Scope
North Carolina Senate Bill 730 (2025-2026 Session, "Ratepayer Protection Act"), in the fifth edition engrossed by the House on 3 June 2026, is titled an act to establish requirements for siting and operation of data centers and to change state energy and utilities policy. Its Part I would require a local government, before approving a rezoning, special or conditional use permit or building permit for a new data center, to require a sound site assessment and an attestation of closed-loop or liquid cooling; direct the Department of Environmental Quality to adopt water use standards for data centers that would not permit evaporative cooling; restrict adversarial foreign government ownership of data centers; require each data center to take electric service under a contract with terms designed to protect other retail and wholesale customers from the costs of serving it; bar condemnation to acquire land for a data center; and prohibit local economic development incentives for siting a data center. The bill has not been enacted; the House version awaits Senate concurrence.
- Geographic scope
- North Carolina
- Jurisdiction
- State
- Authority type
- Legislature
- Issuing authority
- North Carolina General Assembly
Dates
- Adopted
- No adoption day is recorded
- Effective
- Not enacted
- Scheduled expiration
- None scheduled
- Ended
- Not recorded as ended
- Completion condition
- None stated
- Source document
- The source page states no document date
- Last checked
- 1 October 2026 (earlier than tracker date 5 October 2026; not an automatic status change)
Summary
North Carolina Senate Bill 730, the "Ratepayer Protection Act", passed the Senate in May 2025 (no data center provision was found in its first edition). The House rewrote it and passed a fifth edition on 3 June 2026 that contains requirements for data centers: local site assessments for noise, a cooling-system attestation, state water use standards that would not allow evaporative cooling, limits on adversarial foreign ownership, electric service contracts designed to keep the costs of serving a data center off other customers, no condemnation for data center land and no local economic development incentives for data centers. The official bill page shows the Senate received the House version for concurrence and referred it to its Rules committee on 8 June 2026. It is a pending proposal, not law.
What this does not establish
- The status is the last action shown on the official bill page on 23 September 2026 (referral to the Senate Committee on Rules and Operations on 8 June 2026); the bill has not been enacted and could still be acted on during the 2025-2026 biennium.
- Parts II and III of the fifth edition (energy-policy and Utilities Commission provisions, including a study of large load customer rate impacts) are outside this record except as noted; the large-load study text does not itself name data centers.
- Only the fifth edition was read; earlier editions differ.
Unresolved questions
- Whether the Senate will concur, or the bill will go to conference, before the biennium ends.
Relationships
Supersession means a later instrument replaces the earlier legal effect. Repeal links identify the repeal instrument and the measure it ends. A later implementation or related letter is not treated as a replacement unless the record says so.
- No related action is recorded.
Sources
https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookup/2025/S730