Pennsylvania is confronting a decision about who pays for data center growth, at a moment when that growth is reshaping the country's electricity system. This study models a Data Center Cost Allocation Package (“Package”), comprising House Bill 1834 and Executive Order 2026-05. Combined, these policies seek to prohibit utilities from recovering any cost caused by data center load from other customers, including capacity, energy, transmission, and distribution costs, and levy an annual charge on large data centers directed to low-income energy assistance. The alternative is business-as-usual, under which the full cost of serving new data center load is recovered through rates paid by all customers. Measured against that trajectory, the Package lowers household energy costs by $9.9 billion cumulatively from 2027 through 2040, which equals $1,820 for the average Pennsylvania household.

Pennsylvania's announced data center pipeline is among the largest in the country, and the system costs of serving it reach approximately $1.9 billion per year by 2040. This study reports that cost in two parts. Energy cost allocation － the fuel and operating cost of generating additional electricity － drives 56% of the Package’s household benefit. Capacity cost allocation, which is the fixed cost of power plants kept in service or built, constitutes 26% of the Package’s household benefit. The remaining 18% arrives as direct bill assistance funded by a levy on data centers, concentrated among the low-income households that receive it.

These results were produced with GenX, an open-source electricity system capacity expansion model developed at MIT and Princeton University, configured with Rhodium Group data center load projections. Household impacts are calculated with Greenline's PA-AFFORD model, which traces both direct impacts and the indirect pass-through of business energy costs to household budgets.