# The Quest for 90 Gigawatts The defining infrastructure story of the AI era. The race to build the data centers and secure the energy to run them is reshaping American energy policy, land use, nuclear power, and the relationship between the tech industry and the state at a scale not seen since the interstate highway system or rural electrification. The title comes from [[Eric Schmidt]]'s framing at TED 2025: the U.S. needs **90 GW of additional power** — equivalent to 90 nuclear power plants — just to maintain AI leadership. The country is building none. This page tracks the ongoing developments as they unfold. --- ## The Scale of the Problem The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity consumption will hit **1,100 TWh in 2026** — equivalent to Japan's entire national electricity consumption — an 18% upward revision from estimates made just months earlier. The U.S. alone accounts for roughly 40% of global data center capacity. **Key numbers:** - **Current U.S. data center power demand (2025):** ~80 GW - **Projected U.S. demand (2028):** ~150 GW (Bloom Energy estimate) — nearly doubling in three years - **Goldman Sachs estimate:** 85–90 GW of new nuclear capacity alone would be needed to meet all data center power growth expected by 2030, but less than 10% of that will be available globally - **Northern Virginia** — the world's largest data center market — has effectively halted new data center permits through 2028 due to grid capacity constraints The gap between what AI companies want to build and what the power grid can deliver is the binding constraint on AI scaling. Every other bottleneck — chips, talent, algorithms — is secondary to electricity. ## Why This Matters for the KB The quest for 90 gigawatts is not just an infrastructure story. It is a **power story** in both senses of the word: **Energy as geopolitical leverage:** The Trump administration has used energy permitting as a tool to reward aligned companies and punish resistant ones. The [[Stargate Project]]'s emergency declarations, the federal land designations for AI data centers, and the nuclear restart deals all create dependencies between AI companies and government favor. **The climate paradox:** AI companies publicly committed to net-zero carbon goals are simultaneously driving the largest increase in electricity demand in American history. Data centers accounted for ~40% of all corporate renewable energy purchase agreements in 2025 — but renewables alone cannot close the gap, pushing companies toward natural gas (immediate) and nuclear (medium-term) in ways that conflict with their climate branding. **Land and water:** Data centers require not just power but massive quantities of water for cooling and thousands of acres for physical facilities. The deals being struck — Schmidt's Bolt with Texas Pacific Land's 882,000 acres, Stargate's Abilene campus, Meta's nuclear partnerships — are reshaping rural land markets and water rights across the American West and South. **Who gets the power:** Every gigawatt directed to a data center is a gigawatt not available for housing, manufacturing, hospitals, or existing communities. The infrastructure decisions being made now will determine who gets electricity — and at what price — for decades. ## The Major Players ### Stargate Project (OpenAI / [[SoftBank]] / Oracle) The flagship. Announced by Trump on **January 21, 2025**, the Stargate Project is a **$500B AI infrastructure joint venture** between [[OpenAI]], [[SoftBank]], and [[Oracle Corporation]], with initial capital of $100B. [[SoftBank]] and OpenAI each committed $19B and hold 40% ownership; Oracle and MGX contributed $7B each. **Data center locations:** - **10 data centers** under construction in **Abilene, Texas** - **5 additional sites** announced September 2025: Shackelford County, TX; Doña Ana County, NM; Lordstown, OH; Milam County, TX; and an undisclosed midwestern site - **International:** UAE Stargate (expected 2026), Stargate Argentina (Patagonia, up to $25B / 500 MW) **Planned capacity:** Nearly **7 GW** across announced campuses, with a path to **10 GW** — roughly 10% of Schmidt's 90 GW target from a single project. Trump has signaled use of **emergency declarations** to expedite energy infrastructure for the project, and has retained a Biden-era executive order allowing federal land designation for AI data centers. **Tensions:** Reporting in early 2026 revealed squabbles between OpenAI, Oracle, and [[SoftBank]] over operational control of the data centers — a dispute that delayed construction timelines. ### Meta / Zuckerberg Meta is building one of the largest nuclear energy portfolios in corporate history to power its **Prometheus AI supercluster**: - **January 2026:** Signed deals with **Vistra**, **TerraPower** ([[Bill Gates]]'s nuclear startup), **Oklo** (Sam Altman-backed), and **Constellation Energy** for up to **6.6 GW** of nuclear power - These agreements make Meta one of the most significant corporate purchasers of nuclear energy in American history - Meta's approach differs from Stargate's: rather than building its own power plants, Meta is signing long-term power purchase agreements with nuclear operators ### Microsoft - **Three Mile Island restart:** Signed an exclusive **20-year agreement** with Constellation Energy to restart **Unit 1** of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania (renamed **Crane Clean Energy Center**). Unit 1 is expected back online in **2028**. Unit 2 — the reactor that partially melted down in 1979 — remains permanently shut. - Microsoft has also signed a **1,920 MW** power purchase agreement with Amazon for nuclear capacity - The Three Mile Island deal is symbolically significant: the most infamous nuclear accident in American history becoming the power source for AI development ### Eric Schmidt / Bolt Data & Energy Schmidt's entry into the infrastructure layer, launched **January 2026** in partnership with **Texas Pacific Land Corporation** (882,000 acres of West Texas): - **$150M initial capital** raised; TPL contributed $50M plus first-refusal rights on water resources - **Target:** 10 GW of power capacity across West Texas campuses - **Energy mix:** Natural gas initially, with planned transition to renewables and nuclear - Bolt positions Schmidt as a vertically integrated AI operator: from policy (NSCAI/SCSP) → software (Hillspire AI portfolio) → hardware ([[Swift Beat]] drones) → infrastructure (Bolt) See [[Eric Schmidt]] profile for the full conflicts-of-interest analysis. ### Elon Musk / xAI - xAI's **Memphis data center** (the "Colossus" supercomputer) drew controversy in 2025 for its energy demands and environmental impact on the Memphis community - Tesla's **10-K/A filing** (April 2026) revealed **$430.1M in revenue from xAI** — primarily Megapack energy storage products powering xAI's data centers - The Tesla-xAI energy relationship is a case study in Musk's intra-empire self-dealing: Tesla builds the batteries, xAI buys them, Tesla books the revenue ### Google / Alphabet - Pursuing both nuclear and geothermal energy for data center power - Partnered with **Kairos Power** for small modular reactor (SMR) development - Invested in **Fervo Energy** for enhanced geothermal systems - Google's approach emphasizes next-generation clean energy technologies rather than restarting existing nuclear plants ### Amazon / AWS - AWS has committed to **nuclear-powered data centers** through partnerships with multiple energy companies - Amazon's **$4B+ investment in [[Anthropic]]** means its data center infrastructure is partially dedicated to hosting the AI company Trump banned from government work ## The Nuclear Renaissance The AI power crisis is driving the most significant revival of interest in nuclear energy since the 1970s: - **2026 is projected to see 15 new reactors come online globally** — the highest number in years - **Small modular reactors (SMRs)** — championed by companies like NuScale, Oklo, TerraPower, and Kairos — are positioned as the medium-term solution, but none are commercially operational at scale yet - **Existing plant restarts** (Three Mile Island, Palisades in Michigan) are faster than new construction but face regulatory and community opposition - **China** is the largest builder of new nuclear capacity, adding ~10 reactors under construction — creating a geopolitical dimension to the nuclear-AI nexus ## The Structural Tensions **Speed vs. safety:** AI companies want power in 2–3 years. Nuclear plants take 10–15 years to build. This mismatch pushes companies toward natural gas in the short term — undermining climate commitments. **Corporate vs. community:** Data centers create relatively few jobs but consume enormous resources. Communities near proposed sites face increased electricity costs, water scarcity, and industrial noise without proportional economic benefits. **Federal vs. state:** Trump's emergency declarations and federal land designations for data centers bypass state and local permitting processes, creating sovereignty conflicts — particularly in states like Texas, where energy independence is a political identity. **Concentration vs. distribution:** The gigawatt-scale facilities being planned concentrate energy demand in ways the existing grid was not designed to handle. Grid operators in Virginia, Texas, and the Southeast are already issuing capacity warnings. --- ## Development Log | Date | Development | Source | |------|------------|--------| | 2025-01-21 | Trump announces Stargate Project ($500B, OpenAI/SoftBank/Oracle) at White House | CNBC | | 2025-09-23 | OpenAI announces 5 new Stargate data center sites (TX, NM, OH, Midwest) | OpenAI | | 2025-10 | IEA projects global data center electricity at 1,100 TWh for 2026 | IEA | | 2025-12-17 | Schmidt launches Bolt Data & Energy with Texas Pacific Land; $150M raised | Fortune / Bloomberg | | 2026-01-02 | Fortune profiles Schmidt's Bolt / TPL partnership; 10 GW target | Fortune | | 2026-01-09 | Meta signs nuclear deals with Vistra, TerraPower, Oklo, Constellation for 6.6 GW | CNBC / TechCrunch | | 2026-01 | Bloomberg reports Stargate delayed by partner control disputes | Tom's Hardware | | 2026-04-30 | Tesla 10-K/A reveals $430.1M in xAI revenue from Megapack energy storage | SEC filing | | 2026-05-06 | NANO Nuclear signs MOU with [[Super Micro Computer]] to integrate microreactors with AI data center platforms | NANO Nuclear press release | | 2026-05-06 | SpaceX files $55B Phase 1 Terafab chip fab plans with Texas authorities; full buildout $119B; Intel reportedly joining | Reuters / CNBC | | 2026-05-07 | Panthalassa $140M Series B led by Peter Thiel for wave-powered offshore AI data centers; $1B unicorn valuation | BusinessWire / GeekWire | | 2026-05-08 | Stargate "Freebird" campus (Milam County, TX) TDLR filing: 548,950 sq ft Phase 1, $470M, completion October 2026 | DCD | | 2026-05-09 | SpaceXAI rents Colossus 1 (220K+ GPUs, >300 MW) to Anthropic for $3–4B/year; Anthropic expresses interest in space compute | Fortune / CNBC / Anthropic | | 2026-05-09 | Page created; tracking initiated | — | | 2026-05-12 | SMR conditional offtake pipeline grows from 25 GW (end 2024) to 45 GW (May 2026) — nearly doubling in 18 months | IAEA / Data Center Knowledge | | 2026-05-12 | Michigan residents voted down $16B Stargate data center; construction began anyway | TechSpot | | 2026-05-12 | Stargate cancels UK and Norway data center projects; refocuses on U.S. sites | Wikipedia / multiple outlets | | 2026-05-12 | Hill County, TX approves 1-year moratorium on data center construction in unincorporated areas — first Texas county to do so; 8 potential developments affected | Texas Tribune / WaPo | | 2026-05-14 | SpaceX IPO prospectus expected as early as May 19–22; Axios reports IPO "already upending the stock market" as institutional investors trim tech positions to make room | CNBC / Axios | | 2026-05-15 | PJM wholesale power prices up 75.5% YoY ($77.78→$136.53/MWh) driven by data center demand; PJM launching emergency 15 GW matchmaking plan (Phase 1: Sep 2026–Mar 2027) | The Register / FutureTech News | | 2026-05-15 | Stargate Abilene: 5,000 workers building through the night on 1.2 GW campus; first two buildings operational since Sep 2025 with NVIDIA GB200 racks delivered | Texas Standard | | 2026-05-19 | IEA confirms data center electricity surged 17% in 2025; set to double by 2030, AI-focused to triple | IEA | | 2026-05-19 | SMR nuclear offtake pipeline confirmed at 45 GW (up from 25 GW end-2024) | IAEA / IEA | | 2026-05-19 | Data4 signs first-of-kind 12-year Nuclear Production Allocation Contract with EDF for 40 MW direct nuclear supply | IEA | | 2026-05-19 | Microsoft Three Mile Island Unit 1 restart proceeding under 20-year exclusive PPA; 835 MW | IEA / Constellation | | 2026-05-19 | Brookings publishes regulatory framework analysis for AI energy demands; calls for international coordination | Brookings | | 2026-06-03 | SpaceX IPO roadshow opens at $135/share ($1.75T); S-1 disclosed $2.8B in gas turbines for AI data centers — fossil-fuel lock-in now load-bearing in federal SEC filing | CNBC | | 2026-06-03 | Average US household electricity bill estimated to rise $15–25/month due to grid upgrade costs driven by AI data center demand; electricity costs up 42% since 2019 | Brookings | | 2026-06-03 | WEF publishes analysis: Strait of Hormuz disruption during [[Iran War 2026]] + AI data center demand = dual energy crisis driving nuclear renaissance | WEF | | 2026-06-04 | DOE commits up to $850M across 17 projects to modernize coal capacity and build two new coal plants (~2.85 GW), explicitly tied to data-center demand; Section 202(c) emergency orders keep coal units running | Utility Dive / RTO Insider | | 2026-06-08 | Energy Innovation argues ~100 GW of planned behind-the-meter gas (a 57x jump per BNEF) will raise everyone's bills: data centers escape utility-regulator jurisdiction while gas plants set marginal prices | Utility Dive (opinion) | | 2026-06-08/09 | SpaceX unveils "AI1" orbital data-center satellite + 11M-sq-ft "Gigasat" factory, targeting 1 GW/yr of space-based compute by late 2027 (economics unproven) | Tom's Hardware / TechTimes | | 2026-06-09 | Apollo + [[Blackstone]] + banks commit initial $35B to a "Broadcom AI XPV Platform" enabling 20+ GW of compute for [[Anthropic]] and [[OpenAI]] through 2028 | Apollo / Blackstone | | 2026-06-09 | [[OpenAI]] in talks (per The Information) to lease a 10 GW Ohio data-center campus on DOE land, possibly backed by [[NVIDIA]]; ~$500B build, first phase ~2028 | Reuters / The Information | | 2026-06-12 | PolitiFact rates "Mostly False" [[Elizabeth Warren]]'s claim that data-center neighbors pay up to 267% more for power — the figure is wholesale, not residential — but confirms real upward pressure on bills | PolitiFact / WRAL | | 2026-06-16 | Data Center Watch Q1 report: 75+ projects worth $130B+ delayed or cancelled in Q1 2026; opposition groups up from 396 to 833 across 49 states; backlash now bipartisan | Fortune / Data Center Watch | | 2026-06-17 | Trump administration to pay $765M to Invenergy to cancel offshore wind leases off CA/ME/NY, including a 2.4 GW project (~1.8M homes at peak); developer to redirect funds to Midwest gas + Western geothermal; ~$2.6B total federal spending now committed to scuttling offshore wind | Reuters / TechCrunch | | 2026-06-18 | FERC votes unanimously to order the 6 major grid operators (incl. PJM) to fast-track data-center / large-load interconnections under Docket RM26-4-000; loads pay their own interconnection costs; operators get 30 days to report spare generation + 60 days to defend/revise rates; directs accommodation of behind-the-meter power & "alternative transmission technologies"; does NOT address the generation shortfall | TechCrunch / Washington Post / CNBC | | 2026-06-30 | PJM opens its 2028/29 Base Residual Auction (runs June 30–July 4) — the FIRST since the FERC-approved price cap/collar expired, so clearing prices can exceed the old $329–333/MW-day caps both prior auctions hit; market monitor attributed ~$6.5B (40%) of the December 2025 auction's $16.4B cost to data-center load; results due later in July | Utility Dive | | 2026-07-01 | Environmental Integrity Project "The Power Behind AI" report quantifies the behind-the-meter gas buildout: 74 proposed BTM gas plants nationwide for AI data centers (32 in Texas — nearly half), est. 287M tons GHG/yr in Texas alone; Project Matador (Fermi America, Amarillo, 11 GW) alone 40M+ tons/yr; ~90% of proposed plants in counties with below-average life expectancy; 188 schools within 3 miles | EIP / KERA (July 2) | | 2026-06-30–07-03 | **Energy Secretary [[Chris Wright]] signs two Federal Power Act §202(c) emergency orders** covering PJM through 11:59pm July 3: PJM may order transmission owners to **curtail data centers and other large loads ≥50 MW** and force them onto their own (mostly diesel) backup generation, and power plants may exceed normal emissions limits. PJM forecast ~166,147–166,304 MW demand for July 2 — above the all-time record of 165,563 MW (2006). **Third §202(c) invocation inside PJM in 2026** | DOE / Utility Dive / TechTimes | | 2026-07-07 | GridMarket + Deployable Energy announce a $22.5B nuclear pipeline — over 3 GW of cumulative deployments through 2035 (500 MW/yr, 2030–2035), ~$145B est. lifetime contract value over 40 yrs — after Deployable's Unity "nuclear battery" reactor reached criticality in ~150 days from kickoff | GlobeNewswire / Interesting Engineering | | 2026-07-11 | PJM 2028/29 Base Residual Auction offer window closed July 7; **results scheduled to post after 4pm on July 14** — the first clearing price with no FERC price collar | PJM | | 2026-07-22 | [[OpenAI]] plans $30B+ data-center complex near Savannah, GA (Effingham County); 3.2 GW contracted from Georgia Power — among its largest sites; first hundreds of MW online 2028, buildout through 2032 | Bloomberg | | 2026-07-23 | **[[Rashida Tlaib]] introduces H.R. 9939, the "No AI Data Centers on Federal Lands Act"** — a permanent ban on large AI data centers and associated infrastructure on all federally owned/managed land (military bases included), plus mandatory removal and site remediation of existing qualifying facilities; 5 cosponsors. Framed as a response to BLM approving its first data center on public land (Nevada) without public input and DOE pushing AI data centers at as many as 16 federal sites | Tlaib press release / TechRadar | | 2026-07-27 | **PJM board proposes a one-time September "backstop" capacity auction** to plug a **6.8 GW shortfall** left by the just-completed 2028/29 auction, plus a **mandatory registry of large loads** (data centers included): new large loads that don't bring their own supply face curtailment when the grid nears emergency conditions | Utility Dive / National Law Review | | 2026-07-28 | Market-monitor tally: ~**$29B** in data-center-driven costs embedded in PJM capacity auctions since 2024, passed through to ratepayers; capacity prices up ~11x in two years ($28.92 → $329.17/MW-day) | Utility Dive / TechCrunch | | 2026-07-31 | **PJM files the backstop auction plan at FERC** (Docket ER26-3380): one-time reliability backstop auction runs **Sept 30–Oct 21** to fill the 6.8 GW shortfall, with 15-year commitments, resources online by June 1, 2032, and results announced by **Dec 2** — before the 2029/30 base auction. Price cap set at **$555/MW-day**, up from $325 for the last base auction; NRDC estimates up to **$20B** for new plants; PJM projects data-center/large-load growth of up to **70 GW by 2038**; bilateral data-center–supplier deals can shrink the auction target; cost allocation to retail customers is left to the states | Utility Dive (Aug 3) / PJM / NRDC | | 2026-08-06 | **Bloomberg: AI's volatile power demand is physically damaging data centers** — rapid load swings from training runs are wearing out or breaking batteries, generators, and cooling systems far sooner than expected, adding unforeseen costs and reliability risk; minutes of lost uptime hit developer revenue | Bloomberg | | 2026-08-07 | *(planned)* PJM to file the companion **"Interim Resource Adequacy Service"** proposal at FERC: large loads coming online after **June 1, 2027** that don't bring their own power supplies face curtailment when the grid nears emergency conditions, underpinned by the mandatory Large Load Registry | Utility Dive (Aug 3) | | 2026-08-06 | **Forbes: "Every AI Power Announcement Comes With A Gigawatt. Few Come With A Commitment."** — the gigawatt has become the industry's unit of press release rather than of delivered capacity; announced figures routinely outrun signed interconnection agreements, financed generation, and in-service dates | Forbes (Güney Yıldız) | | 2026-08 | **PJM "Large Load" definition set at ≥50 MW** at a single point of interconnection (or multiple points within a one-mile radius) — the threshold that determines who lands on the mandatory Large Load Registry and who becomes interruptible under Interim Resource Adequacy Service from **June 1, 2027** | PJM board decisional letter (July 27) / Foley Hoag / Nat'l Law Review | | 2026-08-20 | *(proposal — see the decision row below)* **TVA board meets in Jackson, TN** on a proposal to strip data centers of the **manufacturing service rate** — roughly 15–20% below what other commercial customers pay — and create a separate large-power rate class. AI data centers are now ~**18% of TVA's industrial load**, up from single digits five years ago, and TVA expects that to double by 2030 | Paducah Sun / WVLT / Data Center Knowledge | | 2026-08-10 | **Canary Media unpacks the IRAS design: PJM has punted the enforcement to the states.** Because states, not PJM, decide which customers connect to state-regulated utilities, PJM re-created its abandoned "non-capacity-backed load" program with states and utilities as the responsible parties. Large loads can escape curtailment via **"bring your own new capacity" (BYONC)** — bilateral contracts for new plants, solar, wind, batteries, demand response, or virtual power plants. Those that don't get cut off *before* pre-emergency demand response fires, from June 1, 2027. PJM forecast: **30–34 GW of new large load by the early 2030s, up to 70 GW by 2038**, against ~15 GW of generation retired since 2022 | Canary Media / Ohio Capital Journal | | 2026-08-10 | Consumer-advocate assessment of IRAS: **"no state that I know of yet is completely prepared"** (Clara Summers, Citizens Utility Board). Illinois **POWER Act** (HB 5513) would require data centers to buy matching clean energy; several PJM states have "large load tariffs" in progress. ~**55 GW** of solar/battery/wind/gas has cleared PJM's interconnection queue but still faces permitting, financing, and grid-upgrade hurdles | Canary Media / Ohio Capital Journal | | 2026-07 | **White House + governors' "Ratepayer Protection Pledge"** — hyperscalers commit that data-center growth "will not raise electricity bills for American households and businesses." No enforcement mechanism disclosed; its practical effect is political, complicating industry legal challenges to state and RTO cost-allocation rules | White House | | 2026-08-12 | **[[Elon Musk]] tells a SpaceX all-hands the company is a compute company**: 20 GW of power and cooling targeted by year-end 2027 ("close to 15 GW" with delays) against **1.4 GW of nameplate compute at the end of Q2** and >2 GW expected by year-end 2026; AI stack pledged to [[NVIDIA]]'s Vera Rubin architecture; "AI will be 99% of the value of [[SpaceX]]" in 4–5 years, with AI revenue passing all space revenue "probably in September" | 24/7 Wall St. / SpaceX all-hands | | 2026-08-11 | **The AI buildout gets a dedicated lender.** [[Erebor]] — the year-old national bank chartered in February — led a **$200M credit facility for [[Valar Atomics]]** as administrative agent, syndicating with JPMorgan, Crescent Cove, and Hercules Capital; the nuclear startup separately announced a **$1B Series B led by [[Sequoia Capital]]**. Reported alongside Erebor's own in-progress raise (~$1.5B at ~$9.5B, deposits $1.1B → $4.6B March–July). Nuclear generation for AI load now has a defense-tech-network balance sheet behind it, not only venture equity | Financial Times / CoinDesk | | 2026-08-14 | **[[Peter Thiel]]'s Thiel Macro reappears in the 13F record with a portfolio that is ~72% electricity.** After reporting zero holdings for two straight quarters, the fund discloses eight all-new Q2 positions worth **$418.7M**: [[Amazon]] $118M (28%), Vista Energy $75.9M (Argentine shale, ~1% of the company), [[Vistra]] $59.1M, American Electric Power $42.2M, DTE Energy $40.3M, FirstEnergy $39.9M, CMS Energy $39.6M, [[X-energy]] $3.7M. Each utility maps to a named AI load — Vistra/AWS 1,200 MW at Comanche Peak, AEP's 56 GW of signed data-center agreements against 180 GW of requests, DTE's 1 GW Alphabet Michigan contract, X-energy/Amazon's 5 GW-by-2039 target | SEC Form 13F-HR / 13F.info / TheStreet (Aug 16) | | 2026-08-24 | **[[Elon Musk]] dates the exit from the grid: first Nvidia-powered AI satellites launch Q4 2027, "significant scale" in 2028.** The vehicle is **Starmind AI1**, compute payload co-designed by [[SpaceX]] and [[NVIDIA]] around Vera CPUs, Rubin GPUs and the Vera Rubin NVL72 rackscale system; SpaceX has filed with the FCC for a megaconstellation of **up to 1 million** Starmind satellites. Terrestrial targets restated: **~2 GW of compute by end-2026, ~10 GW by end-2027** | Bloomberg / Seeking Alpha / TipRanks | | 2026-06-10 | **Gartner: worldwide data center power demand to rise 26–27% in 2026, to ~132 GW from 104 GW in 2025**; AI-optimized servers to account for **31% of data center power consumption in 2026** and to pass conventional servers in 2027 | Gartner | | 2026 (fcst) | **US data center power demand: 31 GW (2025) → 41 GW (2026) → 66 GW (2027)**; share of US peak summer demand **4.1% → 5.3% → 8.5%** over the same window; global data center demand projected at **~290 GW by 2030** | Goldman Sachs / Gartner | | 2026-08-17 | *(deadline)* **The 60-day clock on FERC's June 18 show-cause orders runs out.** All six RTOs/ISOs — PJM, MISO, SPP, CAISO, ISO-NE, NYISO — and their transmission owners must file revised large-load interconnection tariffs or justify why existing ones already suffice, under Docket **RM26-4-000**. FERC's threshold: peak load **>50 MW** interconnecting at **>69 kV**. Generation-adequacy informational reports were due July 20; abeyance requests were due August 3. This is the filing wave that reveals, RTO by RTO, how much spare generation actually sits behind the fast lane FERC opened | FERC / McGuireWoods / White & Case | | 2026-08-12 | **CAISO publishes its Large Load Considerations straw proposal** ahead of the FERC deadline: two flexible interconnection service options and a **50 MW** large-load definition, matching FERC's threshold | CAISO straw proposal (single trade-press source — verify against CAISO's own document) | | 2026-08-17 | **The six show-cause responses come due — and as of Aug 25 nobody has reported what is in them.** The regional proceedings run as separate dockets: **PJM EL26-67, SPP EL26-68, NYISO EL26-69, MISO EL26-70, CAISO EL26-71, ISO-NE EL26-72** (RM26-4 is the underlying ANOPR). FERC's five identified problem areas: application/study procedures, transmission-cost transparency, co-location, flexible-load service, and treatment of generators serving electrically proximate large loads. Interested parties get roughly 30 days after each regional filing to protest. **Open thread — the filings themselves need to be read in FERC eLibrary** | FERC dockets / law-firm explainers; no substantive coverage found | | 2026-08-17 | **[[OpenAI]] secures ~8 GW-IT at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio** — the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant — partnering with SB Energy, [[NVIDIA]] and the [[Department of Energy]]. Trade coverage describes the campus as backed by ~10 GW of new power and projects ~35,000 construction jobs; OpenAI separately committed $164M to Ohio programs. Axios reports an NVIDIA financial guarantee element. A federal nuclear-legacy site becomes AI-campus land | Axios / OpenAI / Dayton Daily News | | 2026-08-18 | **Pennsylvania makes the cost shift a permitting condition.** Gov. [[Josh Shapiro]] signs an executive order creating the **Governor's Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID)** requirements: DEP will review a data-center permit application only if the developer has made a **legally binding commitment** to GRID *and* already holds local approval. GRID mandates that data centers pay the **full cost** of new generation, transmission, distribution and supporting infrastructure, meet water-conservation and environmental standards, and conduct community outreach. The order also **removes all AI data center proposals from the PA Permit Fast Track Program** and **prohibits nondisclosure agreements** on data-center projects. Effective immediately. Follows Gov. Abbott's earlier-August directive that PUCT and ERCOT audit every data center in the ERCOT interconnection queue | pa.gov / Philadelphia Inquirer / WHYY / DCD | | 2026-08-20 | **The TVA board decides: data centers out of the manufacturing service rate, into their own class, with a $1.5M/MW entry fee.** At its Memphis quarterly meeting the board approved a new wholesale rate class for data centers (roughly **10% higher** charges, phased in for existing customers over three fiscal years), the 2026 Integrated Resource Plan, and an FY2027 budget with **>$13B** of generation and transmission spending through FY29. Effective **2026-10-01**, new or expanding data-center loads **above 5 MW** face a **Capacity Commitment Charge of ~$1.5 million per megawatt**, payable over three to five years. CEO Tom Rice: *"That's really to reflect the incremental capacity that needs to be added to the grid that's not covered in the base rate."* **No rate increase** for residential or other business customers in the FY27 budget. The IRP projects [[TVA]] needs **11–32 GW** of additional generation | DCD / Chattanooga Times Free Press / WSMV | | 2026-08-25/26 | **Florida's new cost-allocation law gets its first test, and the commission tells the utility it is on "shaky ground."** At a roughly five-hour Public Service Commission hearing, Duke Energy Florida asked to defer setting an actual large-load rate to a future rate proceeding. Public Counsel Walt Trierweiler said the proposal "doesn't attempt to comply with the most basic provisions" of **SB 484**, signed in May, which requires minimum tariff and service requirements for large-load customers. Duke confirmed it has been approached about multiple facilities of **900 MW or more, including one at 1,400 MW** — roughly a million homes' worth of demand. Briefs due September 15 | Utility Dive / WUSF / WFSU | | 2026-08-26 | **[[Executive Order 14421]] declares a national emergency over foreign-made grid equipment — and names AI load as the reason.** Issued under IEEPA and the National Emergencies Act, it prohibits acquisition, importation, transfer or installation of foreign-produced bulk-power system equipment tied to a "Covered Foreign Entity," covering transformers, utility-scale inverters, battery storage, circuit breakers, **generation turbines**, industrial control systems and associated software and remote-access capability. The Secretary of Energy may order equipment already installed identified, isolated, monitored, disconnected, replaced or removed. Local distribution is exempt; implementing rules due within 120 days. The preamble's stated predicate: "The rapid growth of advanced manufacturing, data centers, artificial intelligence, and defense production has increased the Nation's dependence on abundant, reliable electricity." **⚠️ Several law-firm alerts misnumber this order as 14420; the Federal Register (91 FR 55995) says 14421** | Federal Register (primary) / Utility Dive / pv magazine | | 2026-08-26 | **The Army picks five vendors for the $2.2B "Project Janus" on-base microreactor program.** The pairings: **Antares Nuclear** / Fort Bragg (NC), **Radiant Industries** / Fort Benning (GA), **BWXT Advanced Technologies** / Fort Campbell (KY), **[[General Atomics]] Electromagnetic Systems** / Fort Hood (TX), **Westinghouse Government Services** / Fort Drum (NY). Vendors own, build and operate; the Army awards up to a combined **$2.2B**, of which **Radiant's share is $750M**. Stated goal is energy independence so missions continue if the commercial grid fails, and the deadline is an **Army-regulated reactor on an Army installation by September 2028** under **Executive Order 14299**. Reactor counts per site not confirmed in reporting | Defense News / Federal News Network / National Defense Magazine / PBS NewsHour | | 2026-08-28 | **[[Oklo]] files an emergency complaint at FERC after [[PJM Interconnection]] drops its 750 MW project from the reformed interconnection cycle (Docket EL26-101).** The project is 150 MW advanced nuclear + 300 MW fuel cells + 300 MW gas — the mixed synchronous/inverter-based configuration Oklo says PJM's rules were not written for. Oklo entered the queue April 27; PJM issued a deficiency notice May 15, posted further concerns on its NextGen platform June 24 **without a formal deficiency notice as its own rules require**, and withdrew the project **August 3**, partly because Oklo had not shown it could ride through a sudden voltage drop. Oklo says the withdrawal delays a project of "critical national importance" by at least **14 months**. The project is unnamed in the redacted complaint but matches Oklo's 1.2 GW Pike County, Ohio campus backed by [[Meta]] under a January 2026 deal. PJM says nearly 90% of 811 new service requests qualified; on August 3 it reported 715 projects / 200+ GW entering the first reformed cycle (100 GW gas, 60 GW storage, 17.3 GW nuclear, 11.8 GW solar, 7.5 GW hybrid, 3.9 GW wind) | Utility Dive / RTO Insider / FERC eLibrary + PJM filing (primary) | | 2026-08-28 | **California sues over a $120M federal buyout of an offshore wind lease — and the money is coming out of the Judgment Fund.** AG [[Rob Bonta]] and the California Energy Commission filed in the **Northern District of California** against Interior and Golden State Wind LLC over the April 2026 deal paying the developer **$120M to abandon** its 2 GW floating lease off Morro Bay — enough capacity for up to two million homes. The core allegation: Interior plans to pay from the federal **Judgment Fund**, which exists to satisfy judgments and settlements against the United States, **when there was no underlying lawsuit or legal claim to settle** — a settlement mechanism manufactured to cancel a lease. Claimed violations: the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and the Judgment Fund Act. Part of a reported ~$4B in federal offshore-wind buyouts now drawing multi-state litigation | CA AG (primary) / Bloomberg Law / Canary Media / E&E News | | 2026-08-29 | **[[SpaceX]] moves to cast its own turbine blades.** [[Elon Musk]] confirms a blades-and-vanes foundry in Bastrop, Texas for single-crystal nickel-superalloy airfoils, on ~830 acres bought near the [[Starlink]] plant between March and June 2026. Musk: "The limiting factor for nat gas turbine production is casting the blades & vanes," and in-house casting can pull new gas turbines onto the grid "by up to 18 months." Only a handful of firms cast these at scale — Howmet, Precision Castparts, Consolidated Precision Products, Doncasters — with order books reported full to ~2030. Same castings feed Raptor turbopumps | TechCrunch / The Information / Business Standard | | 2026-08-27 | **X Safety identifies a Chinese bot farm amplifying data-center anger — and the numbers cut against the "foreign influence" framing.** Of roughly **200,000 accounts** implicated in the network, only about **200** consistently posted about data centers. [[Donald Trump]] later gestured at foreign involvement as an explanation for the backlash | X Global Government Affairs / RealClearPolitics | | 2026-08-31 | **The president and the vice president take opposite public positions on the same day.** Trump on Truth Social: *"The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor... let Data Reign."* In a gaggle the same day, before flying to Michigan for [[Mike Rogers]] — the first Republican to call for a statewide one-year data-center moratorium — [[JD Vance]] said *"probably 99% of the backlash to data centers has come in areas where building a data center means higher utilities and higher electricity for the people on the ground,"* and that if a facility puts *"power back into the grid, not taking it out... I don't think the data centers are that controversial"* | RealClearPolitics (Lumetta) | | 2026-09-03 | **The backlash becomes an electoral variable rather than a siting fight.** RCP reports an August University of Pennsylvania poll finding **61% of Americans oppose new data centers near them, up 12 points** from February–March — 69% of Democrats, 54% of Republicans, 53% of independents. An August Echelon Insights poll finds **57% unfavorable** and **52% supporting local bans**, but the ban figure **falls to 34%** when respondents are told the facilities pay for schools, fund property-tax cuts and invest in local water projects. A **leaked August NRSC memo**: data centers are *"a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle"* and *"more than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around [[Jon Husted]]'s neck."* Husted responded by introducing the **Ratepayer Protection Act** to force data centers nationwide to cover their own energy infrastructure; [[Sherrod Brown]] is running ads on it. [[Greg Abbott]] has reversed his earlier support, threatened a Texas moratorium absent full cost-recovery commitments, moved to **phase out state tax incentives** and ordered an audit of all projects. Roughly **4,650 operating data-center buildings** nationwide | RealClearPolitics / UPenn Almanac / Echelon Insights | | 2026 (through July) | **PJM's market monitor prices the data-center share of the wholesale power price: 9%, or $10.48/MWh — via the capacity market alone**, excluding data-center-driven energy and transmission effects. Across PJM's last four capacity auctions, data-center load growth produced a combined **$29.4 billion** increase in capacity market revenues. **⚠️ Publication date not confirmed; figures used, date flagged** | Utility Dive (date unverified) | | 2026-09-09 | **EIA's September Short-Term Energy Outlook puts record numbers on the demand curve and names data centers as the driver.** Electricity sales of **4,135 BkWh in 2026** (up ~2% on 2025) and **4,211 BkWh in 2027**; generation of a record **4,368 BkWh in 2026** (+2.2%), plus 1.7% in 2027. Commercial-sector sales up **3.3% in 2026 and 2.7% in 2027**, accounting for **63% and 56% of all sales growth** — attributed explicitly to data-center development. Industrial up 1.6% then 2.6%. West South Central remains the largest regional contributor despite a reported pause in new Texas projects | [[Energy Information Administration]] (primary) / Reuters | | 2026-09-10 | **Pennsylvania's PUC votes unanimously on two data-center dockets — curtailment and a ratemaking overhaul — on the same day.** Vice Chair Kimberly Barrow's motion directs staff to propose updates to emergency **curtailment** rules and to convene a fall **technical conference on cost allocation**, examining "potential impacts on customers who are not contributing to that new demand." Chairman Steve DeFrank's motion creates a **Ratemaking Working Group** on transparency and affordability — including whether **return on equity** should be set in periodic sector-wide cost-of-capital proceedings rather than litigated in every rate case, and whether the ROE on Distribution System Improvement Charges should be formula-based. Trigger: an August PUC report projecting **18.56% industrial load growth over five years**, driven primarily by PPL Electric Utilities' large-load forecast — while statewide usage actually *declined* from 2024 to 2025. The PUC also cites [[PJM Interconnection]]'s July capacity-auction reliability shortfall of **6,831 MW for 2028–29**. Tentative curtailment order October 1; target vote January 28 | PA PUC (primary) / Utility Dive | | 2026-09-14 | **North Carolina's attorney general asks the Utilities Commission to put data centers in their own rate class.** AG Jeff Jackson filed in Duke Energy's rate cases urging a **separate rate class for data-center customers** so costs and risks are not shifted to residential ratepayers; Duke projects **80% of its new energy demand** comes from data centers and other large users. In the parallel **Carbon Plan** docket Jackson's proposed order would make Duke's **template large-load contract public**, require reports on any agreement deviating from it, **shorten load forecasting from every six months to every 90 days**, and **pause development of new gas plants** pending review of Duke's late load-forecast updates. He has refused to join the Duke Energy Carolinas rate settlement (residential up ~9.5%) and rejected Duke Energy Progress's 15% / ~$960M two-year increase, and is pressing Duke to commit **legally rather than verbally** to the federal Ratepayer Protection Pledge | NC DOJ (primary, single-source) | | 2026-09-15/16 | **The House passes the Ratepayer Protection Act, H.R. 9340, 417–3.** Debated under suspension of the rules September 15 at 5:35 p.m. (40 minutes, Guthrie motion), vote postponed; passed as unfinished business **September 16 at 6:53 p.m., Roll Call 312, 417–3** (R 210–0, D 206–3, I 1–0; 0 present, 12 not voting). The three Nays: [[Summer Lee]] (D-PA), Delia Ramirez (D-IL), [[Rashida Tlaib]] (D-MI). Sponsor [[Gabe Evans]] (R-CO-8), introduced June 18 with 42 cosponsors including Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL); cleared Energy & Commerce 52–0 in July. The bill directs **state public utility commissions to consider adopting a federal standard** requiring data centers to pay the full cost of new generation and transmission serving them, codifying parts of the Trump-brokered Ratepayer Protection Pledge signed by 300+ utilities, co-ops and hyperscalers. **Received in the Senate September 17**; [[Jon Husted]]'s companion has not advanced | congress.gov + clerk.house.gov Roll 312 (primary) / Axios / House E&C | | 2026-09-09/14 | **Michigan's data-center bills are stuck in committee, and the environmental coalition goes to the Capitol steps to say so.** Sierra Club Michigan, Clean Water Action and the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition rallied on the Capitol's east steps September 9. Senate Democrats' June package — water-use permits, a ban on NDAs for public officials covering data-center deals, community-benefit requirements, customer protections — has sat in the Senate Energy and Environment Committee since June; the House companions are in Government Operations, described by advocates as "where bills go to die." One-year moratorium bills are pending in both chambers. House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) has voiced interest and taken no action. MEJC's Chris Gilmer-Hill: *"Data centers have already corroded trust in our government, and shown real flaws in transparency at the state and local level all over our state"* | Planet Detroit / Michigan Advance / WILX | | 2026-09-14 | **Oklahoma utilities argue in a live rate case that data centers will *lower* residential bills.** Public Service Company of Oklahoma (an AEP subsidiary) filed with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission modeling a **large-load tariff** patterned on Indiana Michigan Power's, which is seeking Indiana approval for a structure it says yields about **$59M in total 2027 ratepayer savings**, roughly **$100/year** for a typical residential customer. PSO's Michael Gordon: adopting the model "would place downward pressure on rates." In a separate Oklahoma case tied to three planned [[Google]] data centers, OG&E filed testimony projecting an illustrative residential benefit of **$1.83/month by 2027**, **$5.33/month by 2031** and **$6.84/month by 2036** — caveated by OG&E itself as "projections, not promised reductions." **⚠️ Single-source on the September 14 framing** | Oklahoma Energy Today (single-source) | | 2026-09-19 | **NERC drafts the first continent-wide data-center reliability standards, and sets the threshold FERC declined to set.** Three draft standards — **CLO-001-1, CLO-002-1, CLO-003-1** — would apply to "computational load" facilities with **50 MW or more** of connected load interconnecting at **100 kV or above**. The predicate: a **July 16, 2026 FERC order** that set no size threshold, no registration category and no compliance obligation, delegating the technical line to NERC. Public comment closed **September 18**; FERC filing deadline **December 31, 2026**. This would be the first mandatory floor for which data centers carry reliability obligations — voltage ride-through, disturbance response — on top of the piecemeal thresholds already set by ERCOT, CAISO and MISO. **⚠️ Single-source, trade outlet; not independently cross-checked** | mgrid.org (single-source) | | 2026-09-21 | **[[Greg Abbott]] broadens the Texas data-center pause from interconnection to environmental permitting.** The governor directed the **Texas Commission on Environmental Quality** to halt issuance of new environmental permits for data centers until [[ERCOT]] and the **Texas Water Development Board** complete audits of proposed facilities' electricity consumption, water usage, community impact, ownership and use of tax incentives. This escalates the August ERCOT-interconnection restriction and follows a water-usage survey to which only **28%** of operators responded. Abbott: *"Simply put, Texans must come first. Data centers must pay their own way, protect our grid and water and complete the ERCOT and TWDB audits."* CNBC and Bloomberg both frame the move as coming amid **tightening polls in the Texas governor's race** | Texas Tribune / CNBC / Bloomberg / CBS News Texas | | 2026-09-21 | **[[Gavin Newsom]] signs seven data-center bills — the first state statute that *requires* the cost shift to be reversed rather than asking a commission to consider it.** Package effective **January 1, 2027**, with the California Public Utilities Commission directed to establish tariffs by **January 1, 2028**. **SB 886** (Padilla / McNerney), the *California Technology Innovation and Ratepayer Protection Act*, puts transmission-upgrade and usage costs on the data center and creates a generation-service tariff recovering incremental generation cost from the load that caused it, with a **10-year minimum term**, upfront collateral or prepayment, refunds capped at **75%** of the utility's annual net transmission revenue, and an early-termination fee "not less than the revenue gap over the 10-year term." The generation tariff's peak-demand threshold **may not exceed 25 MW**; publicly funded research, public-safety and utility facilities are exempt. **AB 2383** (Zbur) creates the T&D and generation tariffs; **SB 1168** (McNerney) directs the commission to assess rate structures for equitable cost-sharing; **AB 1577** (Bauer-Kahan) requires energy reporting to the Energy Commission and local governments at **≥10 MW**; **AB 2469** and **AB 2619** (Papan) require water-supply assessments, workforce disclosure and tiered water reporting through business licensing, with water-scarcity plans from **January 1, 2028** and the applicant bearing full cost of conveyance, treatment, storage and distribution upgrades; **SB 887** (Padilla) defines data centers under CEQA and **bars categorical exemptions**, while letting the governor certify a project as an environmental leadership development if it meets conditions including **100% zero-carbon hourly electricity within five years, 75% from newly constructed sources**. Newsom's framing: California has proven innovation succeeds without "sell[ing] out Californians" | gov.ca.gov (primary) / Foley & Lardner / Mayer Brown / Stoel Rives / Sen. Padilla release / mgrid.org | | 2026-09-30 | **The Senate kills the Ratepayer Protection Act 57–43 — and it is Democrats who vote it down, for being too weak.** H.R. 9340, which passed the House 417–3 on September 16, failed the 60-vote cloture threshold on **September 30, 57–43**. Only **four Democrats** voted yes: **Maggie Hassan, [[Amy Klobuchar]], [[Jon Ossoff]], [[Raphael Warnock]]**. [[Chuck Schumer]] led the opposition on the ground that the bill's operative verb is *consider* rather than *require*, calling it **"toothless"** — Democrats pushed for a mandate that data centers cover infrastructure-upgrade costs outright. Republicans backed passage as household-cost relief. The federal "consider the standard" instrument is therefore dead for this Congress, leaving [[Gavin Newsom]]'s seven-bill California mandate and the state rate cases as the only live vehicles | Al Jazeera / Tom's Hardware / congress.gov | | 2026-10-04 | **NPR puts a number on the household share and finds nobody can answer the question cleanly.** An NPR analysis of how much AI data centers are adding to household electricity bills reports upward pressure as real but the per-household attribution as genuinely contested — the same measurement problem PolitiFact flagged in June when it rated [[Elizabeth Warren]]'s 267% claim Mostly False for conflating wholesale with residential. The gap matters politically: the ratepayer-protection fight needs a residential number, and the only rigorous numbers available are wholesale | NPR | | 2026-10-10 | **Bloomberg publishes a national accounting of data centers' effect on US electricity prices.** The piece establishes the cost shift as a settled national story rather than a state-by-state rate-case dispute, three weeks before the midterms and ten days after the Senate killed H.R. 9340 | Bloomberg | | 2026-10-12 | **Foreign Policy reframes the buildout as a resource-extraction story — energy, water and land together.** The land dimension is the one this page has tracked least; the water dimension is now in statute in California (AB 2469 / AB 2619) and in the Texas audit Abbott ordered on September 21 | Foreign Policy | ## The Cost Shift Goes National Just As the Federal Remedy Dies (October 4–12, 2026) **Within twelve days of the Senate killing the Ratepayer Protection Act, NPR, Bloomberg and Foreign Policy all published national accountings of what the data-center buildout is doing to electricity prices, water and land. The story arrived in the national press in the exact window in which the federal instrument for doing anything about it ceased to exist.** The sequencing is the finding. This page has tracked the cost shift upward through three distinct venues in order: the rate cases (North Carolina, Oklahoma, Indiana), then the statehouses (California's seven bills, Abbott's Texas pause, Michigan's stalled package), then Congress (H.R. 9340, 417–3 in the House, dead at 57–43 in the Senate on September 30). National press attention is the fourth venue and it has now arrived last — after the legislative vehicle it would have pressured is gone and with three weeks left before the midterms. **What the coverage adds, and what it does not.** Bloomberg's contribution is consolidation: a single national price story in place of the state-by-state fragments this page has been assembling since May. Foreign Policy's is the resource triad — energy, water *and* land — and the land dimension is the one tracked least well here, with no statutory instrument anywhere comparable to California's water-assessment requirements or the Texas Water Development Board audit. NPR's is the honest one: it reports the upward pressure as real and the per-household number as contested, which is the same wall PolitiFact hit in June when it rated [[Elizabeth Warren]]'s 267% figure Mostly False for conflating wholesale and residential prices. **That measurement gap is now the binding constraint on the politics, not the policy.** Every live instrument — the California tariffs due from the CPUC by January 1, 2028, the Duke and PSO rate cases, the NERC CLO standards due at FERC by December 31 — operates on wholesale and interconnection cost, where the numbers are rigorous. The electoral argument needs a residential monthly figure, and the utilities are supplying their own: OG&E's illustrative *benefit* of $1.83/month by 2027 rising to $6.84/month by 2036, PSO's claim that a large-load tariff puts "downward pressure on rates." Nobody opposing the buildout has a residential number of comparable specificity. Three weeks out, that asymmetry is doing more work than the Senate vote. **Watch:** whether any state commission orders a residential-attribution study on the record; the PJM 2028/29 auction results in the first cycle with no price collar; and whether the land dimension acquires any instrument at all. **Sources:** - [NPR: "How much are AI data centers adding to your electricity bill?"](https://www.npr.org/2026/10/04/nx-s1-5990822/how-much-are-ai-data-centers-adding-to-your-electricity-bill) - [Bloomberg: "How Data Centers Are Driving Up US Electricity Prices"](https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-10/how-data-centers-are-driving-up-us-electricity-prices) - [Foreign Policy: "Trump's Data Center Boom Drains Energy, Water, and Land"](https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/10/12/data-center-energy-water-land-pollution) --- ## The Federal Bill Dies in the Senate — Killed From the Left for Asking Instead of Requiring (September 30, 2026) **H.R. 9340 passed the House 417–3 and failed the Senate 57–43, three votes short of cloture, with only four Democrats voting yes. The party that spent the summer demanding data centers pay their own way is the party that killed the bill telling states to consider making them — on the grounds that considering is not requiring. The section below predicted the verb would be the problem. It was, from the direction least expected.** The arithmetic is worth stating plainly. A bill that drew 417 votes in the House — Republicans 210–0, Democrats 206–3 — could not find 60 in the Senate, and the deficit was Democratic. [[Chuck Schumer]]'s objection was not that the standard was wrong but that the statute did nothing: it directs state public utility commissions to *consider adopting* a federal standard requiring large loads to pay full incremental cost, which is a procedural obligation a commission discharges by holding a docket and declining. The four Democrats who crossed — Maggie Hassan, [[Amy Klobuchar]], [[Jon Ossoff]], [[Raphael Warnock]] — are all from states where the ratepayer politics are already live, and all took the position that a weak federal floor beats none. **What this does to the structure of the fight.** Three instruments were in play as of mid-September: the federal "consider" standard, [[Gavin Newsom]]'s California mandate, and the state rate cases. One of the three is now gone, and it is the one that would have applied in all fifty states. What remains is a mandate in one state, effective January 1, 2027 with tariffs due January 1, 2028, and a rate-case-by-rate-case grind in front of commissions in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Indiana and Michigan — exactly the venue this page has argued is where the decision actually sits. The Senate vote did not change that venue; it eliminated the only thing that might have. **The political reading is the uncomfortable one.** Industry lost nothing on September 30. A bill it could have complied with by attending a docket is dead, and nothing stronger is coming before the election. The faction that killed it did so to preserve the argument that only a mandate counts — a defensible position with a real cost, which is that the pledge-and-consider architecture the administration brokered with 300-plus utilities and hyperscalers remains the only federal artifact on the table, and it is voluntary. Note too what it signals about where the politics have moved: five weeks after [[Greg Abbott]] froze Texas permits with the governor's race tightening, the Senate's progressive bloc judged that *being seen to accept a weak data-center bill* was the greater liability. When both parties' electoral incentive runs against the buildout, the cost-allocation question stops being technical and becomes a campaign asset — which is how it gets decided by ballot measures and rate cases rather than by statute. **Sources:** - [Al Jazeera: "US Senate rejects bill targeting AI data centre electricity costs"](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/30/us-senate-rejects-bill-targeting-ai-data-centre-electricity-costs) - [Tom's Hardware: "US Senate kills bill that could potentially shield Americans from skyrocketing power bills due to AI data centers"](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/us-senate-kills-bill-that-could-potentially-shield-americans-from-skyrocketing-power-bills-due-to-ai-data-centers-opponents-say-bill-is-toothless-and-doesnt-do-enough-to-protect-citizens) - [CNBC: "House advances bill to rein in AI data center utility costs"](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/15/congress-ai-data-center-utility-costs.html) - [WRVO/NPR: "How much are AI data centers adding to your electricity bill?"](https://wrvo.org/2026-10-04/how-much-are-ai-data-centers-adding-to-your-electricity-bill) ## California Writes the Mandate the House Bill Only Asked For (September 21, 2026) **The same day [[Greg Abbott]] froze environmental permits in Texas, the governor of California signed seven bills that do the thing H.R. 9340 merely directs fifty commissions to *consider*. Two states, one date, opposite instruments — and the statute is the one that will still be operating in 2028.** The section below argues that the 417–3 House vote was a position-taking exercise because its operative verb is "consider," and that the real decision therefore stays in front of state commissions one rate case at a time. California just declined to wait for a rate case. SB 886 and AB 2383 do not ask the California Public Utilities Commission whether large loads should pay their own generation and transmission costs; they instruct it to build tariffs that make them, and they specify the terms — a 10-year minimum, collateral or prepayment up front, an early-termination fee floored at the full revenue gap, refunds capped at 75% of annual net transmission revenue. Those are the provisions a utility normally has to win in litigation against a hyperscaler's counsel. Here they arrive as statute, with a January 1, 2028 deadline for the commission to implement. **The 25 MW ceiling on the tariff threshold is the sleeper provision.** Every other threshold this page has recorded is a floor set high enough to exempt most of the fleet — NERC's draft CLO standards apply at 50 MW and 100 kV, and ERCOT, CAISO and MISO set their own piecemeal lines above that. California instead caps how high the threshold may be set, which inverts the usual dynamic: the commission cannot define the problem away by drawing the line above the facilities causing it. Read alongside AB 1577's ≥10 MW reporting trigger, the state has set its disclosure floor below its tariff ceiling — so it will have data on facilities the tariff does not yet reach. **SB 887 is the part the industry will litigate first.** Barring categorical CEQA exemptions for data centers removes the fastest path to approval in the state, and the substitute — gubernatorial certification as an environmental leadership development, conditioned on 100% zero-carbon hourly electricity within five years with 75% from newly constructed sources — is not a streamlining provision so much as a price. Hourly matching on new-build supply is a materially harder standard than the annual-matching claims most hyperscalers currently make. The bill offers speed in exchange for a commitment nobody in this file has yet demonstrated at scale. **What this does to the argument about attribution.** This page recorded on 2026-09-03 that the fix had converged across parties while the blame had not, and that attribution in a midterm is worth more than the remedy. California is the counterexample that clarifies the rule. A Democratic governor in a state with no competitive statewide race signed the most demanding version of the remedy and got a press release for it, seven weeks before an election he is not on the ballot for. Abbott, facing tightening polls, produced a permit freeze — faster, more visible, and reversible by the same executive order that created it. The states with the most electoral pressure are producing the most reversible instruments; the state with the least is producing the durable one. If that holds, the buildout's binding constraints will end up written where the politics were coolest. **Watch:** whether the commission opens its tariff proceeding before the January 1, 2027 effective date or waits toward the 2028 deadline; where it sets the threshold under the 25 MW ceiling; whether any operator seeks environmental-leadership certification under SB 887's hourly-matching condition, which would be the first real test of a zero-carbon claim in a permitting forum; whether the AB 2469/AB 2619 water disclosures produce the response rate that Texas's voluntary survey could not (28%); and whether other states copy the ceiling-on-the-threshold drafting rather than the floor. Sources: - [Office of the Governor: "Governor Newsom signs most comprehensive data center laws in the nation, providing communities more control on water, electricity, and land use"](https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09/21/governor-newsom-signs-most-comprehensive-data-center-laws-in-the-nation-providing-communities-more-control-on-water-electricity-and-land-use/) - [Foley & Lardner: "California Enacts Seven Data Center Bills, Effective January 1, 2027: New Tariff, Entitlement, and Disclosure Rules"](https://www.foley.com/insights/publications/2026/09/california-enacts-seven-data-center-bills-effective-january-1-2027-new-tariff-entitlement-and-disclosure-rules-for-hyperscalers-developers-and-power-producers/) - [Mayer Brown: "California's Governor Signs Nation's 'Most Comprehensive' Data Center Laws"](https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/insights/publications/2026/09/californias-governor-signs-nations-most-comprehensive-data-center-laws-reshaping-regulation-of-energy-water-and-land-use) - [Stoel Rives: "California Governor Signs Data Center Legislation; CPUC Will Address Implementation"](https://www.stoel.com/insights/publications/california-governor-signs-data-center-legislation-california-public-utilities-commission-will-address-implementation) - [Sen. Steve Padilla: "Nation-Leading Data Center Regulations Signed Into Law"](https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/news/nation-leading-data-center-regulations-signed-law) - [mgrid.org: "Newsom Signs Seven Data Center Laws That Shift Grid Upgrade Costs, With None of the Thresholds Written Yet"](https://mgrid.org/2026/09/21/newsom-signs-seven-data-center-laws-that-shift-grid-upgrade-costs-with-none-of-the-thresholds-written-yet/) ## The Permit Pause Becomes a Campaign Instrument (September 14–21, 2026) **The section below treats the 417–3 House vote as a measure of how badly members wanted to be on record about electricity prices before November. Six days later the governor of the state with the most data-center load did the thing a federal advisory standard cannot do, and the reporting on it led with the polling.** [[Greg Abbott]]'s September 21 directive halts **environmental** permitting at TCEQ, not just grid interconnection at [[ERCOT]]. That distinction is the whole substance. An interconnection restriction is a queue-management decision a grid operator can be argued out of, project by project, with capacity commitments. An environmental-permit freeze routed through a state agency with water and air jurisdiction is a **siting veto**, and it applies to facilities that have already solved their power problem. The audits it is conditioned on — consumption, water, community impact, ownership, tax incentives — are also a disclosure regime by another name: Texas is now requiring the ownership and subsidy information that no state has been able to obtain from operators voluntarily. Recall that only **28%** complied with the earlier water survey. A permit freeze fixes a response rate that a survey could not. **The governor's-race framing in the CNBC and Bloomberg coverage is not color.** This page recorded on September 3 that a leaked NRSC memo called data centers "a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle" and an anchor around [[Jon Husted]]'s neck. Abbott had already reversed from supporting the buildout to threatening a moratorium and phasing out tax incentives. The escalation from threat to executed permit freeze, seven weeks before an election, in the state that has staked the most on being the buildout's home, is the clearest price signal the industry has received — and it came from the governor least likely to send it. **The same week supplied the two instruments that will outlast the election.** NERC's draft CLO standards would set the first continent-wide mandatory threshold — 50 MW and 100 kV — for which computational loads carry reliability obligations, filling a line FERC explicitly declined to draw in July. And Oklahoma's rate cases are where the utilities are making the opposite argument in a forum with subpoena power: that large-load tariffs will *lower* residential bills by $1.83 a month in 2027 rising to $6.84 by 2036. Somebody is going to be wrong in a docket, on the record, with a number attached. That is more than the House bill asked any state to do. **Watch:** whether Abbott's freeze is lifted before November or survives it; whether the TCEQ audits' ownership and tax-incentive findings are published rather than merely collected; whether NERC files the CLO standards by the December 31 deadline; and whether any state commission adopts a large-load tariff on the *promise* of residential savings, which would make the OG&E projections the first testable claim in the whole fight. Sources: - [Texas Tribune: "Gov. Greg Abbott broadens moratorium on data center approvals to include environmental permits"](https://www.texastribune.org/2026/09/21/texas-data-center-moratorium-water-energy/) - [CNBC: "Texas Gov. Abbott orders data center permit halt weeks after issuing moratorium"](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/21/texas-governor-abbott-ai-data-center-permits.html) - [Bloomberg: "Abbott Pauses Data Center Permits as Polls Tighten in Texas Race"](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-22/abbott-pauses-data-center-permits-as-polls-tighten-in-texas-race) - [mgrid.org: "NERC Sets Data Center Reliability Rules at 50 MW and 100 kV, a Threshold FERC Declined to Name"](https://mgrid.org/2026/09/19/nerc-sets-data-center-reliability-rules-at-50-mw-and-100-kv-a-threshold-ferc-declined-to-name/) - [Oklahoma Energy Today: "Utilities contend data centers could lead to savings for ratepayers"](https://okenergytoday.com/2026/09/utilities-contend-data-centers-could-lead-to-savings-for-ratepayers/) - [Planet Detroit: "Michigan environmentalists push for statewide data center moratorium, regulations as bills stall"](https://planetdetroit.org/2026/09/data-center-regulations-stall-michigan-legislature/) - [Michigan Advance: "Environmentalists push lawmakers to forge ahead on moratorium and regulations for data centers"](https://michiganadvance.com/2026/09/14/environmentalists-push-lawmakers-to-forge-ahead-on-moratorium-and-regulations-for-data-centers/) ## The Ratepayer Fix Passes the House 417–3 — and the Fight Moves to the Rate Cases (September 9–17, 2026) **The section above closed by asking whether the Ratepayer Protection Act would get a hearing before November. It got a floor vote and near-unanimous passage in eight days. That is the answer, and it is not the good news it looks like.** A 417–3 vote is not a policy victory. It is a measure of how badly every member of the House wants to be on record about electricity prices fifty days from an election. The three no votes — [[Summer Lee]], Delia Ramirez and [[Rashida Tlaib]] — came from the left, not the right, and the left-flank objection is the one worth reading: Food & Water Watch called the bill a "cynical handout to Big Tech" on September 14. Their argument is structural. H.R. 9340 does not require data centers to pay full freight. It directs **state commissions to *consider* adopting** a federal standard that would. The operative verb is the same one Congress has used since PURPA in 1978 when it wants the appearance of a national standard without the authority to impose one, and the actual decision stays exactly where it already was — in front of fifty public utility commissions, one rate case at a time. **Which is why the same week's state filings matter more than the vote.** Pennsylvania's PUC took the two steps a commission actually controls: it opened curtailment rulemaking and it put **return on equity** itself on the table — asking whether the utility's guaranteed profit rate should be set in a sector-wide proceeding rather than fought out case by case. North Carolina's attorney general went further and asked for a **separate rate class**, which is the only instrument in the regulatory toolkit that structurally prevents cost-shifting rather than arguing about it after the fact. Jackson's four Carbon Plan asks are the sharper document: publish the template large-load contract, report every deviation from it, forecast load every 90 days instead of every 180, and stop building gas until the late forecast revisions are reviewed. Those are the demands of somebody who has concluded the utility's load forecast is the thing being gamed. **The numbers underneath the politics moved the same week.** EIA's September outlook confirms the demand curve is real and still steepening: record generation in 2026 and again in 2027, with the *commercial* sector — the EIA's bucket for data centers — supplying **63% of all sales growth this year**. Pennsylvania's own regulator projects 18.56% industrial load growth over five years off a base where statewide consumption *fell* year over year. The load is not distributed across the economy. It is one customer class, and it is the class H.R. 9340 politely asks the states to think about. **Two things to watch.** First, whether the Senate takes up H.R. 9340 at all before November, or whether receipt on September 17 is where it stops — in which case the 417–3 vote was a press release with a roll call attached. Second, whether Jackson's separate-rate-class request survives Duke's opposition in North Carolina. A single commission granting a distinct data-center rate class would do more than the House bill does, and it would give every other state's consumer advocate a template. The federal instrument is advisory; the state instruments are not. Sources: - [congress.gov: H.R. 9340, all actions](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/9340/all-actions) - [Clerk of the House: Roll Call 312, September 16, 2026](https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2026312) - [Axios: "Scoop: House tees up pre-election vote on curbing data center power bills"](https://www.axios.com/2026/09/10/house-republicans-data-center-power-bills-ai) - [EIA: "EIA expects record electricity generation in 2026 and 2027"](https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/press592.php) - [Pennsylvania PUC: "PUC Moves to Address Data Center Impacts on Electric Reliability and Consumer Costs"](https://www.puc.pa.gov/press-release/2026/puc-moves-to-address-data-center-impacts-on-electric-reliability-and-consumer-costs-09102026) - [Utility Dive: "Pennsylvania PUC to consider ratemaking, ROE and curtailment as data center load grows"](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pennsylvania-puc-to-consider-rates-and-curtailment-as-data-centers-grow/830174/) - [NC DOJ: "Attorney General Jeff Jackson Proposes Framework to Ensure Data Centers Pay Their Fair Share for Energy Costs"](https://ncdoj.gov/attorney-general-jeff-jackson-proposes-framework-to-ensure-data-centers-pay-their-fair-share-for-energy-costs/) - [Food & Water Watch: "AI Data Center 'Ratepayer Protection Act' is Cynical Handout to Big Tech"](https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2026/09/14/ai-data-center-ratepayer-protection-act-is-cynical-handout-to-big-tech/) ## The Cost Shift Becomes a Ballot Question (September 2026) **Every state action this page logged in August — Abbott's ERCOT audit, Shapiro's GRID order, TVA's $1.5M/MW capacity charge, Florida's SB 484 hearing — was an administrative or regulatory instrument. In the first week of September the same fight reappeared as electoral arithmetic, and the party that has been building the demand curve found itself on the wrong side of it.** The turn is legible in a single day. On August 31 [[Donald Trump]] posted that communities opposing data centers want "to end up being backwards and poor," and in the same news cycle [[JD Vance]] told reporters that "probably 99% of the backlash" is about utility bills — and then flew to Michigan to campaign for [[Mike Rogers]], the first Republican to endorse a statewide moratorium. That is not message discipline breaking down. It is two politicians reading two different instruments: Trump reading the AI Action Plan's industrial logic, Vance reading the University of Pennsylvania number. The polling is the substance. **61% opposed, up 12 points in roughly six months, with majorities in all three partisan categories** — that is not a partisan issue acquiring salience, it is a valence issue forming. The Echelon result is the more useful one for this page's purposes: opposition to *banning* data centers collapses from 52% to **34%** when respondents are told the facilities cover schools, property-tax relief and local water investment. Voters are not against the buildout. They are against **paying for it**, which is precisely the variable the August regulatory actions were designed to move, and which nobody has yet moved at scale. Two structural notes. First, **the fix has converged across parties while the blame has not.** [[Jon Husted]]'s Ratepayer Protection Act, [[Josh Shapiro]]'s GRID permitting conditions, [[Greg Abbott]]'s threatened moratorium-absent-full-cost-recovery, and TVA's Capacity Commitment Charge are the same instrument with four authors from both parties: make the large load pay its own interconnection. When Republicans and Democrats independently arrive at the same remedy inside four weeks, the remaining contest is over attribution, not policy — and attribution in a midterm is worth more than the remedy. Second, **the foreign-influence explanation was tested and did not survive contact with its own evidence.** X Safety's August 27 identification of a Chinese bot farm covered ~200,000 accounts, of which about **200** consistently posted about data centers — one in a thousand. The number was published by the platform advancing the framing, and it refutes the framing. Compare the June Data Center Watch figures already on this page: 833 active opposition groups across 49 states, 75+ projects worth $130B+ delayed or cancelled in Q1 alone. The opposition is domestic, local, and older than the bot farm. **Watch for:** whether the Ratepayer Protection Act gets a hearing before November; whether Abbott's threatened Texas moratorium is issued or remains leverage; whether any candidate who ran *against* data centers wins a general election, which is the first real price signal the industry will receive; and whether the Echelon "if they pay for it" split shows up in the tariff design at PJM, ERCOT and TVA rather than only in polling crosstabs. Sources: - [RealClearPolitics: "Data Center Backlash Becomes September Surprise"](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/09/03/data_center_backlash_becomes_september_surprise_154467.html) - [University of Pennsylvania Almanac: "Opposition to Local Data Centers Rises Sharply"](https://almanac.upenn.edu/articles/opposition-to-local-data-centers-rises-sharply) - [Echelon Insights: August 2026 Voter Omnibus Topline (PDF)](https://echeloninsights.com/hubfs/_Media%20for%20Insights%20Blog/August%202026%20Voter%20Omnibus%20Topline%20-%20External.pdf) ## The Bottleneck Moves Upstream (August 25–29, 2026) **This page has spent eighteen months treating the constraint on AI power as a queue problem — interconnection, permitting, capacity auctions, who pays. In the last week of August three separate developments relocated the constraint to places no state commission can adjudicate: a metal-casting supply chain, a national-security prohibition, and the Army's real estate.** Start with the casting. [[SpaceX]]'s Bastrop foundry is the first attempt by an AI-compute buyer to vertically integrate into single-crystal superalloy blades — the hot-section parts without which a gas turbine is scrap. [[Elon Musk]]'s claim is that this is *the* limiting factor in turbine production, and the market structure supports it: four firms worldwide cast these at scale, and their order books run to roughly 2030. If that is right, then every gigawatt on this page's forecast tables has been implicitly assuming a supply of castings that does not exist, and the interconnection queue is downstream of a bottleneck nobody in the FERC dockets is arguing about. It also means the fast lane out of the queue is now capital-intensive vertical integration, which only the largest buyers can attempt. Then the prohibition. [[Executive Order 14421]] declares a national emergency over foreign-produced bulk-power equipment, and its covered list explicitly includes **generation turbines**, grid-connected inverters, battery storage and transformers, along with their software and remote-access capabilities. The Secretary of Energy is authorized to order equipment *already installed* isolated, disconnected, replaced or removed. Read against the paragraph above, the two are the same story from opposite ends: the order narrows the set of legal suppliers at the moment the physical supply is already short, and the order's own preamble says the reason it was necessary is that data centers and AI made the country more dependent on electricity. This is the first federal instrument on this page that constrains AI power buildout in the name of protecting AI power buildout. Then the land. The Army's $2.2 billion Janus awards put 1–20 MW microreactors on five installations — Bragg, Benning, Campbell, Hood, Drum — with vendor capital covering most of the project cost and a first operating unit targeted for September 30, 2028. Military bases are the one category of American real estate where siting, security and the political fight over "who is this for" are all pre-resolved. Whatever else Janus is, it is a demonstration pathway for advanced nuclear that routes entirely around the state commissions, county boards and interconnection queues documented everywhere else on this page. **The two live disputes tell you the rules are not settled.** [[Oklo]]'s FERC complaint is the sharper one: PJM's reformed cycle was designed for conventional generation, and a project that mixes 150 MW of nuclear with 300 MW of fuel cells and 300 MW of gas does not fit the ride-through and deficiency-notice framework. Oklo alleges PJM posted concerns on NextGen and withdrew the project without ever issuing the formal deficiency notice its own tariff requires. Whether or not Oklo is right, the underlying problem is real and general — the reformed queue is the mechanism this page has been treating as the fix, and the first hybrid advanced-nuclear project through it got withdrawn on a procedural ground fourteen months into the schedule. Meanwhile Florida's SB 484 hearing shows the state layer working exactly as [[TVA]] and Pennsylvania did in the previous entry: a utility asked to defer the hard question, and the Public Counsel said the filing "doesn't attempt to comply with the most basic provisions" of the statute. Duke has been approached about a 1,400 MW facility. That is a million homes, arriving as one customer, in a state that just wrote a law about who pays for it. **And the number to keep.** PJM's own market monitor puts data-center load at 9% of the wholesale power price — $10.48/MWh — through the capacity market alone, with $29.4 billion of added capacity-market revenue across four auctions. That is the answer to the question the July Ratepayer Protection Pledge was written to avoid, produced by the RTO's independent monitor rather than an advocacy group. It has already happened; it is not a forecast. *(Publication date for this figure is unconfirmed — verify before citing.)* ## Somebody Finally Prices the Cost Shift (August 18–20, 2026) **For eighteen months this page has tracked the same unanswered question in a dozen jurisdictions: when a data center adds load that requires new generation, who pays for the new generation? In one week two governments answered it in writing, and neither answer was "ratepayers."** The [[TVA]] board's August 20 decision is the cleaner instrument because it is a price. Data centers come out of the manufacturing service rate — the discount they had been sharing with factories, worth roughly 15–20% against ordinary commercial rates — and into a class of their own at about 10% higher, phased over three fiscal years for existing customers. Then the part that actually bites: from October 1, any new or expanding data-center load above 5 MW pays a **Capacity Commitment Charge of roughly $1.5 million per megawatt**, spread over three to five years. A 300 MW campus therefore arrives owing $450 million before it draws an electron. CEO Tom Rice's explanation is unusually plain for a utility: the charge reflects "the incremental capacity that needs to be added to the grid that's not covered in the base rate." The FY2027 budget contains no rate increase for residential or other business customers, which is the political point being made and the reason the board could make it. Pennsylvania's August 18 executive order is the other half of the same idea, expressed as a permit condition rather than a tariff. Under the GRID requirements, the Department of Environmental Protection will not review a data-center application at all unless the developer has made a **legally binding commitment** to pay the full cost of new generation, transmission, distribution and supporting infrastructure — *and* has already obtained local approval. Two secondary provisions are quietly as consequential: AI data centers are removed from the state's Permit Fast Track Program, and nondisclosure agreements on data-center projects are prohibited, which strips out the standard mechanism by which siting negotiations stay invisible until they are settled. [[Josh Shapiro]]: *"if you can't agree to our strict requirements and get the community where you want to build to say 'yes,' you're not going to have the Commonwealth's support either. These are some of the biggest companies in the world — they can afford to be good neighbors."* Set these against the July **Ratepayer Protection Pledge**, in which hyperscalers voluntarily promised the White House and a group of governors that data-center growth "will not raise electricity bills for American households and businesses," with no enforcement mechanism disclosed. Within six weeks a federal power authority and a large PJM state independently converted the same promise into a number and a condition precedent. The pledge's practical function turns out to be exactly what this page suspected: it does not bind the industry, but it makes the industry's legal challenges to binding rules considerably harder to argue. Two structural notes. First, this is the states-and-authorities layer moving faster than the RTO layer — PJM's Interim Resource Adequacy Service does not bite until June 1, 2027, and PJM explicitly punted enforcement to the states, which is now visibly happening. Second, the same week produced [[OpenAI]]'s ~8 GW-IT commitment at the PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio, on a former federal nuclear site, with [[NVIDIA]] backing and [[Department of Energy]] involvement. The lesson large loads are being taught is not *don't build*; it is *build where the cost shift is subsidized*. Watch whether Ohio, TVA-adjacent Tennessee counties, and the Texas queue Abbott just ordered audited begin to diverge on price — and read the six FERC show-cause filings from August 17, which nobody has yet. ## The Jurisdiction Play: Somebody Names a Date for Leaving the Grid (August 24, 2026) **Every constraint on this page is a constraint on load connected to a grid. On August 24 the largest single announced load put a launch date on not being connected to one.** [[Elon Musk]] told Bloomberg that SpaceX's first AI satellites will launch in the fourth quarter of 2027 and reach "significant scale" in 2028. The vehicle is **Starmind AI1**, the first of an orbiting network whose compute payload [[SpaceX]] and [[NVIDIA]] co-designed around Vera CPUs, Rubin GPUs and the Vera Rubin NVL72 rackscale system — the same architecture Musk pledged the entire SpaceX AI stack to on the August 4 earnings call. SpaceX has separately filed with the FCC proposing a megaconstellation of **up to one million** Starmind satellites. The satellite form factor, per SpaceX, is "significantly simpler, lower cost, denser and lighter than a traditional rack." Read it against the terrestrial curve this file already logged. Musk's stated targets are roughly **2 GW of compute online by end-2026** and **~10 GW by end-2027**, against 1.4 GW of nameplate compute at the end of Q2 — with a year-end-2027 power-and-cooling ambition variously stated as 20 GW or "close to 15 GW" with delays. The first Starmind launch arrives *after* that sevenfold terrestrial ramp is supposed to have happened. Orbit is not the near-term capacity plan. It is the stated answer to what happens when the near-term capacity plan meets an interconnection queue. **Why it belongs on this page.** The August 10 and August 17 entries traced enforcement migrating downward and outward — PJM relocating curtailment authority to fifty state commissions, FERC's 50 MW / 69 kV threshold catching essentially every data center in planning, TVA moving to strip the manufacturing rate, thirteen state proceedings that a consumer advocate called uniformly unprepared. Every one of those levers operates on a customer taking service from a regulated utility. None of them reaches a satellite. A million-satellite filing is, among other things, a request to site generation and compute in a venue where no public utility commission sets the allowed return, no RTO maintains a Large Load Registry, and no state legislature can pass an Illinois POWER Act. That is the same move as the May 2026 pivot from terrestrial solar to "orbital solar farms," except that this version has a partner, a chip architecture, an FCC docket and a date. Two cautions against taking the date at face value. First, this file's own August 6 finding stands: the gigawatt is the industry's unit of press release, and a Q4 2027 launch target announced in August 2026 is an announcement-layer artifact until it appears as a capital commitment in a filing. Second, the physics that make orbit attractive for power make it hard for everything else — thermal rejection, radiation, servicing, and orbital-debris and spectrum objections that the FCC docket will surface. What is *not* speculative is the direction of intent. When the constraint became regulatory rather than technical, the largest announced load began describing a path out of the regulator's jurisdiction. Watch the FCC docket, watch the first post-IPO 10-Q for whether Starmind is capitalized or narrated, and watch whether any other hyperscaler follows the same reasoning to the same place. --- ## The Sixty-Day Clock Runs Out (August 17, 2026) **The fast lane FERC opened on June 18 comes due this week, and the compliance filings are the first honest inventory of what is behind it.** The June 18 entry logged the show-cause orders in Docket RM26-4-000 as a decisive win for industry: FERC told all six RTOs — PJM, MISO, SPP, CAISO, ISO New England, NYISO — and their transmission owners that their existing large-load interconnection tariffs were presumptively unjust and unreasonable, and gave them sixty days to defend or replace them. That clock expires **August 17**. FERC set the trigger at peak load above **50 MW** interconnecting at above **69 kV**, which is the threshold that catches essentially every AI data center now in planning. Generation-adequacy informational reports were due July 20; abeyance requests were due August 3. What makes the filing wave worth watching is not the tariff language but the arithmetic underneath it. A show-cause order under Section 206 puts the burden on the operator: each RTO has to say, on the record, either that it can already interconnect these loads justly or exactly how it proposes to. PJM has spent the intervening weeks answering that question in the negative through other channels — a 6.8 GW shortfall in the 2028/29 auction, a backstop auction at a $555/MW-day cap, a mandatory Large Load Registry, and the Interim Resource Adequacy Service that makes new large load interruptible by default from June 1, 2027. The compliance filings force the other five to show their version of the same ledger at the same time. The through-line this log keeps returning to holds here. Every federal action in 2026 has shortened the queue to plug in without adding anything to plug into: the fast-track order, the coal revival, the $765M paid to cancel offshore wind. August 17 is the date the six operators have to put a number on that gap in their own words. Watch which RTOs ask for abeyance rather than file, and whether any of them adopts PJM's interruptible-by-default design — the point at which "curtailment as standing market design" stops being a PJM story and becomes the national template. --- ## Somebody Bought the Bottleneck (August 14, 2026) **The first clean read of how a tech-right principal is positioned for the thesis on this page: not in the AI companies, in the wires.** [[Peter Thiel]]'s Thiel Macro filed a Q2 13F showing eight new positions worth $418.7 million after two consecutive quarters of reporting nothing at all. Roughly **72% of it is electricity** — [[Vistra]], American Electric Power, DTE Energy, FirstEnergy, CMS Energy, the small-modular-reactor developer [[X-energy]], and Vista Energy, the Vaca Muerta shale producer. The single largest position, [[Amazon]] at $118 million, is itself a power story: it was bought into the July 31 earnings move in which AWS backlog jumped to $496 billion and Amazon raised 2026 capital spending to $220 billion. Read against the Development Log, the holdings are not a sector bet so much as a list of counterparties already named in this file. Vistra holds the 20-year, 1,200 MW nuclear power agreement with AWS at Comanche Peak and separate nuclear deals with [[Meta]]. AEP told investors it had 56 GW of signed data-center agreements against another 180 GW of requests. DTE's Alphabet contract in Michigan covers 1 GW. X-energy and Amazon are targeting more than 5 GW of new nuclear by 2039. These are the entities on the delivering side of every gigawatt this page has scored as announced-but-uncommitted. **Why it belongs on this page.** The Forbes finding below — that the gigawatt has become a unit of press release — describes an announcement layer that outruns a delivery layer. A capital allocator reading the same gap has two options: buy the announcers or buy the constraint. This filing buys the constraint. That has a political consequence rather than merely a financial one, because the returns on six of these eight positions are set by state utility commissions, interconnection queues, and cost-allocation fights — exactly the venues where PJM's Interim Resource Adequacy Service has just relocated enforcement, and exactly the thirteen state proceedings the August 10 entry flagged as unprepared. It converts electricity-siting politics from an abstraction into a disclosed personal interest for one of the most politically active investors in the tech right. Watch whether the Q3 filing holds the book, and whether any of these utilities appear in federal permitting or ratemaking fights where the same network is active on the policy side. --- ## The Ask and the Answer, Six Days Apart (August 10–12, 2026) This window produced the cleanest side-by-side the file has yet had between the announcement layer and the commitment layer — and they arrived in the same news cycle. **The answer (August 10).** Canary Media's reporting on PJM's FERC filings clarified what the July 31 tariff language actually does, and the design is a jurisdictional workaround rather than a market fix. PJM cannot tell a state-regulated utility which customers to shed — that authority is exclusively the states' under the Federal Power Act — so the **Interim Resource Adequacy Service** rebuilds the "non-capacity-backed load" program PJM abandoned in 2025, only with states and utilities as the enforcing parties. Large loads get one escape hatch, **BYONC — "bring your own new capacity"** — satisfied by bilateral contracts for new generation, storage, demand response, or virtual power plants. Fail to bring it and, from **June 1, 2027**, you are curtailed *before* pre-emergency demand response fires, which is to say ahead of the customers who are paid to reduce load. NRDC's Tom Rutigliano's read is the honest one: "it's almost like they got to not too far off from where they started." The number PJM put in the filing is the one that matters for this page: **30–34 GW of new large load by the early 2030s and up to 70 GW by 2038**, against roughly 15 GW of generation retired since 2022. And the enforcement is now thirteen separate state fights on a clock — the Citizens Utility Board's Clara Summers: "no state that I know of yet is completely prepared." Illinois's POWER Act (HB 5513) would make data centers buy matching clean energy; several PJM states have large-load tariffs in flight; none has moved as fast as consumer advocates want. Meanwhile the White House and a bloc of governors have extracted a **"Ratepayer Protection Pledge"** from the hyperscalers — a commitment that data-center growth won't raise household bills, with no disclosed enforcement mechanism. Its real function is defensive-legal: having signed it, the industry is awkwardly placed to sue the states over cost allocation. A pledge is what you get instead of a tariff. **The ask (August 12).** Two days later [[Elon Musk]] told a SpaceX all-hands that **"AI will be 99% of the value of [[SpaceX]]"** within four or five years, pledged the compute build to [[NVIDIA]]'s Vera Rubin architecture, and named a target of **20 GW of power and cooling by year-end 2027** — hedged in the same breath to "close to 15 GW" with delays. The installed base behind that number is **1.4 GW of nameplate compute** at the end of Q2, with >2 GW expected by year-end 2026. So: a 14x increase in eighteen months, announced verbally, with no interconnection agreement, financed generation, or queue position disclosed alongside it. Set the two against each other and the Forbes thesis below stops being commentary and becomes arithmetic. **One company's stated 2027 target is roughly two-thirds of the 30–34 GW that the largest U.S. grid operator forecasts for its entire 13-state footprint by the early 2030s** — and PJM's answer to any load of ≥50 MW that shows up without its own power is *you are interruptible*. Musk's plan is BYOP by construction (Terafab, gas turbines in the S-1, Megapacks, the orbital-compute concept), which is precisely why it is worth tracking as the test case: if the largest single announced load in the country intends to self-supply, the BYONC regime is not a constraint on it, and the ratepayer-protection question migrates from *who pays for the grid* to *who permits the private generation*. The gigawatt as unit of press release and the gigawatt as unit of tariff obligation are now moving on different clocks, and this page's job is to keep scoring both. ## The Gigawatt as a Unit of Press Release (August 6, 2026) Forbes put a name on something this file has been implicitly tracking since the Stargate announcement: **the gigawatt has become a rhetorical unit, not an engineering one**. Announcements now arrive denominated in GW because the number signals ambition at a scale investors reward — while the things that actually determine whether electrons flow (a signed interconnection agreement, financed generation, a queue position, an in-service date, a transmission upgrade) go unmentioned or unnamed. The result is an announced-capacity figure that no one reconciles against delivered capacity, because the announcements are marketing artifacts and the delivery is a decade-long utility process ([Forbes, Aug 6](https://www.forbes.com/sites/guneyyildiz/2026/08/06/every-ai-power-announcement-comes-with-a-gigawatt-few-come-with-a-commitment/)). **Why this matters for the file:** the 90 GW framing that names this log is itself an announced number. The corrective is to track the *commitment* layer instead — and that layer is now producing hard, dated artifacts: PJM's $555/MW-day backstop cap, the ≥50 MW Large Load threshold, the June 1, 2027 curtailment date, the TVA board's August 20 vote on whether data centers keep the manufacturing rate. Those are the numbers that bind. The gigawatt figures in the press releases are the ask; the tariff filings are the answer, and so far the answer is *bring your own power or be interruptible*. The TVA item is the same fight in a different jurisdiction and a revealing one, because it is retrospective: nearly twenty years ago the TVA board let data centers pay the manufacturing rate, a category built for factories. AI data centers are now ~18% of TVA's industrial load and projected to double by 2030 — meaning a discount designed for a different kind of customer is now the default price for the largest new load on the system, with the other ten million ratepayers absorbing the difference. Watch the August 20 vote. ## Hardware Strain and a Federal-Lands Counterattack (July 23 – August 6, 2026) Two additions from opposite ends of the story this window. On the physical layer, Bloomberg reported August 6 that **AI's volatile power draw is damaging the data centers themselves**: the rapid megawatt-scale swings of training workloads are wearing out batteries, generators, and cooling systems well ahead of schedule — a reminder that the 90-GW race stresses not just the grid but the buildings, and that reliability costs are creeping in on both sides of the meter ([Bloomberg, Aug 6](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-06/data-centers-are-being-damaged-by-ai-s-volatile-power-demand)). On the political layer, the federal-lands strategy this file has tracked as a "Next Steps" item now has formal congressional opposition: [[Rashida Tlaib]]'s **H.R. 9939** would permanently ban large AI data centers from all federal land and force removal of existing ones ([Tlaib press release](https://tlaib.house.gov/posts/rep-tlaib-introduces-a-bill-to-ban-ai-data-centers-on-federal-lands) · [TechRadar](https://www.techradar.com/pro/our-corrupt-ai-addicted-president-cannot-be-allowed-to-sacrifice-our-federal-lands-a-bill-to-permanently-ban-ai-data-centers-from-federal-lands-has-been-introduced-to-congress)). With 5 cosponsors it is a marker, not a threat — but it is the first legislative vehicle organizing opposition to the BLM/DOE siting push, and a sign the backlash is moving from county meetings to Congress. ## The Backstop Goes to FERC (July 31 – August 2026) The July 27 board proposal became a formal filing on July 31: PJM asked FERC to approve the one-time **reliability backstop auction** (Sept 30–Oct 21, results by Dec 2), and disclosed the price of admission — a **$555/MW-day cap**, a 71% jump over the $325 cap that the last base auction cleared at. That single number quantifies the shortfall better than any forecast: to conjure 6.8 GW of new capacity on an accelerated timeline, PJM is prepared to pay nearly $555 a day per megawatt for 15 years, a bill NRDC sizes at up to **$20 billion**, layered on top of the ~$29 billion in data-center-driven auction costs already in the rate base. PJM's own filing projects large-load growth of up to **70 GW by 2038** — meaning this "one-time" auction is the first installment, not the fix ([Utility Dive, Aug 3](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-backstop-capacity-auction-ferc-data-centers/826792/)). Two design choices deserve the file's attention. First, **the cost-allocation question is punted to the states**: PJM says the plan's success "relies on each of the PJM states to refine... which retail loads — including which 'large loads,' as each state defines such loads — should be allocated the costs." That is thirteen separate legislative fights over whether data centers or households pay, on a clock that ends when the auction clears. Second, the **curtailment half arrives separately on August 7** as the "Interim Resource Adequacy Service" filing — new large loads (post–June 2027) that don't bring their own supply become interruptible by rule, with the mandatory Large Load Registry as the enforcement backbone. The bring-your-own-power era is being written into the tariff. NRDC's read — "might be the single best thing they could have done to stabilize the grid" — is notable as environmental-advocacy endorsement of the BYOP mandate, even as the same group's framing concedes the plan improves *reliability*, not *prices*. Watch: FERC's response to both filings (ClearView flagged the commission's posture as the variable that shapes utility capex and data-center timelines); whether bilateral deals materially shrink the 6.8 GW target before Sept 30; and the December 2029/30 base auction as the first test of whether the two-tier design (capacity-backed vs. interruptible load) actually clears the market. ## The Backstop Auction and the Curtailment Registry (July 22–28, 2026) The last week of July delivered the sequel to the July 4th weekend's emergency orders: **curtailment moved from emergency improvisation to standing market design.** On July 27 the PJM board proposed a one-time **backstop capacity auction** in September — needed because the just-completed 2028/29 auction, the first without a FERC price collar, came up **6.8 GW short** of the capacity required for the delivery year starting mid-2028. Alongside it, PJM proposed a **mandatory registry of large-load customers**: new data centers and other large loads that do not bring their own generation would be enrolled for curtailment whenever the grid approaches emergency conditions ([TechCrunch, July 28](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/data-centers-may-face-temporary-power-cuts-to-prevent-blackouts-on-largest-us-grid/)). This is the §202(c) precedent (see previous section) institutionalized. What was a discretionary federal emergency power three weeks ago is becoming a routine grid-operator rulebook: bring your own power or accept interruptibility. The cost ledger arrived in the same news cycle — the market monitor now puts data-center-driven costs embedded in PJM capacity auctions since 2024 at roughly **$29 billion**, passed to households and businesses through rates, with capacity prices up ~11x in two years. Meanwhile the demand side did not pause: on July 22 Bloomberg reported [[OpenAI]]'s plan to spend more than $30B on a campus near Savannah, Georgia, with **3.2 GW** already contracted from Georgia Power — a single company's single site equal to nearly half of PJM's entire shortfall. The two stories in the same week are the whole file in miniature: the grid operators are building machinery to ration what the hyperscalers keep ordering more of. Watch: whether FERC approves the backstop auction and registry; the September auction's clearing price; whether "interruptible by default" becomes the national template for large-load interconnection (Texas's ERCOT has flirted with the same design). ## The Curtailment Precedent (July 2026) Over the Fourth of July weekend the grid crisis stopped being a forecast and became an executive order. On June 30, Energy Secretary [[Chris Wright]] signed **two emergency orders under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act** — the statute that lets the federal government suspend normal rules when the grid is in danger — covering PJM Interconnection through the night of July 3. PJM was forecasting roughly **166,150 MW** of demand for July 2, which would have broken the all-time record of 165,563 MW set in 2006. It was the **third §202(c) invocation inside PJM in 2026 alone**. The orders did two things worth separating: 1. **They authorized curtailment of the data centers themselves.** PJM can now direct transmission owners to force large loads of **50 MW or more** off the grid and onto their own backup generation. For an AI data center, "backup generation" means a diesel farm. 2. **They waived the pollution limits.** Both the emergency generation and the displaced backup diesel are allowed to run past their normal emissions caps. Three implications for this file: **The federal government has now conceded, in writing, that the load cannot be served.** Every prior policy move in this log has been an attempt to *supply* the demand — the FERC fast-track order (June 18), the $850M coal revival (June 4), the $765M paid to *cancel* offshore wind (June 17). Curtailment is the opposite admission: on the hottest days, the compute has to be shed. The gap between the ~90 GW of announced AI demand and what the grid can physically deliver is no longer an argument between analysts; it is an operating procedure. **It establishes the mechanism before the politics are settled.** The precedent that a federal energy secretary can order hyperscale data centers offline is a lever that cuts both directions — a future administration could use it as a demand-management tool, and a friendly one can decline to use it. Who gets curtailed, in what order, and whether ordinary ratepayers are shed before or after the AI load, is now a discretionary federal decision made inside an emergency order rather than an open rate case. **The emissions bill lands on the same communities twice.** The Environmental Integrity Project's July 1 report (see log) found ~90% of proposed behind-the-meter gas plants sit in counties with below-average life expectancy. The §202(c) waivers add a second layer: when the grid is stressed, those same neighborhoods get the diesel backup *and* the un-capped plant emissions. The "clean AI" story and the actual combustion ledger keep diverging. Watch: whether §202(c) invocations become routine summer infrastructure rather than emergencies, and the **PJM 2028/29 capacity auction results, due after 4pm July 14** — the first clearing price with no FERC price collar, and the number that tells us what data-center load is doing to everyone else's bill. ## New Vectors: Offshore and Space Compute (May 2026) Two developments in May 2026 signal the emergence of compute-infrastructure pathways that bypass the grid-capacity and land-use constraints slowing onshore construction: **Panthalassa (offshore, ocean-powered):** [[Peter Thiel]] personally led a $140M Series B (May 4) for Panthalassa, an Oregon-based company building autonomous floating "Ocean-3" nodes powered by wave energy. Targeting AI **inference** compute (not training), with pilot deployments in the northern Pacific in 2026 and commercial systems in 2027. $1B unicorn valuation. Co-investors include [[John Doerr]], [[Marc Benioff]], [[Max Levchin]], Super Micro Computer. **SpaceXAI / Anthropic space-compute interest:** As part of the Colossus rental deal (May 6–9), [[Anthropic]] publicly expressed interest in working with SpaceX to develop **multiple gigawatts of compute capacity in space** — the first major customer signal for orbital data centers. Musk himself walked back the concept in April as "may be a really terrible idea," but Anthropic's interest may revive it. **The SMR pipeline explosion:** Conditional offtake agreements between data center operators and small modular reactor projects have grown from **25 GW (end 2024) to 45 GW (May 2026)** — nearly doubling in 18 months. This is the clearest demand signal that the nuclear renaissance is real, even as no SMR is yet commercially operational at scale in the U.S. **Democratic override:** In Michigan, local residents voted against a $16B Stargate data center project — and construction began anyway. This is the first documented case of a community democratic rejection being overridden by the AI infrastructure buildout, and it foreshadows the sovereignty conflicts flagged in the Structural Tensions section above. ## The Grid Crisis Materializes (May 2026) The grid-capacity constraint flagged throughout this page is now producing concrete emergencies: **PJM hits "crisis stage."** PJM Interconnection — the largest U.S. grid operator, serving 65 million people across 13 states — projects it will be **6 GW short of reliability requirements by summer 2027**. Bloomberg reported PJM sees a potential **60 GW shortfall over the next decade**. The independent market monitor's president stated flatly: "PJM has never been this short." Wholesale power prices in PJM territory jumped **75.5% year-over-year** ($77.78→$136.53/MWh in Q1 2026 vs. Q1 2025), driven by data center demand. PJM is launching an emergency **15 GW matchmaking plan** — acting as confidential broker between data center developers and power plant builders — with Phase 1 running September 2026 through March 2027. **The BYOP (Bring Your Own Power) era.** The 3–5 year backlog on high-voltage grid transformers has affected half of America's 2026 AI data center capacity. Sightline Climate tracks **12 GW of 2026 U.S. data center capacity** announced across 140 projects, but grid connection timelines make many of these aspirational. The industry response: on-site power generation bypassing the grid entirely — natural gas turbines, diesel backup, and (eventually) SMRs. The defining risk for AI data center expansion has shifted from computational efficiency to the physical availability of grid-scale power. **Community resistance accelerates.** Hill County, Texas (55 miles south of Fort Worth) became the **first Texas county to impose a moratorium on data center construction** on May 12 — a 1-year pause on new builds in unincorporated areas, passed 3-2 by county commissioners after residents raised concerns about water consumption, noise pollution, and electricity costs from a proposed 300-acre development. Eight potential data center developments are affected. The county expects lawsuits from developers. This joins the Michigan case (community voted down $16B Stargate data center, construction began anyway) as part of a growing pattern: the AI infrastructure buildout is running into democratic opposition at the local level, and the outcomes depend on whether local or federal authority prevails. ## The Backlash Goes Mainstream (June 2026) The clearest shift versus the May baseline is political, not technical: the affordability backlash against AI data centers turned **mainstream and bipartisan**, and the supply response tilted toward **gas and coal** rather than the nuclear renaissance. **The opposition is now a national movement.** A June 16 Data Center Watch report found **75+ projects worth more than $130 billion delayed or cancelled in Q1 2026 alone** — matching all of 2025's opposition in three months. Active opposition groups grew from 396 (end of 2025) to **833 by the end of March 2026**, spanning 49 states; about a dozen states have introduced moratoriums, and New York passed a one-year pause on large data-center permits. Crucially, the resistance is no longer partisan — Republican-led restriction bills are advancing in South Carolina, and proposed data centers have become a GOP issue in South Dakota and Michigan. A June Heatmap poll found roughly 7 in 10 Americans now oppose a data center near them, a ~49-point swing since September 2025 that crosses party lines (63% of Trump voters). **The bills mechanism gets sharper — and a fact-check.** Energy Innovation analysts argued (June 8) that the ~100 GW of planned **behind-the-meter gas** for data centers will raise household and small-business bills *more* than grid connection would: data centers buying bulk gas via contracts escape state utility-regulator jurisdiction, while gas plants set the marginal electricity price in most hours, so their gas demand lifts prices for everyone. On June 12, PolitiFact rated "Mostly False" [[Elizabeth Warren]]'s claim that data-center neighbors pay up to 267% more for power (that figure is wholesale, not residential) — while confirming the underlying reality of tens of billions in wholesale increases passed to ratepayers. **The supply answer this window was fossil, plus a space moonshot.** The Trump DOE committed up to **$850M to coal capacity** (June 4) explicitly tied to data-center demand, even as Apollo, [[Blackstone]], and banks stood up a **$35B "Broadcom AI XPV Platform"** (June 9) for 20+ GW of compute for [[Anthropic]] and [[OpenAI]], and OpenAI weighed a **10 GW Ohio campus on DOE land** (~$500B). SpaceX, the same company whose IPO carried the $2.8B gas-turbine commitment, unveiled an **orbital "AI1" data-center** concept (June 8–9) pitching space-based compute as an end-run around the terrestrial power crunch. Nuclear/SMR news was quiet this window — the "45 GW pipeline / no US commercial SMR operational" picture is unchanged. **The federal fast-lane lands (June 18).** The first of those imminent tests resolved decisively in industry's favor. On June 18 FERC voted **unanimously** to order the six major grid operators — including PJM — to fast-track interconnection for data centers and other large loads under Docket RM26-4-000, the action [[Chris Wright]]'s DOE had been pressing since October. Large loads must pay their own interconnection costs; operators get 30 days to report any spare generating capacity and 60 days to defend or revise their rate structures, and FERC told them to be more accommodating to behind-the-meter power and to weigh "alternative transmission technologies." The tell is what the order does *not* do — as TechCrunch put it, it shortens the queue to plug in while doing nothing about the shortage of generation to plug into: the line to connect is being cut even though the grid itself can't yet serve what's already waiting. A day earlier (June 17) the administration agreed to pay Invenergy **$765M** to cancel offshore wind leases off California, Maine, and New York — including a 2.4 GW project — pushing total federal spending to kill offshore wind to roughly **$2.6B**, with the developer redirecting the money to Midwest gas and Western geothermal. Same week, same vector: accelerate fossil-backed load growth while retiring clean supply. **Pending:** PJM's 2028/2029 capacity auction is due in June — the remaining imminent test with no result yet. FERC's large-load rule (above) now moves into the 30-/60-day operator-report phase, which will reveal how little spare generation actually exists behind the new fast lane. ## The Uncapped Auction Opens (June 30 – July 4, 2026) The pending test arrived. PJM opened its **Base Residual Auction for the 2028/29 delivery year on June 30** (running through July 4) — the **first auction since the FERC-approved price cap/collar mechanism expired**, meaning clearing prices can rise above the $329–333/MW-day caps that *both* of the previous two auctions slammed into. The stakes were quantified by PJM's own independent market monitor: data-center load accounted for roughly **$6.5 billion — 40% — of the $16.4 billion** in costs from the December 2025 auction (2027/28 delivery year), costs that flow to ratepayers across 13 states and DC. With the collar gone and the FERC fast-lane order (June 18) accelerating new large-load connections into the same constrained pool, the 2028/29 results — expected later in July — are the next flashpoint in the data-center/ratepayer fight and the clearest price signal yet on what the AI buildout costs everyone else. Watch: the clearing price against the old caps, the political reaction in PJM states, and whether "data centers pay their own way" proposals gain legislative traction off the result. Sources: [Utility Dive: "Data centers loom over PJM capacity auction"](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/data-centers-pjm-capacity-auction/808951/) · [Utility Dive: "PJM capacity auction opens without price collar"](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacity-auction-data-center/808264/) ## The BYOP Buildout Gets an Emissions Bill (July 1–2, 2026) The behind-the-meter gas turn flagged in the June analysis now has hard numbers. The Environmental Integrity Project's July 1 report **"The Power Behind AI"** counts **74 proposed behind-the-meter gas plants nationwide** built specifically to power AI data centers — plants that bypass the grid (and, in Texas, state utility-regulator jurisdiction) entirely. **Texas hosts 32 of them, nearly half**, and EIP estimates the Texas projects alone could emit **more than 287 million tons of greenhouse gases per year**, plus thousands of tons of particulate matter and NOx. The single largest: **Project Matador** (Fermi America) near Amarillo, whose planned **11 GW** of gas generation could release 40M+ tons/yr — among the largest proposed emitters in the country. The equity findings sharpen the political exposure: ~90% of proposed plants nationwide sit in counties with below-average life expectancy, 40% of residents within three miles are low-income, and at least 188 schools sit inside that radius. Panhandle 1st Coalition organizer Kendra Seawright: *"What is the point of winning the AI race if it costs the lives of the people you're supposed to protect?"* This is the missing ledger line for the BYOP era — the same behind-the-meter architecture that solves the interconnection-queue problem (see the FERC fast-lane, June 18) also escapes both ratepayer accounting and, largely, public review, and the report hands the bipartisan siting backlash its first consolidated emissions inventory. Sources: [KERA: "Proposed Texas AI power plants could emit 287 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, report says"](https://www.keranews.org/energy-environment/2026-07-02/ai-data-centers-texas-power-plants-pollution-climate-change) · [EIP: "The Power Behind AI" (PDF)](https://environmentalintegrity.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/EIP_Report_ThePowerBehindAI_7.1.26.pdf) ## A Nuclear Battery Reaches Criticality (July 7, 2026) The nuclear thread this page has tracked — a 45 GW SMR offtake pipeline with *no U.S. advanced reactor yet operational* — got its first hardware milestone. On July 7, energy-project marketplace GridMarket and microreactor developer Deployable Energy announced a partnership framed as a **$22.5 billion nuclear pipeline** to power data centers and other energy-intensive infrastructure, targeting **over 3 GW of cumulative clean nuclear deployment through 2035** and an installation cadence of **500 MW per year from 2030 to 2035**. The companies put the estimated lifetime contract value at roughly **$145 billion over a 40-year horizon**. The news peg underneath the deal is the technical one: Deployable Energy says its **Unity "nuclear battery" demonstration reactor achieved criticality in about 150 days from project kickoff** — positioning it among the first advanced-reactor developers to hit the DOE's accelerated-deployment targets. The Unity unit is pitched as delivering electricity, heat, and cooling in a single package while cutting water intensity, which speaks directly to the cooling-water and siting constraints driving the offshore (Panthalassa) and behind-the-meter-gas workarounds elsewhere on this page. Two cautions keep this in perspective. A demonstration reactor reaching criticality is a long way from **commercial-scale, grid- or data-center-serving generation**, and the headline "$22.5B pipeline / $145B lifetime value" figures are projected contract value through 2035 and beyond, not committed offtake or operating capacity today. Still, it is the clearest sign this window that the SMR pipeline is beginning to convert from paper agreements toward built hardware — the missing piece in the "nuclear renaissance is real but nothing is running yet" picture. Watch for NRC/DOE licensing steps, the first named data-center offtaker, and whether the 2030 first-installation date holds. Sources: [GlobeNewswire: "GridMarket and Deployable Energy Partner on $22.5B Nuclear Pipeline to Power Data Center Customers Through 2035"](https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/07/07/3323396/0/en/GridMarket-and-Deployable-Energy-Partner-on-22-5B-Nuclear-Pipeline-to-Power-Data-Center-Customers-Through-2035.html) · [Interesting Engineering: "Advanced US nuclear battery deal targets 3000 MW power with $22.5 billion pipeline"](https://interestingengineering.com/energy/advanced-us-nuclear-battery) ## Next Steps to Track - Stargate Abilene campus construction milestones and first operational date - Three Mile Island / Crane Clean Energy Center restart timeline (target: 2028) - Northern Virginia permit moratorium updates - First commercially operational SMR in the U.S. - Federal land designations for AI data centers under Trump executive orders - Community opposition and environmental litigation against data center projects - China's nuclear build-out and its implications for AI compute competition - Grid reliability impacts as data center load increases through 2026–2028 - Eric Schmidt / Bolt first campus groundbreaking - Meta Prometheus supercluster operational timeline --- ## See Also - [[Eric Schmidt]] — Bolt Data & Energy; SCSP; "90 GW" framing at TED 2025 - [[OpenAI]] — Stargate Project lead partner - [[Stargate Project]] — $500B AI infrastructure joint venture - [[Elon Musk]] — xAI data centers; Tesla Megapack self-dealing - [[Sam Altman]] — Stargate co-architect; Oklo board member - [[Meta]] — Nuclear energy mega-buyer - [[Microsoft]] — Three Mile Island restart - [[Non-Stationarity of Objectives]] — Schmidt's AI-limitations framework (context for why scaling matters) - [[TESCREAL]] — The ideological framework that treats AI scaling as civilizational imperative