OK / HB 2992 / 5th state ratepayer protection / 75 MW threshold
Oklahoma's House Bill 2992 — the 'Data Center Consumer Ratepayer Protection Act of 2026' authored by Rep. Brad Boles (R-Marlow) and carried in the Senate by Sen. Grant Green (R-Wellston) — passed both chambers of the Oklahoma legislature with unanimous votes on May 5 and was formally transmitted to Governor Kevin Stitt's desk; the bill defines a 'large load customer' as any new facility adding 75 MW or more of demand, statutorily prohibits utilities from passing those customers' incremental infrastructure costs (substation upgrades, transmission additions, generation capacity) to residential or small-commercial ratepayer classes, requires 60-day advance notice of any land-acquisition tied to a large load to (1) all adjoining landowners, (2) the county commissioners, and (3) the Oklahoma Corporation Commission (Oklahoma's state utility regulator), explicitly excludes traditional residential, commercial, and industrial customers from the large-load classification, and was signed by 36 House and Senate co-authors across both parties — the same legislative pattern (bipartisan unanimous passage, transmitted to governor) that Florida used for SB 484 in early May
HB 2992 is structurally different from the other four state-level ratepayer-protection actions in the May cluster. Pennsylvania's May 8 PUC model tariff is regulator-issued guidance (binding on the four PA investor-owned utilities only after utility-by-utility filings); Florida SB 484 (signed May 7) is statutory but delegates implementing-tariff authority to the Public Service Commission; Wisconsin's We Energies VLC ('Very Large Customer') tariff was approved by the Wisconsin PSC on April 24 as a utility-specific filing; Oregon's PGE Schedule 96 (effective June 10) is a tariff filing approved by the Oregon PUC. Oklahoma's HB 2992 is the only May action that operates entirely by statute — no PUC tariff layer between the law and the customer. The bill defines a 'large load customer' as a new facility adding 75 MW or more of demand (any single point of interconnection), and the statutory cost-causation rule reads roughly 'large load customers shall pay all costs caused by the customer's incremental load, and no portion of those costs may be allocated to other customer classes through the utility's general rate case or rider mechanisms.' The 60-day notice requirement is the second novel feature: any developer acquiring land for a planned large load must notify adjoining landowners, the county board, and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission before closing on the property. That requirement converts what was previously a private real-estate transaction into a public-facing land-use trigger that puts the project on local political radar before zoning. Oklahoma is the 5th state in the May ratepayer-protection cluster after PA, FL, WI, and OR, and the 75 MW threshold is the second data point above the 50 MW convergence pattern (PA model tariff 50 MW individual / 100 MW aggregate; PJM NCBL ≥50 MW; FL SB 484 50 MW; PPL Electric 50 MW individual / 75 MW aggregate within 10-mile radius). The 75 MW Oklahoma number matches the PPL Electric aggregation cap and is roughly 1.5x the modal threshold — meaning the per-state 'large load' regulatory definition is converging on a 50-75 MW band rather than a single point. Stitt's signature is widely expected (the unanimous bipartisan vote leaves no political cover for a veto; the 36 co-authors include the House Republican leadership). Implementation is immediate on signature — no PSC rule-writing phase. Sources: Oklahoma House of Representatives press release (May 6); Oklahoma Senate press release ('Senate Passes Data Center Ratepayer Protection Act with Added Transparency Requirements'); KGOU (Oklahoma's NPR affiliate, May 4); OKCFOX; Fox23; Oklahoma Energy Today (May 2026); legiscan / OKleg HB 2992.
Why it matters
Three updates. (1) The cluster is now 5 states + 1 regional ISO in one ~30-day window: Pennsylvania (PUC model tariff May 8), Florida (SB 484 signed May 7), Wisconsin (We Energies VLC tariff PSC-approved April 24), Oregon (PGE Schedule 96 effective June 10), Oklahoma (HB 2992 to governor May 5), and PJM at the regional level (NCBL framework paper May 6, FERC filing targeted in time for the 2028/29 Base Residual Auction in June 2026). This is no longer 'a handful of states reacting' — this is convergent regulatory drift across PUCs and legislatures at sufficient velocity that any data-center site evaluated for a 2027+ in-service date should now be underwritten assuming a ratepayer-protection tariff exists or will exist in the relevant jurisdiction. The competitive-landscape page should add an 'in-state ratepayer-protection tariff' field to every site row with values {none, statutory, regulator-issued, in-flight}. The five May states should be marked 'statutory' (OK, FL), 'regulator-issued' (PA, WI, OR), and the rest should be marked 'in-flight' until proven otherwise. (2) The 75 MW threshold is the second data point above the 50 MW modal convergence. The regulatory community is converging on a 50-75 MW band as 'large load = systemically significant = different rules.' For site-readiness underwriting, this means any campus that buildouts past 50 MW (basically every hyperscale AI site) crosses into the systemically-significant zone in nearly every jurisdiction. The 'sub-threshold colocation' workaround — building two 49 MW facilities on adjacent parcels to stay under the threshold — is closing because the PA, PPL, and We Energies definitions all include aggregation rules within a geographic radius. Oklahoma's HB 2992 does NOT include an explicit aggregation rule (verify on the final bill text once signed), which is a structural loophole an aggressive developer could exploit if Stitt signs as-is. The de-rate calculator should add an 'aggregation-rule presence' boolean to each state's tariff representation, and Oklahoma's value should be 'no' as a working assumption (verify on signature). (3) The 60-day land-acquisition notice provision is novel and structurally important. Most ratepayer-protection regimes operate at the tariff layer (rates and infrastructure cost recovery), not the land-use layer. By requiring notice to adjoining landowners and county commissioners BEFORE the developer closes on the land, Oklahoma is creating a pre-zoning political-trigger mechanism that effectively gives local opposition a 60-day organizing window for every hyperscale parcel. This is the first state to bridge tariff-layer protection and land-use-layer transparency in a single bill, and it's a template other states will copy. For Cliff's regulatory knowledge graph, this creates a new field type ('pre-zoning notice trigger') that needs to be tracked separately from the existing 'tariff threshold' and 'aggregation rule' fields. Investor-update translation (for investor-updates/2026-05-13.txt): Oklahoma becomes the 5th state in ~30 days to formally tell hyperscale data-center developers 'you pay your own infrastructure costs, and you pre-disclose your land purchases.' The 5-state pattern in a 30-day window is the kind of regulatory-velocity signal Cliff is built to capture — the per-state tariff structures are different enough that a hyperscaler operating across 5 states needs 5 different tariff lookups, 5 different threshold rules, 5 different notice timelines. That heterogeneity is the moat: the cost of an LLM-powered cross-state tariff lookup approaches zero, but the cost of a human-consultant doing the same thing scales linearly with state count.