NM 4 Democratic lawmakers announced Jul 3 statewide moratorium bill / Reps Chavez Cadena Rubio + Sen Hamblen / January 2027 60-day session / first-in-nation statewide moratorium if passed / paired with microgrid loophole closure + data security / Santa Fe County Jun 30 unanimous 18-month moratorium / 1 MW threshold (lowest in US) / 75x below ERCOT Batch Zero 75 MW / 20x below NY A11560 20 MW / 50x below Lakeland FL 50 MW / 100 MW draft lowered on floor / durability higher than county ordinances / removes state from siting map for duration

Plain-English background on why 'statewide' and '1 MW threshold' are the two most important words in this item. Until this week, every US data center moratorium was either a county ordinance (Linn IA, Washington MD, Prince George's MD, Whitley IN, Clark IN, Santa Fe NM, etc.), a city ordinance (Zephyrhills FL, Lakeland FL first-reading Monday), or a state statute that had passed the legislature but not yet been enacted (NY A11560, still undelivered to Hochul). No state has actually enacted a statewide moratorium via signed legislation. Governors elsewhere have used executive orders (Hochul's earlier Feb 2026 EO paused DEC issuance in some cases; Braveboy in Prince George's MD is a county executive) but no legislature-plus-governor state statute exists yet. The New Mexico proposal, if it passes, would be the first. What the New Mexico legislators announced Thursday July 3. Four Democrats — Reps. Eleanor Chávez (District 13, Albuquerque), Micaela Lara Cadena (District 33, Mesilla), Angelica Rubio (District 35, Las Cruces), and Sen. Carrie Hamblen (District 38, Las Cruces) — announced at a Thursday press event that they will introduce statewide moratorium legislation when the New Mexico Legislature convenes for its 60-day session in January 2027. Stated design of the bill: prohibit new 'large-scale' data center projects (specific MW threshold not yet published in the announcement) while the state develops a framework for evaluating impacts on water, energy, emissions, ratepayers, and 'community benefits.' The bill will be paired with additional measures on data security for residents and closing what the sponsors call a 'microgrid loophole' — a workaround where hyperscalers install behind-the-meter generation to skirt New Mexico's Energy Transition Act requirements. New Mexico's Energy Transition Act (2019) requires major utilities to reach 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2045 with specific interim benchmarks; the microgrid loophole refers to the fact that a data center that generates its own power on-site is not technically a 'utility customer' and therefore is not obligated to source from utility renewable-mix requirements. Why the 1 MW threshold in Santa Fe County matters as a design signal. Santa Fe County commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday June 30 to enact an 18-month moratorium on any data center facility using 1 megawatt or more. The staff draft originally proposed a 100 MW threshold; commissioners lowered it to 1 MW on the floor because — in commissioner Anna Hansen's words — 'we don't want a developer to come to Santa Fe and build a 99-megawatt facility.' This is the lowest MW floor in any US data center moratorium anywhere. For context: • ERCOT Batch Zero eligibility floor: 75 MW • New York A11560 (bill awaiting Hochul): 20 MW • Lakeland FL (first reading Monday July 6): 50 MW/month • Illinois DCIP freeze: no MW floor, applies to any DCIP-eligible facility (i.e. ≥5 MW effectively) • Virginia rate class (approved Nov 2025, effective Jan 2027): 25 MW Santa Fe's 1 MW figure is roughly 75 times smaller than ERCOT's floor and 20 times smaller than NY's. Any data center of consequence — even a small edge or colocation facility — clears 1 MW. Practically, this is a total ban dressed as a threshold. If New Mexico's statewide bill takes Santa Fe County's threshold as its reference point (which is plausible given the sponsors overlap with the county's political base), the statewide bill's effective floor could be as low as 1 MW, which would make it materially more restrictive than any peer state. Why statewide legislation is legally more durable than county ordinances. A county moratorium can be preempted by state law, overturned by state courts on jurisdiction grounds, or challenged as spot-zoning. A state statute enacted by both chambers of a state legislature and signed by a governor is not preemptable by county actors and is much harder to challenge — it requires either a federal preemption argument (rare and expensive) or a state constitutional argument (also rare). This means the New Mexico bill, if enacted, would create a durable multi-year regulatory floor for the entire state that federal EOs or hyperscaler lawsuits cannot easily route around. That's a structurally different failure mode from the county-cluster patterns Cliff has tracked all week. The generalizable pattern for Cliff's regulatory corpus. State-scale moratorium legislation is the third distinct failure mode Cliff needs to model, alongside (1) county moratoriums (short-term, easily proliferating, jurisdictionally bounded) and (2) public-notice defect litigation on rezonings (project-killing per QTS Digital Gateway, but requires local rezoning to be in-flight). State moratorium legislation is a durable multi-year freeze that eliminates entire states from hyperscaler siting maps for the duration. If New Mexico enacts January 2027, that removes NM from the map through at least mid-2028. That's a real capex-routing input.

Primary source · Source New Mexico — New Mexico lawmakers announce proposed statewide moratorium on data centers (Jul 3 2026) + Santa Fe New Mexican — Santa Fe County approves 18-month data center moratorium + KRQE — Santa Fe County commissioners approve 18-month moratorium on data centers + KOB — Santa Fe County approves 18-month moratorium on data center development + Albuquerque Journal — Santa Fe County becomes latest New Mexico community to adopt data center moratorium + Los Alamos Daily Post — State Lawmakers To Introduce Data Center Moratorium In Upcoming Legislative Session + Santa Fe New Mexican — Four New Mexico lawmakers plan to propose statewide data center moratorium ↗