PolitiFact checked Byron Donalds' claim that Florida's SB 484 "ensures that utility rates will not go up due to data centers" and found it does not hold, in a fact-check carried by WLRN. The law requires certain large data centers to bear their "full cost of service," then leaves it to a state energy commission to make that happen. It caps no consumer rate and bans no future increase. Donalds, the Republican frontrunner for governor, welcomes the projects with consumer protections attached and has taken campaign contributions from AI companies. David Jolly, the leading Democrat, wants a moratorium, which several counties have already enacted. Running underneath all of it, Florida Power & Light is seeking close to $10 billion in rate increases across four years.
Full cost of service is a ratemaking concept. It allocates generation, transmission, and distribution among customer classes, and it has no standard treatment for consumptive water at all. In Florida water is administered by five regional water management districts rather than by the Public Service Commission, so a campus running an evaporative tower shifts a cost onto an aquifer that never appears in the rate case where its "full cost" is supposedly being settled. The water-for-power trade is the whole argument, and a statute that prices one side of it and ignores the other has not closed the loop. Federal transparency bills exist because this gap keeps showing up.
Florida's system peak is an air conditioning peak on a summer afternoon, which is the most expensive hour on the system to serve and the hour a cost-of-service study weights hardest. A data center on mechanical chillers puts its own maximum draw at exactly that hour, because chiller load climbs with ambient. A warm-water or dry-cooled design with a high supply temperature flattens that curve and can shift its worst hour away from the system peak entirely. Whoever writes the commission's methodology is therefore deciding, without naming it, whether a campus gets rewarded for a cooling architecture that helps the grid. Nevada is litigating the same allocation question in court, the utility ratepayer pledges are the voluntary version, and Virginia shows where public opinion lands once bills move.
Our position: a coincident-peak allocation method beats a flat energy charge here, and cooling vendors should be filing comments saying so. If Florida's commission allocates on contribution to system peak, a 45C warm-water campus with dry coolers is measurably cheaper to serve than a chilled-water campus of identical IT load, and that difference becomes a line item a developer can take to a board. If it allocates on annual energy, the two are identical on paper and nobody buys the better building. The methodology docket is where this is won, and it will be decided by people who have never specified a CDU.