Cliff · Data center policy snapshot · May 9
Seattle · May 1
Mayor Wilson plans 365-day moratorium on facilities ≥10 MWBox Elder County · May 4
9 GW Stratos campus approved unanimously — 40k acres, off-grid gasMaricopa County · May 6
Project Baccara approved 4-1 — $36B / 700 MW gas DC near Luke AFBSedgwick County · May 6
90-day moratorium extended to Sep 11Hermantown · May 4
Council tables vote on Google $2B project + $80M / 28-yr abatementOneida County · May 8
Zoning advances proactive 1-yr moratorium — no proposal pendingBulloch County · May 6
Moratorium extended through DecemberDurham · May 4
60-day moratorium passed — 24-month follow-on intendedNorthampton County · May 4
32-month moratorium passed unanimouslyVirginia DEQ · May 7
APG-576 locks Tier 4 BACT as presumptive for emergency + non-emergency gen-setsJurisdiction
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41 of 94 filings
Plain-English framing: ERCOT runs the Texas grid. It received so many giant new load requests (the queue is over 230 GW, more than 70% data centers) that the normal process — make every project wait years for full transmission upgrades — would freeze the...
EPE Consulting / ERCOT / Zero Emission Grid / Seyfarth Shaw ↗
Plain-English framing: in the U.S. grid, FERC (the federal regulator) governs interstate transmission, while individual state commissions govern local distribution and retail service. Data centers are so large that they blur the line — a single campus can...
Utility Dive / White & Case / American Bar Association / ENR ↗
Plain-English framing: 'co-location' means putting a data center directly next to a power plant and having the plant feed the data center directly (rather than going through the grid). 'Behind the meter' means the generation is on the data center customer's...
FERC / National Law Review / Troutman Energy Report / Akin Gump / Day Pitney ↗
Plain-English framing: SB 6 is the Texas legislature's response to ERCOT receiving 225 new large-load interconnection requests in 2025 (vs. 152 total from 2022-2024) and tracking ~238.6 GW of large-load requests as of December 2025. The law says: any new load...
PUCT / Perkins Coie / Greenberg Traurig / Bracewell / EPE Consulting / Seyfarth Shaw ↗
Today is the single highest-density 'moratorium decision day' of 2026 so far. Four municipal-level decisions in geographically distinct markets (Mountain West urban, Sun Belt urban, central Kentucky rural, Mountain West regional capital) plus a structurally...
Two parallel Texas tracks. (1) Batch Zero (PGRR145 + NPRR1325) is ERCOT's proposed replacement for the existing one-at-a-time Large Load Interconnection Study (LLIS) process — instead of studying each new large-load request individually, Batch Zero would...
Hyperion is the largest single-site hyperscaler gas-fleet buildout in US history. The 10-gas-plant, 7+ GW figure is roughly 2x the next-largest hyperscaler gas commitment on the public tape (Microsoft's Quincy WA campus, ~3.5 GW gas commitment) and roughly...
Yahoo Finance / The Cool Down / WinBuzzer / EnergyNow / Energy Connects / Utility Dive ↗
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...
PJM's 'Powering Reliability Through Market Design' paper is the most significant single regulatory-process document in the PJM footprint since FERC's December 18, 2025 order on co-located generation (which Cliff has been tracking via the pjm-er26-1088 page)....
PJM Inside Lines / Utility Dive / Modo Energy / PR Newswire / ROI-NJ / Daily Caller (yournews) ↗
Pending-item resolution for May 11. Colorado SB 102 (Sen. Cathy Kipp, March 18 introduction): the bill would have banned utility economic agreements incentivizing data centers and required 100% new-renewable sourcing by 2031. Per Colorado Politics ('Despite...
Colorado Politics / CPR / Seehafer News / 9News Denver / WBTV / ERCOT ↗
Three regulatory events in the same 24-hour window on May 8 — Pennsylvania PUC's model-tariff vote, PPL Electric's pending rate-case settlement (filed March 13, ALJ recommendation April 17, effective July 1), and Oregon PUC's PGE Schedule 96 directive —...
WHYY / WESA / Utility Dive / KGW / KOIN / Beaver County Radio / RTO Insider ↗
NVIDIA and IREN announced the partnership on May 7 with two simultaneous structural elements. The first is a $2.1B equity warrant: NVIDIA receives a 5-year right to purchase up to 30 million IREN ordinary shares at an exercise price of $70 per share (subject...
NVIDIA Newsroom / CNBC / DCD / Globenewswire ↗
Hut 8 Corp (Nasdaq: HUT) — formerly a Bitcoin miner, similar pivot trajectory to IREN — announced on May 6 the commercialization of the first phase of its Beacon Point AI data center campus on a 525-acre site in Nueces County, Texas (near Corpus Christi). The...
Hut 8 / PRNewswire / DCD / KRIS-TV / CoinDesk ↗
PGRR145 (Planning Guide Revision Request 145) and NPRR1325 (Nodal Protocol Revision Request 1325) are the two governance instruments that establish ERCOT's 'Batch Zero' large-load interconnection process — PGRR145 sets the planning-guide framework and...
ERCOT NPRR1325 + PGRR145 issue pages ↗
NPRR1325 — Nodal Protocol Revision Request 1325 — operationalizes the Provisional Controllable Load Resource framework, which lets large loads (data centers in particular) commit to a partial-firm + curtailable service profile in exchange for a faster path...
ERCOT NPRR1325 issue page / EPE Consulting tracker ↗
Virginia Department of Environmental Quality's APG-576 (Diesel Engine-Generator Set Procedure for Writing New and Modified Permits) became effective April 9, 2026, with the new BACT (Best Available Control Technology) requirements applicable to air permit...
Virginia DEQ / Trinity Consultants ↗
SpaceX filed an application for property tax abatements with Grimes County, Texas, for a semiconductor fabrication and advanced-packaging facility branded 'Terafab' that would cost $55 billion in initial phases and up to $119 billion if all planned expansions...
Tom's Hardware / KBTX / TechCrunch / ERCOT ↗
PJM filed its Expedited Interconnection Track (EIT) proposal February 27, 2026 in response to FERC Order EL25-49 (issued December 18, 2025) directing PJM to revise its Open Access Transmission Tariff to address co-located load and behind-the-meter generation...
FERC / PJM / Day Pitney / Digitimes ↗
Box Elder County commissioners voted unanimously to approve two resolutions in support of a 40,000-acre data center campus on an unincorporated site in northern Utah. The project, dubbed Stratos and developed by O'Leary Digital, would span 40,000 acres of...
Utah News Dispatch / KSL.com ↗
Meta Platforms is working with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase on a roughly $13 billion financing package for its El Paso, Texas data center, sources told Bloomberg and Reuters. The majority of the package is expected to be structured as debt, with the...
Bloomberg / Reuters via Investing.com ↗
ERCOT's PRS is scheduled to vote on PGRR145 and NPRR1325 today, with the companion ROS vote tomorrow (May 7) and the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) final stakeholder vote May 19-20. PGRR145, filed March 4, would create the Batch Zero process for large...
WRAL and Data Center Knowledge confirm North Carolina lawmakers have moved HB 1004, the Ratepayer and Resource Protection Act, into the 2025-2026 General Assembly. Filed April 27, 2026. Threshold: facilities with peak electricity demand of ≥40 MW...
The Sedgwick County KS Board of Commissioners is set to vote tomorrow (May 6) on whether to extend the data-center application moratorium beyond its current June 11 expiration. Current pause sequence: enacted Jan 13, extended unanimously March 4, expiring...
PJM Interconnection's Critical Issue Fast Path Reliability Backstop Procurement (CIFP-RBP) proposal, released April 10 and detailed in its April 16 stakeholder package, calls for a one-time two-phase backstop procurement of 14.9 GW of new resources to serve...
PJM Inside Lines and Utility Dive both confirmed April 29 that 811 new generation projects representing 220 GW of nameplate capacity have entered PJM's first interconnection cycle since the queue was paused for reform in 2022. Mix by fuel: gas-fired 106 GW...
Fleet Data Centers filed applications with Nevada state energy regulators April 20 to construct more than 350 MW of behind-the-meter natural gas and diesel power for two data center campuses at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center (TRIC) in Storey County, NV. South...
Three Seattle councilmembers (Juarez D5, Lin D2, Hollingsworth President) announced April 30 they will introduce an emergency 365-day data center moratorium with the bill drop targeted for mid-May; a public hearing is required within 60 days of adoption....
Joule Capital Partners, Caterpillar, and Wheeler Machinery (the Cat dealer for Utah/Idaho/Nevada/Wyoming/Montana) announced an agreement to power Joule's 'super-compute-ready' campus in Millard County, UT — 4,000 acres, gigawatt-scale operational launch in...
QTS Realty Trust filed an appeal Apr 30 (hours before the deadline) to the Virginia Supreme Court asking it to overturn the Court of Appeals ruling that nullified Prince William County's 2023 zoning amendments authorizing the 22M sqft Digital Gateway...
NuScale Power (NYSE: SMR) gained over 10% Apr 30 on Amazon's announcement of three new SMR-backing deals, including a $500M investment in X-energy. The broader nuclear sector rallied; Amazon's structuring is similar to its prior June 2025 MOU with Dominion...
Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission unanimously approved the I&M / Google demand-response agreement for the $2B Fort Wayne campus. Google agreed to cut load when the grid is strained and to share clean-energy capacity with the system; I&M will discount...
OG&E announced a contract with Google for three new data centers in Muskogee and Stillwater. Google will cover 100% of grid-connection costs and pay all contracted charges regardless of consumption (take-or-pay capacity), and will contribute capacity from two...
The Data Center Consumer Ratepayer Protection Act of 2026 cleared the OK Senate unanimously and now returns to the House. Bill defines 'large load customers' as new facilities ≥75 MW grid demand; requires those customers cover their share of electricity +...
Q1 2026 earnings dropped Apr 29. Microsoft outlined $190B in CY2026 capex (vs. ~$152B analyst consensus). Alphabet raised the full-year range to $180-190B from $175-185B and CFO Anat Ashkenazi said 2027 will 'significantly increase' from there. Meta raised to...
Reconvened session Apr 22 (vote count finalized through Apr 29): General Assembly bucked Spanberger on the Dominion-backed energy / data center package. Her three proposed weakeners — SCC sole discretion over undergrounding, halved spending cap, opt-out...
PJM issued the RFI Apr 16 to LSEs, large load participants, hyperscalers, generation developers, DR/DER aggregators, EDCs, and state commissions. Two-phase backstop procurement for 14.9 GW: bilateral phase Sept-Mar (PJM + Charles River Associates as...
Manitowoc County WI passed unanimous 18-month moratorium Apr 21 after a developer approached three towns with land offers. Swain County NC unanimous 12-month Apr 22. Orange County NC unanimous 1-year Apr 22. Weaverville NC reclassified data centers + crypto...
BloombergNEF (released Apr 24, covered Apr 27): CCGT capex jumped from <$1,500/kW (2023) to $2,157/kW (2025). Global turbine orders at 110 GW vs 60–70 GW manufacturing capacity at the Big Three. This is the BTM-economics input to every de-rate-calculator...
Utility Dive: DOE's October interconnection-reform principles (the 'data center backstop / accelerated study' set) were due for FERC action by Apr 30. FERC tee'd up June instead. Adds a federal interconnection-reform docket on top of ER26-1088 / RM26-4 — a...
Analysis presented to PJM Interconnection's governing board: roughly 49 large gas-plant equivalents short by 2028. Aligns with the air-permit / interruptible-load wedge — 49 GW of unrealized capacity is the same number as 'load that needs to be derated,...
Fluidstack — the AI-DC-as-a-service play with the $50B Anthropic deal — raising $1B at $18B led by Jane Street, more than 2x the December round. Not a Cliff competitor, but the operator-side capex flowing through is what makes the site readiness intelligence...