The costs of meeting new energy demand is actually socialized among all of the rate payers on that grid.

And that theory worked fine when individual additions to the grid were small.

And even a large factory can be small compared to one of these big data centers.

Now that we have a single customer class coming in with such immense demands, it's not fair for us to pay the cost of those data centers coming in and raising all of our rates.

So we don't literally pay for the energy that a data center uses.

What we pay for is the impacts to our shared resource that the data center is uniquely causing.

So that's a big challenge.

And then the other side of the energy problem is our climate.

Illinois has set climate targets to attempt to decarbonize our electric sector.

And data centers pose a real challenge to that, but they can also be an opportunity.

If data centers are bringing renewable energy with them, if they build enough renewable energy to meet their demand, not only do they not increase our electricity costs, because they're meeting their own demand, they also build out renewables on our grid.

And that has economic impacts, that builds up a sector, that means we can have more trained workers, more trained companies able to build, that reduces the cost of build for everyone.

So we have a path here where data centers can help us meet climate targets if we have them bring their own new clean energy, which is the key policy in the Power Act, acronym is Bring Your Own Clean Energy, is BYOCE.

And it really, if we get that, we can really reshape our energy in Illinois.