Your morning read on who's building what, where, and who pays for the grid it needs.
If you've been wondering why your electric bill keeps going up while data centers keep going up next door — three things landed this weekend that are worth knowing about. Pennsylvania regulators moved to make data centers pay for their own power lines instead of putting the cost on your bill. The New York Times finally put a name on the problem of secret land deals showing up in rural communities — both for AI data centers and for ICE detention. And the Associated Press explained why most state-level efforts to slow the buildout keep dying in committee: the construction unions are on the same side as the tech companies.
Pennsylvania said data centers should pay for their own grid upgrades. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission voted Wednesday in favor of a new rule that would require big electricity customers — meaning data centers, mostly — to pay up front for the new power lines, transformers, and substations built to serve them. Right now, when a utility builds new infrastructure for a giant new customer, the cost gets spread across everyone's electric bill. The proposed rule would say no — the customer who needs the new equipment pays for it. The exact language hasn't been finalized yet, and there's a loophole-sized question about what counts as infrastructure that was “already planned” before the data center showed up. But the principle is clear, and it lands in the state with arguably the biggest data-center pipeline in the country. The Environmental Defense Fund, which had pushed for the rule, called it a step toward “protecting Pennsylvania customers from bearing the costs of rapid data center growth."
The Times identifies the secret-land-deal problem. A New York Times opinion piece by Rotimi Adeoye named two cases: a 300-person Pennsylvania township whose supervisor learned only after the deed was recorded that the federal government had bought the town's biggest commercial property for an ICE detention center holding up to 7,500 people, and a Kentucky farm family who got a $26 million offer for their land — ten times the going rate — from an AI company that hid its identity behind nondisclosure agreements with their neighbors. Adeoye's argument: rural communities aren't being given a chance to weigh in on what gets built next to them, and the fix is a federal disclosure law requiring both private developers and federal agencies to say who they are and what they're building before they buy land or apply to rezone it. The Pennsylvania case is bipartisan — both Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat who supports Trump's immigration enforcement, and Governor Josh Shapiro oppose the Tremont Township detention facility, on water and infrastructure grounds.
The construction unions explained why moratoriums keep losing. An Associated Press feature out of Harrisburg this weekend laid out something that anyone who's been in a town-hall fight over a data center has probably noticed: the construction unions show up to defend the projects, often as the only voice in the room speaking in favor. Boilermakers Local 154 in southwestern Pennsylvania went from recruiting zero apprentices for four years straight to building a class of 200-plus, almost entirely on the back of data center and power plant work. Forty percent of work hours at the Columbus-Central Ohio building trades are now on data centers; in metro DC's electricians' local, it's at least half. State Senator Katie Muth, a Pennsylvania Democrat, told the AP she can't get fellow Democrats to sign onto her data-center regulation bill because the unions back weaker alternatives. The clearest line came from the head of the national plumbers and pipefitters union: “If we chose as a union to have a moratorium on building the data centers because we didn't believe it was right for America, the data centers would still be getting built. They're not stopping because of organized labor."
Texas got more detail on the next big Google data center. Google has told Archer County, Texas — southwest of Wichita Falls — that its proposed “Project Raptor” would cover 2,800 acres, cost about $1 billion to build, employ 50 full-time people, and need 1,000 megawatts of power from the Texas grid. That's $20 million in capital investment per permanent job. The water number is small (32,000 gallons a day, mostly for restrooms), because the design uses air-cooling instead of water-cooling. The local judge, Randall Jackson, was diplomatic about it: “We are an advocate for Archer County. That dynamic has been twisted since there has been so little information provided by Google."
South Carolina's Lowcountry got two more big environmental groups in its corner. The Sierra Club of South Carolina and Savannah Riverkeeper have joined landowner opposition to a trio of projects in rural Colleton County: a 2,200-megawatt natural gas power plant, a 70-mile underground pipeline, and an 800-acre data center. Meanwhile, the state-owned utility Santee Cooper voted Friday to start the process of raising electric rates roughly 9 percent over the next two years, partly to fund that gas plant — whose cost estimate has doubled, in less than a year, from $2.5 billion to $5 billion.
Your electric bill, if you live in PJM territory. That's the regional grid covering most of the Mid-Atlantic and the upper Midwest — Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, Delaware, parts of Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee. The grid operator is projecting that a couple of years from now, demand for electricity in this region will outrun supply. Whether that shortfall actually materializes — and who pays the cost of building the new power plants and transmission lines to head it off — is now the central regulatory question in every PJM state. Pennsylvania's move this week (above) is the cleanest attempt yet to put that cost on the data centers driving the demand instead of on households.
Your electric bill, if you live in Dayton, Ohio. Montgomery County Commissioner Mary McDonald — a former Trotwood mayor — filed written opposition this week to AES Ohio's pending request for another distribution rate increase. Ohio electricity prices are up 5 percent year-over-year against 3 percent overall inflation, and a Dayton Daily News reader survey in January reported heating bills topping $1,000 in some households.
Your electric bill, if you're a Santee Cooper customer in South Carolina. See above — about $13 a month more, on average, by 2028.
Three votes on Tuesday, May 5, are worth watching. Ohio's Richland County is voting on whether to repeal its renewable-energy ban — and Canary Media reported through Ohio Capital Journal that the campaign to keep the ban has financial ties back to a dark-money group founded by former natural-gas-industry executives. Ohio's Democratic gubernatorial primary is the same day; so is a contested council primary in St. Joseph County, Indiana that could flip the council's partisan balance.
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