Pacific Gas and Electric has cut electric rates for the fourth time in two years. The latest reduction took effect on January 1, 2026. CEO Patti Poppe discussed the cuts on the company’s February 12 earnings call. Bundled residential electric rates are now 11% lower than they were in January 2024.

Utility Dive reported the story on February 17. Poppe credited accelerated large-load growth, and data centers account for a large share of that demand. PG&E says each gigawatt of new load on the system can reduce customer bills by about 1%. At the time of the call, about 3.6 gigawatts of large-load projects were in final engineering.

That is the opposite of the usual warning about data centers. A completed facility is a large power customer. When more kilowatt-hours move across the same wires, the cost of the grid is spread more widely, and other customers can see a lower rate. PG&E’s December 2025 press release described the outcome directly: the company lowered electric prices for the fourth time in two years.

This is a California utility story, not a Texas rate order. The underlying math still matters in East Texas. Cloud email, backups, and the applications a Lindale office already uses have to run in a building somewhere. Those buildings buy power and help pay for the grid they use.

Texas already has operating data-center campuses and they purchase electricity the same way. A small business in Lindale does not need a campus on Highway 69 to be part of that system. It already uses the cloud those campuses exist to run. A campus that is built is infrastructure — closer to a highway than to a rumor. Public debate often assumes household bills will rise. PG&E’s figures show a case in which rates went down.

My I.T. Consultants is a managed service provider in Athens. For a short review of whether the office is using off-site cloud services instead of a server in the building, call 903-675-5431, Monday through Friday, 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.