A new bill has been proposed in North Carolina that would prevent data centers in the state from receiving state and local tax incentives, require new large-load facilities to cover the full cost of the energy and water infrastructure required to serve them, and mandate state oversight through pre-construction disclosures.

Proposed by Representative Lindsey Prather, a Democrat from Buncombe County, the "Ratepayer and Resource Protection Act” is the latest to be proposed in a US state seeking to ensure data centers cover the costs required to hook them up to the grid.

The bill would target data centers with a projected peak energy demand of 40MW or more, and with a projected annual water consumption of more than one billion liters. In addition, the bill would require data centers to deploy on-site “clean energy generation capacity” to offset at least 25 percent of their peak electricity demand. Finally, the bill would require all data center operators within the state to file an annual report detailing the amount of electricity consumed by the data center, the amount of water used, and data covering the efficacy of the facility's cooling systems.

The bill also stipulated that the state commission “may increase the minimum percentage of on-site clean generation capacity that a large data center must maintain relative to its projected peak demand upon finding that additional on-site clean generation is necessary to maintain the reliability of the electric grid and protect other customers from rate increases and is otherwise consistent with the public interest.”

The bill is currently in the early stages of the legislative process, having been formally filed on April 27, 2026. Given that the bill was sponsored by Democratic lawmakers, who are a minority in the House, it seems likely the legislation will face opposition and likely be amended if it is to be passed.

The bill is the latest to be proposed within a US state legislature that seeks to enforce new utility rate structures on large data centers, in an attempt to prevent cost shifting onto regular ratepayers.

Ohio was one of the first states to pass legislation to this effect, with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) approving a new rate class in July. It requires new data center customers in Ohio to pay for a portion of their energy requests, even if they use less, to cover the cost of the infrastructure required to bring electricity to those facilities.

Following this, in September, Virginia’s main utility Dominion Energy proposed a new rate class for data centers, applying to utility customers who consume more than 25MW of energy and have a monthly load factor of more than 75 percent.

In January, Wisconsin joined the party, with the Wisconsin State Assembly passing a bill that would set out several protections for ratepayers.