Plain-English framing of a 'moratorium': a city or county council voting to refuse all new data-center applications for a fixed window (here ranging 6 months to 1 year) while staff study the impacts. It is a pause button, not a permanent ban. What changed this week is that three councils voting on the same day used three different templates, which is the first clear evidence the playbook has bifurcated. Template 1 — Cave City: pre-emptive total ban. No project has been proposed. A developer merely expressed interest, a councilmember filed an ordinance, and 30 days later there is an enforceable 12-month freeze. The 'high-impact industries' language is the part to flag: it is broad enough to also catch crypto mines, AI training clusters branded as something other than 'data center,' and possibly large warehouse / fulfillment projects with backup generation. Template 2 — Minneapolis: square-footage carve-out. The council was politically split (moderate Democrats wanted to allow data centers to revive downtown property values; progressives and democratic socialists wanted a full ban). The compromise was a six-month freeze EVERYWHERE EXCEPT downtown, AND only for projects bigger than 350,000 sq ft. A 200,000 sq ft project downtown is unaffected. This is the model big cities with weak downtowns will copy. Template 3 — Oklahoma City: megawatt carve-out. The original April-21 ordinance was broader. After hours of debate, the council narrowed it to only data centers above 75 MW net electrical load AND added named-project exemptions. The line being drawn is between 'hyperscale' (caught) and 'mid-tier / edge / colo' (not caught). The Councilman Hinkle quote ('no water from OKC's water supply for cooling') signals the binding fight is water-cooled vs air-cooled, with water-cooled treated as the disqualifier. Sources: WBKO 'Cave City council enacts 12-month moratorium on data centers' (May 21); Bowling Green Daily News 'Cave City looks ahead after data center moratorium' (May 24); Star Tribune 'Minneapolis council approves 6-month moratorium on data centers, downtown exempt'; KARE 11 'Minneapolis City Council enacts a six-month pause on some data centers'; Insight News 'Bigger and harder than it looked' (8-5 vote analysis); OKC Fox 'Oklahoma City leaders narrow data center moratorium after debate'; KGOU 'After pausing data center development, OKC city council adds exemptions'; Free Press OKC 'City Council's data center exemptions raise questions of favoritism' (covers the Hinkle / Pennington / Hamon floor debate).
Primary source · WBKO / Star Tribune / KARE 11 / OKC Fox / KGOU / Free Press OKC ↗
Why it matters
For Cliff this kills the simple 'moratorium yes/no' flag and forces a richer data structure. Each parcel needs (a) which template the local jurisdiction is using or likely to copy, and (b) the carve-out thresholds (sq ft, MW, water vs air cooling, in-progress-project named exemptions). A Minneapolis-template moratorium does not kill a 300k sq ft downtown deal — but a developer relying on a binary 'no moratorium here' field would not know that. Three concrete to-dos: (1) Add a 'moratorium_template' enum to the jurisdictions table: {pre_emptive_total, sq_ft_carveout, mw_carveout, named_project_carveout, none}. (2) Capture the carve-out parameters: threshold_sqft, threshold_mw, exempted_zones (e.g. 'downtown_core'), exempted_projects (named-list). (3) For OKC specifically, log the named exemptions — Expand Energy Campus and the OKC Outlet Mall site — into the approval-outcomes corpus, because being named on an exemption list is the most valuable possible signal that a parcel is politically pre-cleared. The Cave City 'high-impact industries' wording is also worth a separate flag — it implies the same ordinance can be triggered against adjacent project types and is the cleanest signal that an anti-data-center council intends to catch re-brands.
Related filings
Minneapolis 5-month moratorium / passed Jun 25 / 350k sqft + downtown geographic exemption (I-35W / I-94 / Plymouth Ave / Mississippi River) / first size+geo combined exemption mechanic / Inver Grove Heights 1-year moratorium / passed 3-2 Jun 26 / QLevr 54k sqft Carmen Ave / $150M damages letter Iverson Rivers Law Firm / EAW petition filed Jun 25 / second large-damages-threat moratorium-still-passed / MN becomes 4th state cluster / MISO show-cause territory
Plain-English background. Minnesota sits in MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator) — the same RTO that just received FERC's June 18 show-cause order on large-load tariff design. Minnesota's data center growth had been more measured than...
FERC show cause orders Jun 18 / Section 206 / PJM MISO SPP CAISO ISO-NE NYISO / 30-day informational report Jul 20 / 60-day tariff response Aug 17 / 90-day abeyance request Aug 3 / five reform categories / cost-shift prevention is the big one / colocation + BTMG rules / flexible-load transmission services
Plain-English version. On June 18, 2026, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, the federal regulator with jurisdiction over the interstate transmission grid) used Section 206 of the Federal Power Act to issue what are called 'show-cause orders'...
20MW threshold convergence / NY S.10642 + AOC HR + Sanders S.4214 + FERC RM26-4-000 / forming model-bill consensus / sweeps in wholesale colo + hyperscaler leased capacity / not just marquee campuses
Plain-English version. Until June 24, the most common threshold for state and local data-center legislation was either 100 MW+ (hyperscale conventional definition, used by industry groups like AFCOM and Uptime Institute) or no threshold at all (county...
Wisconsin cluster / Dane Jun 4 / Superior May / La Crosse Jun 18 / MISO territory / 5000-server 10000-sqft template
Plain-English version of the geographic pattern. The moratorium streak has been geographically dispersed — Iowa, Tennessee, California, Georgia, Nebraska, Utah, North Carolina, Indiana, Oklahoma, Nevada (the counter-signal), Wisconsin. Most states have had at...
WisBusiness / Dane County Board ↗