Data centers have become one of the most contentious issues in American politics. The opposition unites left and right, and it has turned a technical infrastructure question into open warfare at local planning meetings, in county commissions, and now on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Florida is no exception. Opponents have already killed Project Tango in Palm Beach County and paused one in DeSoto County. A growing list of counties have passed restrictions of their own, and the state has followed suit. Given the visible public hostility toward data centers, it’s hardly surprising that a new poll from The James Madison Institute finds Floridians opposing the state’s efforts to attract data center investment, 49 percent to 40 percent.
That opposition is a mistake. Data centers bring jobs, tax revenue, and, at a moment when Beijing is racing to out-build America in AI infrastructure, a national security interest in keeping that capacity on American soil rather than ceding it to whichever country is willing to build it first.
But dig into the polling, and the public’s objection isn’t the one you hear at the podium. Asked what would make them less likely to support a data center in their area, Floridians didn’t reach for the grievances that dominate the debate. Electricity costs topped the list at 60 percent, well above the number who cited water usage (44 percent), and well ahead of noise or falling property values (20 percent and 15 percent, respectively).
Floridians who responded to the poll, in other words, aren’t objecting to data centers. They are objecting to the perception that data centers will see them paying more. A single hyperscaler can require power generation and transmission infrastructure on the scale of a small city. Floridians have concluded that the cost of building it gets folded into the rate every customer pays, including the ones who will never see a dime of the jobs or tax revenue a data center brings to the state. Their assumption is not without merit; after all, electricity prices are set by a process of socialized cost whereby when “utilities spend money on infrastructure (e.g., generation facilities, transmission lines, transformers), this cost is spread across all ratepayers.”
Some policymakers have noticed this trend and sought to respond. Earlier this year, the White House brokered the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, under which Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI agreed to cover the generation and transmission costs their own data centers create, rather than passing them to the neighbors. Florida’s major utilities — TECO, NextEra Energy (parent of Florida Power & Light), and Duke Energy — have signed on as well.
What most Floridians don’t know is that the Legislature has already done the more durable version of what the pledge only promises. This spring, lawmakers passed SB 484, and while the bill wasn’t perfect – its water permitting, land use provisions, and prohibitions on NDAs drew fair criticism – its core ratepayer protection went further than Washington’s promise by enacting protections into law. SB 484 requires every public utility to file a Public Service Commission tariff ensuring large load customers bear their own full cost of service, covering connection costs, incremental transmission, incremental generation, and operations and maintenance. The law explicitly bars utilities from shifting that risk to the general body of ratepayers. Utilities must file compliant tariffs with the commission by October 1. Florida didn’t just match the federal pledge. It wrote a stronger version into law months before the companies that signed the pledge had any reason to.
That’s what makes the polling numbers concerning. Floridians are still opposed 49 to 40 in our polling, and still naming electricity costs as their top objection, months after the Legislature passed a statute that should have appeased their concern. The problem isn’t that lawmakers haven’t recognized the public’s concern; it’s that almost nobody outside the Capitol knows it has. Unfortunately, a law that nobody has heard of does nothing to rebuild trust.
To restore public confidence that the state has acted decisively to protect ratepayers, those in Tallahassee need to start saying out loud, repeatedly, and in plain English that Florida already requires data centers to pay their own way. Right now the state has done the hard part and gotten none of the credit, while the public keeps voting no out of a fear the law has already addressed.
The alternative is a Legislature that solved the problem and never told anyone, and a public that keeps opposing a data center policy that already answers the objection it’s raising.
Dr. Edward Longe is the director of the Center for Technology and Innovation and the director of national strategy at The James Madison Institute in Tallahassee.
