Florida PSC Tells Duke Its Data-Center Tariff Is on "Shaky Ground" in First Test of SB 484 Cost-Shift Law

The Florida Public Service Commission held an evidentiary hearing on August 25-26, 2026 on Duke Energy Florida’s petition for a large-load customer framework — the first test of SB 484, the Florida statute requiring public utilities to “reasonably ensure that each large load customer bears its own full cost of service,” including connection, operations, maintenance, incremental transmission, incremental generation, and infrastructure costs. Duke’s filing proposed contractual protections rather than prices: a minimum twenty-year contract term, minimum monthly bill provisions, and mandatory early-termination fees. What it conspicuously did not do was set new rates for large-load customers such as data centers. A commissioner told the company it appeared to be on “real shaky ground” on compliance with the new law. Walt Trierweiler, Florida’s statutorily authorized consumer advocate for public-utility customers, testified that the proposal “doesn’t attempt to comply with the most basic provisions of SB 484” and fails to disclose projected data-center costs to the commission or to customers. No vote was taken; a written order follows post-hearing briefs.

The gap between the statute’s language and Duke’s filing is the substance here. SB 484 imposes a cost-causation obligation — the large load pays for what the large load requires — and Duke answered with term commitments and exit penalties, which protect the utility against a data center walking away mid-buildout but do not by themselves allocate the incremental cost of serving it. Twenty-year contracts and termination fees are stranded-asset insurance. They are not a rate. Without disclosed cost projections, neither the commission nor ratepayers can determine whether the residual falls on the large load or on everyone else, which is the precise question the law was written to settle.

The contrast with Oregon is instructive, because Oregon shows what the completed version looks like. The Oregon PUC approved PGE’s large-load rate class in July, raising data-center rates 29.7 percent while cutting residential, commercial, and other industrial rates (2026-07-07–oregon-puc-approves-pge-large-load-rate-class-29-percent-data-center-increase) — a statutory class boundary under the POWER Act, then an actual number on an actual bill (2026-05-07–oregon-puc-order-26-154-schedule-96-datacenter-tariff). Florida has the first half and is still contesting the second. The same fight is live in Michigan (2026-08-10–nessel-earthjustice-appeal-mpsc-dte-stargate-contracts-474m-rate-case), Wisconsin (2026-06-19–oracle-sues-wisconsin-psc-data-center-ratepayer-cost-shift), Louisiana, where the PSC let Meta withhold its Hyperion demand data (2026-08-12–louisiana-psc-meta-hyperion-hides-electricity-demand-data), and Pennsylvania (2026-03-13–ppl-electric-pa-puc-275m-rate-hike-large-load-data-center-tariff). Duke is separately before North Carolina regulators on data-center-driven permits (2026-06-26–nc-deq-opens-comment-amazon-10b-datacenter-duke-air-permits-richmond). The pattern across states is that passing a cost-shift statute is the easy half; the order that puts a price on the load is where the outcome is actually decided, and Florida’s is not yet written.