H.R. 7066: SHIELD Act

The SHIELD Act — short for the “Stopping Hikes In Electricity from Large Load Demands Act” — would add new standards to the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. Its core rule is that a “large load facility” must be treated as its own class of electric consumers, and electric utilities must fully recover all costs of grid upgrades from that class. The bill is very specific about scope: it covers generation, transmission, and distribution upgrades, including local facilities, and it even says the large-load class must cover costs if a facility later shuts down or uses less electricity than projected when the upgrade was built.

The bill defines a large load facility as a facility, or aggregation of facilities at a single site, with peak demand exceeding 75 megawatts. It also draws a line around what does not count: existing facilities are exempt if their increased demand is predominantly caused by electrification or by measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That means the bill is aimed more at entirely new or newly intensified very large loads than at existing sites switching equipment to cleaner technologies.

The measure also tries to shape how utilities handle service requests from these large customers. Utilities would have to prioritize requests from large load facilities that agree to use demand reduction features such as energy efficiency or conservation measures, onsite energy storage, or demand response and load flexibility technologies. They would also have to prioritize facilities that meet 100% of their demand with zero-emission electric energy generated onsite or bought through a power purchase agreement within the same balancing authority. The bill defines zero-emission electric energy broadly as electricity generated without greenhouse gas emissions, including solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, fission, or fusion.

The timetable is quick. State regulatory authorities and nonregulated utilities must start considering these new standards, or set a hearing date, no later than 1 year after enactment, and they must finish and make a determination no later than 2 years after enactment. Then, within 30 days after making that determination, they must send a report to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources explaining both the process they used and why they decided as they did. There is an off-ramp for states that already acted before enactment: the requirement does not apply if a state already implemented a comparable standard, already held a proceeding on one, or if the state legislature voted on implementation within the 3-year period ending on the date of enactment.