs). Pennsylvania’s PPL Electric large-load tariff is the nearest structural cousin (2026-03-13–ppl-electric-pa-puc-275m-rate-hike-large-load-data-center-tariff). Downstream, Clackamas County’s data-center moratorium process continues on the land-use side of the same pressure.