SALEM, OR – Oregon’s governor is organizing a new committee of advisers to weigh in on issues rising from the rapid growth of data centers in the state.

Gov. Tina Kotek announced the new Data Center Advisory Committee on Tuesday and named seven members, who will provide policy recommendations to her and the Legislature no later than October 2026.

Kotek and state lawmakers will use those to create regulations, most likely aimed at where data centers can be built, according to a news release from Kotek’s office. The regulations would aim to protect energy infrastructure and water supplies from being overburdened by the privately run data and AI processing centers, which require massive amounts of energy to run and water for cooling.

“Oregonians have made their concerns about rising utility bills clear. As our state faces rapid growth of data facilities, we must have frank conversations about the challenges and opportunities ahead,” Kotek said in a statement. “I expect the Data Center Advisory Committee to help ensure economic growth while protecting affordable power and Oregon’s critical water resources.”

Oregon’s data center market is among the largest in the nation, according to Chicago-based commercial real estate group Cushman & Wakefield. Access to relatively clean, cheap hydroelectricity in the region and a lack of sales tax, along with billions of dollars in property tax incentives, helped lure the companies.

But the decision to offer those property tax incentives and site a data center is largely a local one, made at the city and county level. The Data Center Advisory Committee is the state’s first big foray into setting data center policy, following several laws that passed in 2025 meant to curb rising electricity rates driven by data centers.

As the giant data complexes expanded across the state during the last several years, energy rates rose on all customer classes served by the state’s private, investor-owned utilities. For residential customers, rates have gone up an average of 50% in the last five years.

Between 2013 and 2023, Oregon’s overall electricity consumption rose by more than 20%, according to a Sightline Institute analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

“Data centers undoubtedly drove a major share, if not almost all, of this growth,” analysts wrote.

In the next two decades, demand for electricity in the Northwest could double, and demand from data centers is expected to outpace demand from the growing use of electric vehicles until 2046, according to regional energy experts.

Kotek appointed as committee chairs Margaret Hoffmann and Michael Jung. Hoffman is also a member of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, former energy policy adviser to Oregon governors John Kitzhaber and Kate Brown and former rural development director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Oregon. Jung is an environmental policy executive and director of the ICF Climate Center, an international tech and energy consultancy.

Other commission members are:

• Dan Dorran, chair of the Umatilla County Commission. Umatilla has sited a large number of Amazon data centers in the last decade that have caused 554% demand growth at the Umatilla Electric Cooperative, according to Sightline’s analysis.
• Greg Dotson, an energy and environmental law expert at the University of Oregon.
• Bill Edmunds, a former private utility executive who teaches energy and business courses at Portland State University and the University of Portland.
• Tim Miller, director of the nonprofit industry group Oregon Business For Climate.
• Jean Wilson, a renewable energy executive and former president of the nonprofit Oregon Environmental Council.

The group will meet publicly at least once a month and focus on studying data center citing decisions, according to Kotek’s news release. They’ll look at regulations to support how and where data centers could be built to spur “responsible economic development” and job creation, without overburdening local energy and water supplies in the rural communities they tend to be built in.

Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Shumway for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com.