Data Center Stocks Fell After the Midterms. Factory Power Bills Are the Bigger Story

On Nov. 4 the shares of companies that power the data-center boom fell before anything had changed in how the grid is run or paid for. Vistra, one of Texas's biggest generators, was down about 12% by midmorning. GE Vernova, which builds the turbines new plants need, was down about 10%, and Constellation Energy had fallen as much as 7%.

Analysts quoted by Reuters tied the drop to the map. The Democratic sweep reached Texas and Georgia, two of the country's largest data-center hubs, and Goldman Sachs warned that wins there could put about 45% of planned U.S. data-center capacity at risk. In their reading, investors were pricing a harder road for the build-out.

For manufacturers, the share prices are the smaller story. Factories pay into the same grid, and rules that decide how the cost of serving very large new loads is shared are being written now, mostly by state regulators. In Texas, the one that matters most to existing plants is due by Dec. 31.

What factories already pay

In August 2026 the average American industrial customer paid 9.64 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity, EIA data show. Power that cost a plant $100 in August 2021 cost about $128 this August, and about $107 for every $100 it cost a year earlier. The July 2026 average, 9.77 cents, is the highest in an archive that begins in March 2021.

What $100 of industrial power in August 2021 costs in August 2026: $128. EIA industrial average: 7.54 cents per kilowatt-hour in August 2021, 9.64 cents in August 2026.

Take a plant built for this story, running one megawatt of load at 70% of capacity through the year. It uses about 6.1 million kilowatt-hours. At the August 2026 average that comes to about $591,000 a year, roughly $40,000 more than at the price a year earlier. The EIA average is revenue divided by sales, so it already folds in demand and other charges; a plant's own bill depends on its tariff and its load shape.

Two Texas factories on the build-out

Inside Texas plants the build-out itself divides opinion, though neither view settles who should pay for the wires. In the Dallas Fed's October manufacturing survey, a printing firm wrote: “Data centers spending money on flimsy steel and HVAC systems does not make the economy robust. Rates should come down for those of us that have to support the system in the long term.”¹

A machinery maker answering the same survey saw it differently: “The data center bubble will burst soon, but a viable business model underlies it that will survive, just on a smaller scale. The creative destruction of the free-market system will prevail.”²

Texas: the transmission rule due Dec. 31

Texas wrote its answer into law in 2025. Under Senate Bill 6, the Public Utility Commission adopted interconnection standards on Sept. 18 for new loads of 75 megawatts and up, in Project No. 58481. The rule that matters most to existing factories is a separate one. The same law directed the commission to revisit how transmission costs are allocated in the ERCOT grid, and to adopt any amended rule by Dec. 31.³ Today large customers pay transmission charges based on their demand during the four summer intervals of highest systemwide load, a method known as four coincident peak, or 4CP, and plants that cut load in those intervals pay less. In July the commission published a proposal in Project No. 58000 to replace it with a 12-month method, measured over the 30-minute interval of each month's systemwide peak.⁴ Comments closed Aug. 11. The proposal sets how transmission costs are assigned to the distribution utilities that deliver power and requires their retail recovery to stay aligned with it; how the change reaches a given plant runs through each utility's tariff. For a factory that has organized its summer around four peaks, that docket is the bill.

For a factory that has organized its summer around four peaks, that docket is the bill.

Take a second plant built for this story, one that draws a steady 10 megawatts and cuts to 2 megawatts in each of the four summer peak intervals. Under a tariff that passes 4CP through, its transmission billing demand is about 2 megawatts. If its utility passed the 12-month method through the same way, and the plant still curtailed only in summer, the figure would be about 7.3 megawatts, more than three times as much, unless it learned to curtail every month. That is a change in the billing-demand measure, under those assumptions, not a bill: the dollars depend on the rate applied to it and on how every other customer's share moves at the same time.

Put a plant's billing demand and its utility's rate through the utility demand charge calculator, then test what curtailing in more months would be worth. Size a peak-demand charge

Georgia: contracts for the largest loads

Georgia took a different route. In January 2025 the Public Service Commission approved a Georgia Power rule letting the utility serve new customers above 100 megawatts on terms beyond the standard tariff, including long minimum contracts and upfront payments meant to keep their costs off other customers, and requiring each such contract to be filed with the commission at least 30 days before it is signed.⁵ Georgia Power's base rates are frozen through 2028 under a separate agreement. The first large test was the contract Georgia Power filed on July 15 for an OpenAI data center of 3.2 gigawatts in Effingham County. Commission staff approved it on Aug. 26 after the utility agreed not to recover lost revenue from residential and small business customers if the customer leaves early and to publish semiannual reports on its large-load customers, The Current reported; the contract itself has not been made public.⁶ For an industrial customer in Georgia, the test is whether those terms cover what the new load costs, and the contract filings are where it is run.

What Washington controls

Less than Wednesday's trading implied. Federal levers are slower: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's rules for transmission and for connecting very large loads, permitting, and the tax credits that shape what gets built. Any federal bill to slow data-center construction would still need the president's signature, a point analysts made as the shares won back part of their losses during the day.

Rate cases and rule makings can show what particular projects cost and who is asked to pay. They will not settle how much of the 28% rise in industrial power since 2021 comes from data-center load rather than fuel, weather or aging equipment, and no national series answers that either.

The shares that fell on Nov. 4 will trade on every rumor out of Washington next year. For a factory, the dates that matter are closer to home. In Texas, the adopted rule is due by Dec. 31, and within 30 days of adoption each transmission utility must file a tariff update to apply it, the filings where an industrial customer, directly or through an industrial energy group, can intervene.⁷ In Georgia, each contract for a load above 100 megawatts reaches the commission at least 30 days before it is signed.

Further reading

• Data center stocks slide as Democrats sweep, Reuters via Yahoo Finance, Nov. 4, 2026.
• Project No. 58000, proposal for publication, Public Utility Commission of Texas, July 10, 2026.
• Texas PUC adopts data center interconnection rules, Utility Dive, Sept. 21, 2026.
• Georgia PSC passes rule for data centers' power usage, The Current, Jan. 24, 2025.
• Industrial electricity price, the live series behind this story.