Oregon PGE / 100% distribution + 90% take-or-pay + 30-yr term / effective June 10

Plain-English framing. A 'rate class' is the legal bucket a utility puts a customer into to decide what tariff applies — residential, small commercial, large industrial. Oregon just carved out a new bucket exclusively for data-center-scale loads, ring-fenced it from everyone else, and rebalanced the rate case so the cost burden flows almost entirely to that bucket. Four design choices worth flagging separately because each is portable into other states' next dockets. (1) 90% take-or-pay. The data center pays for 90% of contracted capacity whether or not it uses it. That removes the developer's ability to over-contract early ('reserve 500 MW now, scale into it later') because over-contracting becomes immediately expensive — a 200 MW campus that only ramps to 100 MW still pays for 180. The economic-rational response is to contract for less capacity and ramp through smaller increments. (2) 100% distribution-cost coverage. Standard for substation work; the novel piece is that Oregon is signaling no socialization at all of system upgrades — even at the distribution level. This is more aggressive than Wisconsin's 100% generation cost recovery, because Wisconsin still left distribution costs to the standard allocation. (3) Contract length scales with load. 10 years at 20 MW, 30 years at 220 MW. The 30-year term is the longest in any tariff in the U.S. and meaningfully constrains a developer's ability to unwind or move a site. For PE-financed deals, 30-year contracts also pull cash flows out far enough that the IRR math starts looking like utility infrastructure rather than data-center growth equity. (4) Emissions-linked interconnection. Specifics are still being implemented through PGE's tariff filing, but the principle is that interconnection terms (queue position, available capacity) depend on the on-site emissions profile of the load. A diesel-backup-heavy campus and a clean-baseload-paired campus get different treatment. Sources: Utility Dive 'Oregon PUC approves PGE's large-load tariff framework for data centers' (effective June 10); KPTV 'PGE requests large rate increase for Oregon data centers' (June 4); KGW 'PGE asks to raise rates on data centers this year — and drop them for everyone else'; Oregon PUC 'Large Customer Demand' page; Data Center Dynamics 'Portland General Electric moves to implement Oregon's new data center rate class'.

Primary source · Utility Dive / KPTV / KGW / Oregon PUC ↗