Plain-English version of what Spartanburg did and why the procedural mechanic matters. Spartanburg County, in the Upstate region of South Carolina, called a 9 a.m. special meeting on June 22 to introduce a 12-month moratorium on all new data center applications in the county. The vote on first reading was 12-0 — no dissent. The meeting itself lasted under five minutes, and most of the residents present were not given an opportunity to speak (a procedural choice the same residents had criticized at a prior June 16-17 hearing). Why the procedure matters. South Carolina county ordinances normally require three readings on three separate days to pass. A first reading vote is, in most jurisdictions, just a procedural step that puts the ordinance on the docket — it does not yet have legal effect. Spartanburg County, however, expressly invoked something called the 'pending ordinance doctrine.' Under that doctrine, recognized by South Carolina case law, once a local government has formally introduced a proposed ordinance, the local government can halt the issuance of new permits or applications inconsistent with the proposed ordinance even before the ordinance finishes its full three-reading process. In practical terms: the 12-month data center moratorium took effect at 9:05 a.m. on June 22, even though it has not technically been adopted yet, and any data center developer who walked into the Spartanburg permitting office after that time is blocked from filing. What is exempted. The ordinance carves out the already-permitted NorthMark data center on Pine Street (a 'vested rights' style exemption — the same in-flight-project carve-out pattern seen in Coweta GA, Boone IN, Rowan NC, and Charlotte). No other projects are exempt. Next step. A public hearing during second reading has been scheduled but the date has not been finalized. Third reading would come later. The pending-ordinance effect is in force during the entire intervening period. Why Spartanburg matters as a state-line crossing. Until June 22, every county moratorium in the corpus was in: TX (Hill, rescinded), WY (Cheyenne, rejected), AR (Pulaski, one vote short), GA (Coweta), IN (Boone), MD (Calvert, 2-2 tie), NV (Clark, approved a campus), WI (Dane, Superior, La Crosse), NC (nine jurisdictions, the new densest cluster), MO (Warrenton-area context), OK (Luther), and a handful of others. South Carolina had no county-level moratorium yet. Spartanburg is the first, and it sits in Duke Energy Carolinas territory — the same vertically-integrated non-RTO regime as North Carolina. So the structural cost-allocation analysis for Spartanburg developers is the same as for Charlotte or Durham: there is no FERC tariff fight to wait out (Duke does not sit inside a FERC-jurisdiction RTO for most retail purposes), and the only cost-allocation lever available to the SC legislature would be an SB-730-style state ratepayer-protection bill — which South Carolina does not yet have. That regulatory gap is part of why the local moratorium is the only available pressure mechanism.
Primary source · WSPA — Spartanburg County Council gives first approval of data center moratorium ↗
Why it matters
Two implications. (1) The Duke Energy non-RTO moratorium belt — NC plus SC — is now the largest contiguous, state-policy-coherent moratorium cluster in the country. Both states sit in Duke Energy Carolinas / Duke Energy Progress territory; both are outside FERC-jurisdiction RTOs for retail purposes; both will eventually need either a state ratepayer-protection statute (NC has SB 730 pending, SC has nothing yet) or hundreds of local moratoriums to address the cost-shift question. That coherence makes the belt a natural Cliff expansion market beyond ERCOT — same structural diligence problem repeated across ~20+ counties in two adjacent states. (2) The pending-ordinance doctrine is the procedural counter-move to the RCM Hill interconnection-timing lawsuit (covered yesterday). RCM Hill's $100M Texas damages theory rests on showing that a moratorium blocked the developer's ability to hit ERCOT interconnection milestones — but the damages clock only starts running if the developer was actually trying to file. By making the moratorium effective on first reading, Spartanburg ensures developers cannot accrue clean filing-blocked damages during the second-and-third-reading interval. The corpus should tag every moratorium with its procedural-effect mechanism (standard three-reading vs. pending-ordinance-doctrine immediate-effect vs. emergency ordinance) as a separate field, because that determines how legally fragile the pause is to a developer challenge.
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