Today the “what is a public utility?” question moves through three state regulatory venues, in three different directions. Wisconsin's PSC votes on whether hyperscale data centers should pay 100% of their grid costs or 75%. Ohio's Supreme Court rules unanimously that any company supplying electricity to consumers — including third-party submeterers — falls under utility regulation. And Mississippi's PSC takes up a developer's request that would carve on-site data-center generation out of the public-utility framework entirely. Three states, three levers, one definitional question — pulled in three directions on the same day.
The Public Service Commission of Wisconsin votes today on We Energies' first-in-nation Very Large Customer (VLC) tariff — a special rate structure for hyperscale data-center loads of 500 megawatts or more, designed in partnership with Microsoft and Cloverleaf Infrastructure. The opposition framing is on the record in equal volume: the docket received more than 2,100 public comments, with 98.5% opposed to the tariff as filed per the Sierra Club of Wisconsin's analysis, and 93% of verbal commenters arguing data centers should pay 100% of their costs — not the ~75%/25% split implicit in the proposal. We Energies has explicitly pitched the tariff as a template for other utilities and state commissions to adopt. Whichever framing wins the commission's reasoning today becomes the reasoning every other state cites tomorrow. Read the full story →
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that submetering companies — third-party middlemen who buy electricity wholesale from the utility and resell it to apartment and mobile-home tenants — must be regulated under Ohio's public-utility framework. Justice Pat DeWine's opinion frames the question functionally: “NEP is in the business of supplying electricity to consumers... From the tenants' perspective, NEP is for all practical purposes the supplier of their electricity.” The decision sides with AEP Ohio against Nationwide Energy Partners and the rest of the submetering industry, bringing them under PUCO's regulatory authority. The functional-definition principle — that supplying electricity triggers utility regulation regardless of corporate structure — is live in several adjacent fights, including the Mississippi PSC declaratory-opinion case being filed the same day and the Michigan AG's challenge to DTE's Green Chile Ventures contracts. Read the full story →
Jackson-based Gabriel Prado's PraCon Global Investment Group has filed a Request for Declaratory Opinion with the Mississippi Public Service Commission asking the commission to confirm that private, on-site power generation — including for tenants on the same site — does not constitute a “public utility” under Mississippi law. If the PSC grants the opinion, the ruling creates a regulatory carve-out: a data-center developer could build dedicated generation, lease space to data-center tenants on the same parcel, and sell power to those tenants without any utility-scale rate case, integrated resource planning review, or PSC oversight. The legal theory turns on whether serving a defined set of tenants constitutes “the public” — and Prado argues it doesn't. The Ohio Supreme Court ruling issued the same day pushes the opposite direction; if Mississippi grants Prado's opinion, the parallel filings are likely to land in Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, and West Virginia within months. Read the full story →
Also worth your attention this week: Louisiana's 11-year longitudinal study from The Data Center — 11 years, $90 billion invested, 0.18% net job growth versus ~10% nationally, $19 billion in foregone property-tax revenue — is the single most useful empirical rebuttal in circulation to the “transformative-investment-equals-transformative-jobs” pitch every community evaluating a data-center proposal will hear. The numbers should be on hand at every planning-commission hearing.