I find the whole thing a little odd. They’re basically pledging to pay their electricity bills. So what? So does every business.

Saying they’re going to pay for generation and transmission adds little. That’s already baked into the charges! It’s like saying they’re going to finally pay for the farmers to grow the produce and the drivers to get the produce to market when they buy apples--as though spontaneous generation and teleportation was ever an option.

An actual problem was them trying to avoid paying.

They'd ask the utilities to make Gigawatts of energy available over the next two decades and the utilities would say "No problem, just sign here and agree to pay for us building out the grid to support that".

Then the AI companies said "No we only want to pay for energy if we actually use it, if we go bust or decide not to use the energy in a couple of years we want you to charge all the others consumers to recoup that cost".

No idea if that's addressed here. I'm assuming not.

It was never clear if that reflected uncertainty about future demand or of they just like shifting costs and risk onto other people whenever possible.

edit: the pledge references this problem, whether it actually solves it I don't know.

They are pledging to not only pay for their own bills but rather increase the supply of electricity itself. This will reduce retail electricity prices.

This mean retail consumers are paying less for electricity than what they would have paid if not for the pledge.