Three sides of the same fight showed up on the same morning. On the developer side, PPL Electric said its Pennsylvania data-center pipeline grew 12% in three months, to 28.3 GW; PJM unveiled a market-reform paper and opened its long-paused interconnection queue to more than 800 projects; and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore opened PJM's annual meeting by telling the grid manager that data centers should pay for their own infrastructure instead of pushing the cost onto everyone else. On the resistance side, an Ohio Capital Journal exit-poll review found that confusing ballot wording in Richland County, Ohio likely flipped last week's vote on a renewable-energy ban — about one in five voters appear to have voted the opposite of what they intended. In Indiana, 27 groups led by the Citizens Action Coalition asked local governments for an indefinite statewide moratorium on data centers, while a state senator launching her run for Indianapolis mayor said she'd back one too. And on the supply side: a Reuters investigation that ran in at least 16 Gannett papers found that top solar companies, banks, and insurers have stopped doing business with at least half a dozen recently built U.S. solar-panel factories because of Trump-administration policy uncertainty over their China ties — paralyzing the financing of more than a third of U.S. solar capacity at the same moment that demand is climbing.
On its first-quarter earnings call Friday, Allentown-based PPL Electric Utilities told investors its “advanced stage” data-center pipeline in Pennsylvania climbed from 25.2 GW three months ago to 28.3 GW by 2034, with about 5 GW already under construction. PPL has signed contracts in Pennsylvania with QTS, Amazon Web Services, PowerHouse Data Centers, and CoreWeave. A separate PPL joint venture with Blackstone Infrastructure is now signing multiple gas-turbine reservation agreements with hyperscalers and submitting generation requests to the PJM interconnection queue. CEO Vincent Sorgi told the call he'd “be surprised if we weren't … announcing something meaningful this year.” On who should pay for the new wires and plants those data centers need, Sorgi said the same thing Maryland's governor said the next day: the customers driving the demand should foot the bill — and he wasn't sure PJM's proposed backstop auction will actually deliver that.
That same Monday, PJM Interconnection — the grid manager for 13 states from Illinois to Virginia — opened its annual member meeting and put a three-pathway reform paper on the table after years of price-spike pressure. PJM also reopened its interconnection queue, frozen since 2022, with more than 800 proposed power projects to review. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, opening the meeting: "For too long, affordability and reliability have been framed as competing goals. That somehow keeping the lights on tomorrow requires working families to pay crushing prices today. It's a false choice." Moore asked PJM to finish the planned 15 GW reliability auction on schedule, approve new power resources faster, and require data centers to pay for the infrastructure they need rather than spreading those costs to ordinary ratepayers.
Source: Ethan Howland / Utility Dive and Marley Parish / Pennsylvania Capital-Star.
A University of Michigan Ph.D. candidate, Graham Diedrich, ran exit polling at a dozen locations across Richland County during the May 5 vote on the county's ban on most large solar and wind projects in 11 of its 18 townships. The certified tally: 53% “yes” to keep the ban, 47% “no” to repeal it. But Diedrich's analysis of 1,193 voter surveys found that roughly one in five voters across all political groups stated a preference that did not match their ballot choice. The reason: under Ohio Senate Bill 52, a county commission can pass a ban, and a citizen referendum can be put on the ballot to overturn it — but the ban then needs a majority “yes” to take effect. So a “yes” vote actually keeps the ban, and a “no” vote repeals it. When Diedrich modeled what the result would have looked like if every voter had cast the ballot that matched their stated preference, the outcome flipped to 54-46 against the ban.
The vote did not change the legal outcome. But the size of the gap is large enough to matter the next time SB 52 lands on a ballot anywhere else in Ohio — and that is the kind of structural problem that travels. Even one of the county commissioners who supported keeping the ban, Cliff Mears, told Canary Media in March, "It's confusing."
Source: Kathiann M. Kowalski / Canary Media, republished by Ohio Capital Journal.
The Citizens Action Coalition led 27 named organizations — including the Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter, the Hoosier Environmental Council, and local groups in Warrick and Vanderburgh counties — in a release Thursday asking Indiana's local governments to put an indefinite pause on new data centers while the state writes rules. Per the coalition, roughly 60 large data-center proposals have surfaced in Indiana over the past two years, and only 13 Indiana counties have passed moratoriums or bans. Indianapolis-area readers will remember the bill-shock anchor: Indiana ratepayers saw average electric bills jump by about 25% after the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approved a CenterPoint base-rate hike last year. Ben Inskeep, the coalition's program director — the same Indiana voice quoted in last week's national Reuters investigation on construction-work-in-progress charges: "AI data centers are the number one threat to utility affordability, reliability, and environmental sustainability in Indiana. Elected officials should ensure that there are adequate rules in place to protect their constituents from the extremely harmful impacts that a data center can impose on a community." The same day, the Boone County Area Plan Commission unanimously sent a favorable recommendation for a one-year data-center moratorium to county commissioners — Boone County is where Meta is currently building a $10 billion campus in Lebanon, which the proposed moratorium would not affect.
The same morning, IndyStar ran a long interview with State Sen. Andrea Hunley, who launched her bid for Indianapolis mayor at a 1,500-person event May 8 at Tinker House. Asked about a project called Metrobloks now coming into her Senate district in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood, Hunley said the developer told her the building, when complete, would provide about 10 jobs. (IndyStar's editor noted that Metrobloks now expects closer to 45 permanent “high-skilled” jobs.) On a moratorium: "I would support a moratorium to create a plan, a moratorium to slow us down, to really make sure that we're looking at the entire landscape. There are other mayors, there are other city governments in Indiana who are doing this well … saying, 'OK, hold on, we need to look at what the impact is going to be on our energy costs. Can our grid handle this? How is this going to impact our electric bills?' That's not happening here."
Source: Jon Webb / Evansville Courier & Press; Kayla Dwyer / Indianapolis Star; Axios Indianapolis “Burb Bites."
A Reuters investigation by Nichola Groom ran in at least 16 Gannett papers today. Top solar companies, banks, and insurers have stopped doing business with at least half a dozen recently built U.S. solar-panel factories, Groom reported, because of uncertainty over whether the factories' ties to China might disqualify them from clean-energy tax subsidies. The policy driver: provisions in the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cut clean-energy subsidies and restricted certain foreign countries — including China — from securing the ones that remained. Sunrun, the largest U.S. residential solar installer, is one of the companies now avoiding Chinese suppliers. Keith Martin, an attorney at Norton Rose Fulbright who advises on renewable-energy tax deals: "It's holding up financings of desperately needed solar and storage projects." The Reuters piece notes the policy could backfire by slowing U.S. manufacturing jobs and new power generation at exactly the moment electricity bills are rising and data-center demand is climbing.
Source: Nichola Groom / Reuters, via USA Today Network in 16+ Gannett papers.
Have a tip? The Docket tracks zoning hearings, ordinance drafts, rate cases, transmission disputes, and community organizing efforts that often don't reach print. Send leads to [email protected]. Sources protected by default.
The Development Docket covers electric infrastructure, data-center development, and energy policy. Subscribe to receive each new piece by email.