On July 24, the Public Service Company of Oklahoma announced its support for the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a White House initiative under which participating companies commit to paying for the generation their operations require, funding the electric infrastructure upgrades they trigger, and entering long-term arrangements that keep them responsible for the cost of serving their own facilities. OG&E signed as well.

That is the right principle, stated in the right order. It is also not, by itself, enforceable against anybody.

The enforceable version is a tariff, and PSO filed one — its proposed data center and large load tariff — with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission in June. It is pending. Everything that determines whether the principle survives contact with a negotiation lives inside that filing: the length of the contract, the minimum the customer must take and pay for whether or not it uses the power, who funds interconnection and the transmission upgrades that follow, what security the utility holds if the facility never ramps or leaves early, and how any of it is enforced when the counterparty is a company with better lawyers than the average ratepayer.

The statute behind the filing is House Bill 2992, the Data Center Consumer Ratepayer Protection Act of 2026, authored by Rep. Brad Boles, R-Marlow, and Sen. Grant Green, R-Wellston. Governor Stitt signed it on May 13 and it took effect July 1. It applies to customers drawing 75 megawatts or more, requires utilities to file separate terms for them, and requires a qualifying project to notify the Corporation Commission, the county commissioners, and abutting landowners within 60 days of buying the land.

"As Oklahoma continues to grow and attract this new industry, we have to make sure the cost of that growth does not fall on hardworking families and small businesses," Boles said when the bill was signed. Green's stated concern was narrower and more rural: data centers taking thousands of acres of prime farmland, and the absence of any requirement that neighbors be told.

PSO's regulatory director, Amy Brown, described the intended effect in a July interview: large industrial customers "will be taking a larger slice of that pie," reducing "the slice paid for by the residential customers."

One fact belongs in the open, stated as a fact and not an allegation. Boles, who wrote the statute, won the Republican nomination in June for the Corporation Commission seat on the November ballot. If he wins in November, the legislator who authored the act will be one of three commissioners ruling on the tariffs that implement it. There is nothing improper in that. It does mean voters have an unusually direct way to ask a candidate what his own law was supposed to accomplish, and to check the answer against the filing.