Regardless of Actual Usage: The Kansas Commission's Large Load Rate Plan

The Kansas Corporation Commission, the KCC, said in a news release dated November 6, 2025, that it had approved a unanimous settlement agreement creating a Large Load Power Service (LLPS) rate plan. The plan is "designed to serve electric customers requiring greater than 75 megawatts of peak power consumption." The settlement, the release says, focused on meeting the growing needs of the state's largest electric users, "including data centers and large manufacturers," while protecting other ratepayers from bearing "an unfair portion of any incremental associated costs."

The release is not the order. It ends with links to the order, to the settlement agreement and to a recording of the commission's meeting. Parts of the release follow, not the whole.

The Threshold and the Settlement

The new rates "will apply to any new facility beginning service with a peak load forecast at 75 megawatts (75 MW) or more, or an existing customer expecting to expand by 75 MW." For a new facility the release names a forecast. For an existing customer, an expected expansion.

The release calls the settlement "a collaborative effort." Those who took part in the negotiations, it says, included consumer interests, large company interests, the utility, conservation interests and several school districts.

The Contract and the Minimum Bill

The contract term, the release says, "will be a minimum of 12 years, plus an optional load ramp period of up to 5 years, which most customers are expected to use, for a total contract length of 17 years." The ramp is optional.

A customer on the plan will pay a minimum monthly bill based on 80% of its contract demand, "regardless of actual usage." Customers "will also be required to provide collateral equal to two years of minimum monthly bills." If the contract is terminated early, an exit fee will apply, and it "will require the customer to pay all minimum bills that would have been billed had the customer continued service." All of them.

The minimum bill makes a fixed share of the contracted demand a cost the customer owes, used or not. A lender to a campus on this plan would want to see what pays that bill in a month when the campus draws little.

Rates, Upgrades and Other Tariffs

The plan's demand and energy rates "are designed to cover" the utility's "incremental cost to serve large load customers, so existing customers are not subsidizing those users." Any system upgrades needed solely to serve a new or expanded customer, the release adds, "will be directly assigned to the new/expanded customer." Network upgrades to the transmission system needed to bring the large loads online "will be directed by the Southwest Power Pool, as regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is responsible for ensuring that wholesale transmission costs are allocated in a fashion that is at least roughly commensurate to the benefits being received by those transmission upgrades."

The release assigns the upgrades needed solely for a new or expanded customer to that customer, and leaves network upgrades to be directed by the Southwest Power Pool. It gives a cost for neither. That is the number a developer still has to find.

Efforts were also made, the release says, to design a plan that was competitive with other large load tariffs throughout the country, so that Kansas can "properly compete for the economic development benefits that these loads represent."