Today's throughline: everyone else is being asked to pay. The grid's federal reliability body says the current system can't absorb what's being built. A Southern governor is moving to stop absorbing the tax cost. And in Allen County, Ohio, a utility is beginning the public process that will ask ratepayers to absorb the transmission cost of serving a single Google data center. Three levers, three levels, one question.
NERC — the federal-designated body responsible for bulk power system reliability — will issue a May alert escalating its warnings on data center load volatility, publicly stating that utilities “generally did not have sufficient processes, procedures, or methods to address emerging computational loads." The summer peak demand forecast grew by 224 gigawatts over ten years in a single year of revision — a 69% jump — and NERC attributes most of it to new data centers. Communities reviewing data center proposals no longer have to argue the grid-reliability question from first principles. The grid's own overseer has answered it. Read the full story →
AEP Ohio will build a new substation on Google's property in Sugar Creek Township plus four miles of 345-kilovolt transmission lines on steel poles 140 to 170 feet tall — and the public open house is Wednesday, May 6 at the Veterans Memorial Civic Center in Lima. This is the earliest public step in a project that will go through Ohio Power Siting Board review and, later, PUCO cost-recovery proceedings. Residents along the four-mile corridor have roughly 18 months of advance notice before construction begins in fall 2027 — and the open house is the highest-leverage hour of community engagement in that window. Once the formal OPSB filings land, a 10-day intervention clock runs out fast. Read the full story →
The North Carolina General Assembly returns to Raleigh today with bipartisan momentum behind Gov. Josh Stein's push to modify or repeal the state's sales tax exemptions on data center electricity and equipment purchases — exemptions that currently cost the state about $50 million a year and could grow to as much as $450 million a year if left alone. Stein: "We must be clear-eyed about the cost of data centers to ratepayers in terms of higher power bills, and clear about their cost to taxpayers in terms of lost revenue." He also cited Trump's March “ratepayer protection pledge” — a cross-aisle framing that gives Republican legislators cover. The 2006 and 2015 exemptions were written when a 5-megawatt facility was large. Today's hyperscale projects are two orders of magnitude bigger. Read the full story →
Also today: Maine Gov. Mills continues to weigh LD 307, the country's first statewide data-center moratorium — no procedural movement this week, but Maine Morning Star's analysis piece flags that Mills is considering the bill “without the exemption process she wanted,” which could hint at a veto. Residents near Sterling Vantage II are continuing to press Loudoun County on the off-grid gas-turbine facility, and a newly surfaced Leesburg-area substation proposal is drawing supervisor concern. Pennsylvania's PSATS statewide zoning push was picked up by States Newsroom today, confirming the story is traveling beyond the Pennsylvania press.