Our priority is delivering reliable energy to all customers – a critical factor in helping businesses and communities thrive across Missouri. The Powering Missouri Growth Plan is designed to support large new enterprises, including American data centers, while ensuring rates remain just and reasonable for all customers.
Goals of the Powering Missouri Growth Plan
Job Creation
Drive meaningful employment growth – including full-time roles, construction jobs and skilled trades – by making Missouri more attractive for businesses to expand or relocate.
Community Betterment
Generate new revenue streams for essential local services such as schools, fire protection and other public infrastructure.
Fair Cost Allocation
Reasonably ensure large electric load customers pay their fair share of service costs, protecting other customers from unjust or unreasonable charges, in alignment with Missouri Senate Bill 4.
Customer Protections
Our plan includes customer protections to reasonably ensure large customers pay their fair share, with no special discounts or incentives. Strong financial protections are also required with long-term commitments to provide stability. With protections in place, data centers help spread costs more widely and may absorb a significant portion of the total shared cost, reducing the cost for existing customers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Large manufacturers and data centers bring tremendous economic benefits to Missouri. In addition to the permanent and construction jobs, they also drive new revenue to support everything from education to public safety. In addition, American data centers are critical national infrastructure, and experts say our national security interests depend on expansion of U.S. technology faster than it happens in other parts of the world.
Data centers are essential to national security. They are classified as critical national infrastructure because they are the core of the modern digital infrastructure that runs American prosperity. These facilities also power aspects of everyday life that we might take for granted – whether it's the map function on your smart phone or the web-based search where you look for information your family depends on.
Yes. These states recognize the tremendous economic and community benefits of American data centers, as well as the national security aspects.
Missouri is competing with these states for jobs and economic benefits.
We don't want Missouri to get left behind. Missouri is competing with others states for jobs and economic benefits. American data centers deliver benefits, including job creation and community betterment. The Powering Missouri Growth Plan is also designed to support other large businesses, including onshoring manufacturing.
Large customers must directly pay for all the equipment and costs for constructing the infrastructure required to extend service to their location. This includes interconnection to the grid, new line extensions, switching stations, transformers, breakers and other materials.
Ameren Missouri does not provide rate discounts or incentives to these new large customers.
There are several components to the Powering Missouri Growth Plan designed to reasonably protect the customer, Ameren Missouri and all other customers served by Ameren Missouri. Specifically, a large load user or data center would be required to pay a certain percentage of their maximum demand each month – even if they use less. It also requires the end-use customer to provide collateral or prove financial viability and be able to meet those requirements, as well as to pay an exit fee if they cease operations or otherwise are unable to meet the obligations outlined in the electric service agreement contract.
The Powering Missouri Growth Plan is structured in a way that new large customers pay their fair share of the costs of providing electric service to them, and it provides options to accomplish their various clean energy goals. The plan also includes several mechanisms to ensure these new customers live up to their commitments to bring the desired economic development benefits to our communities.
Ameren Missouri is well positioned to serve new large load customers. The company recently announced significant changes to its generation strategy, aiming to accelerate generation investments to support robust economic expansion, bolster reliability and create jobs across Missouri. The revision to Ameren Missouri's Preferred Resource Plan is designed to provide for up to 2 gigawatts of new energy demand by 2032, with a balanced mix of generation resources to deliver reliable, affordable and cleaner energy for all customers.
Business customers looking to locate in the Ameren Missouri service territory first contact us to see if we can meet their energy demand requirements. This includes conducting a detailed engineering study, which is also reviewed and approved by MISO before the project can proceed.
As data centers ramp up, they will provide benefits to existing electric customers by spreading system costs across a broader base. Large customers help spread fixed system costs across more customers – putting downward pressure on rates.