The package of laws requires data center operators to shoulder more of the costs tied to their operations, rather than passing them along to everyday ratepayers. Three of the bills redirect electric infrastructure expenses away from residential customers and onto the companies building and running these facilities. Another three require data center operators to disclose how much water and other resources their operations consume. The seventh law strips data centers of automatic environmental review exemptions, though it does offer a faster approval path for projects that meet the state’s water and energy conservation benchmarks.

In a statement announcing the signings, Newsom drew a sharp contrast between California’s approach and that of the Trump administration, which has largely encouraged unchecked data center expansion nationwide.

“We know that we don’t have to sell out Californians or sacrifice our well-being to innovate and succeed,” Newsom said. “California has proven that time and time again. With these laws, we are ensuring that Californians remain in the driver’s seat — and that those profiting from data centers aren’t doing so at our expense.”

President Trump, for his part, has been an outspoken champion of rapid data center growth, calling the sector the “oil of the next 20, 25 years” during remarks last week at the All-In Summit, a business leaders’ conference.

The move represents a considerable reversal for Newsom, who last year vetoed a bill that would have required water usage disclosures, citing worries that added regulation might slow the growth of artificial intelligence. At that time, he approved only a single, watered-down measure calling for environmental studies.

Lawmakers and environmental groups say the change in course reflects a surge of public opposition to data center construction that grew too loud to ignore — even as tech companies poured money into lobbying efforts to blunt the legislation.

“When you’re looking down the barrel of public outcry that says we don’t want [data centers] at all, and you’ve got localities that are saying they’re going to ban them, then you know the atmosphere has changed,” said Assemblymember Diane Papan, a San Mateo Democrat who authored two of the bills Newsom signed Monday.

California isn’t alone in this reconsideration. Other state legislatures, along with Congress, are weighing similar restrictions. A Gallup poll from May found that seven in 10 Americans oppose having data centers built in their own communities, while a July survey from the Public Policy Institute of California found comparable resistance among state residents. Across the country, hundreds of cities — including Monterey Park locally and Pittsburg in the Bay Area — have either banned data centers outright or reversed prior approvals after residents pushed back.

Arnab Pal, executive director of the clean-energy nonprofit Deploy Action, called the new laws a meaningful step but said there’s more work ahead to ensure data centers genuinely benefit Californians through grid improvements and clean energy investment.

“I don’t think these bills are the end of this fight; I think we’re gonna have to do a lot of implementation on the back end, and as other states roll out their policies next year, I think California is going to look back and be like, ‘maybe we should have done more,'” Pal said. “I’m interested to see what we do next year on this.”

Industry groups, meanwhile, warn the new rules could drive data center development out of state. The Data Center Coalition — whose members include Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — points to the sector’s economic footprint in California, which it says supported 665,500 jobs, generated more than $159 billion in economic activity, and produced $14.1 billion in combined federal, state and local tax revenue in 2024.

Khara Boender, the coalition’s director of government affairs for the western U.S., said the industry supports responsible growth but cautioned that policymakers need to strike a balance.

“The data center industry shares the goal of ensuring growth of this critical infrastructure is responsible and well managed,” Boender said, adding that more needs to be done “to promote responsible data center growth while maintaining California as a key, competitive market in the global economy.”

The bills Newsom signed include Senate Bill 1168, Senate Bill 886 and Assembly Bill 2383, all aimed at shifting electric infrastructure costs from residential ratepayers to data center operators; Assembly Bills 2469, 1577 and 2619, which require disclosure or estimation of water and other resource usage; and Senate Bill 887, which eliminates blanket environmental review exemptions for data centers while providing expedited approval for projects meeting state conservation standards.

Original source: CalMatters

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The agency’s bimonthly report, based on metrics for western Riverside County and the cities of Ontario and San Bernardino, indicated that the Inland Empire’s Consumer Price Index was up exactly 1 percent.

BLS officials said Wednesday the principal driver behind the increase was retail gasoline prices, which jumped 11.6 percent between the beginning of April and the end of May. That in turn pushed the energy component of the CPI up 8.6 percent for the entire two-month period.

Prices went stratospheric as a result of the Mideast war.

Other contributors to the index’s upward trajectory were food prices and apparel costs, which advanced 1.5 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively.

Conversely, shelter costs — or property rents — trended marginally downward throughout the region in April and May, slipping 0.1 percent, and costs in the household furnishings category fell by 2.3 percent, according to the BLS.

Nationwide, the overall CPI registered a .5 percent increase for the month of May. The impetus, again, was energy costs. For the one-year period ending May 31, the national CPI was 4.2 percent.

In the Inland Empire, the year-over-year CPI was 3.4 percent, measuring a host of economic inputs from May 2025 to May 2026, data showed.

The most notable upward pressures in the annualized CPI were reflected in the energy and healthcare components of the regional index, moving up 20.9 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

The current rate of inflation reflects the price trajectory impacting most sectors of the economy.

Energy price shocks that began at the end of February are directly connected to commodities markets and oil trading, which turned bullish immediately after the joint Israel-U.S. military operations against Iran, beginning with a missile attack on a girls’ school, where almost 200 Iranians were killed. The nation’s supreme leader and multiple members of his family were also assassinated. Hostilities abated amid peace overtures in April and May but have recently resumed with intensity.

Iran declared a quasi closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where tankers carrying nearly one-fifth of the world’s energy supplies must pass. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has characterized the narrow Persian Gulf sea lane as a “chokepoint.”

Accelerating consumer price hikes have also been blamed on loose monetary policy and excessive federal spending, decaying the dollar’s purchasing power.

The national debt is now $39.2 trillion, according to the congressional Joint Economic Committee’s “Debt Dashboard.” Some projections indicate the debt load will almost double in 10 years or less.

Fortune magazine reported in April that federal payments just to cover interest on the debt total $88 billion a month.

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Satyasai’s Pacific Gas and Electric bill jumped by about $100 compared to the same month last year. Like many of PG&E’s 5.5 million customers, she’s having to rescript her monthly budget around these rising costs. 

“Everyone is getting squeezed,” Satyasai said. 

Propelled in large part by PG&E, which hiked residential electricity rates by 20% for about 16 million Californians in January, the state high electricity prices are second only to Hawaii, which is always an expensive outlier because of the costs of shipping oil to the far-flung archipelago.

A pack of New England states have historically had some of the nation’s highest electricity prices (the federal government doesn’t track rates but rather calculates prices using customer counts, sales and revenue data) due to factors like a shortage in natural gas pipeline capacity plus the region’s reliance on costly fossil fuels to generate electricity. 

But California has joined them in the last ten years, leapfrogging with Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire to periodically hold the title as the most expensive state for electricity usage in the lower 48. (Even though Californians pay a high amount for each unit of electricity, their total bills tend to be lower than other states in the Northeast and South due to the West Coast’s relatively temperate climate.)

East Coast residents are paying higher prices during cold winter months with Californians paying higher electricity prices for a brief period nearly every summer since 2014, likely when people must cool their homes during heatwaves. 

It is unusual for Californians to pay higher prices than the East Coast in the depth of winter. This year alone, typical Northern and Central California households (which use about 500 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month) will pay over $400 more annually on their PG&E bill.  

PG&E currently charges the most for electricity among California’s three investor-owned utilities with an average residential rate of $0.397 per kilowatt hour. The company’s residential electricity rates have risen more dramatically than the other utilities, jumping 128% over the last decade. 

San Diego Gas and Electric’s average residential electricity rate is $0.383 per kilowatt hour and Southern California Edison’s rate is $0.338. 

PG&E has vowed to keep future rate increases between 2% and 4% annually, and said January’s dramatic hike was partly due to the slow pace of state approvals that compressed two years of rate hikes into one. 

PG&E chief executive officer Patti Poppe last week told investors during a quarterly earnings call that the company is taking dramatic steps to increase efficiency and lower costs. In an interview with the Chronicle, Poppe said the focus on lowering operational costs is new for the company and one that she hopes will show up in lower bills in the future. 

“The work we’re doing is really necessary,” Poppe said. 

Robert McCullough, an Oregon-based energy consultant who has studied California’s utility markets, said California’s historically high electricity prices can in part be tied to complicated factors like the state’s deregulation of the energy industry in the 1990s. 

But McCullough blamed January’s sticker shock hitting PG&E customers this year on the company’s deferred maintenance of its aging electric grid.

The company attributes about 85% of January’s rate increase to covering the costs to modernize, upgrade and strengthen its aging electric and natural gas infrastructure at a time when climate change has made the state increasingly vulnerable to storms and wildfires. 

“Pacific Gas and Electric fell behind on its maintenance and even without global warming that would have been a big bill,” McCullough said. 

And PG&E’s rates are set to be eclipsed by San Diego Gas and Electric before the end of 2024. The San Diego utility has temporarily dropped rates to compensate customers after previously  charging too much, according to the Public Advocate’s Office of the California Public Utilities Commission. 

Californians’ utility bills could also be impacted by a controversial proposed monthly fixed charge of about $24. 

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