Three states, three different regulatory moves, and every one of them is a community telling grid planners, not so fast. This is The Data Center Daily — I'm Cassidy, Matt's here — and by the end of this episode, that municipal-ordinance question we opened the week with has a third answer. Also, LS Power just put a shovel in the ground on a $2 billion underground HVDC line in San Jose, which changes the whole brownfield transmission conversation. And 49,000 Lake Tahoe customers finally put a human number on the ratepayer-displacement argument. We're going to see whether NV Energy's sequencing promise actually holds once Liberty's transmission access slips. Lake Tahoe, Goochland County, Franklin County, Pennsylvania — same week, same infrastructure pressure, three totally different legal levers. Let's get into it. Here's TD World:
Some 49,000 customers in the Lake Tahoe region are concerned they may lose their electricity supply in favor of utilities powering data centers owned by Meta, Amazon and Google, according to a widely shared report by Fortune. NV Energy supplies Lake Tahoe with about 75% of its electricity through the California-based Liberty Utilities.
Lake Tahoe, 49,000 customers, and NV Energy says about 75% of their power comes through Liberty Utilities — and their line is that this handoff was always the plan. The arrangement goes back to 2009, and they say the data center boom had nothing to do with it. NV Energy's spokesperson calling the Fortune piece "incomplete or misleading" is doing some serious stretching when the actual commitment on the table is, "we'll keep the lights on until Liberty has its own transmission access ready." That's not a guarantee — it's a sequencing promise with no enforcement date attached. To be precise about what is settled and what isn't: on the displacement question — are Meta, Amazon, and Google actively pulling supply from those 49,000 customers? NV Energy says no, and the 2009 origin date is real. The open question is the sequencing one — who enforces the Liberty timeline, and what happens if it slips? This is the week's "who pays the ratepayer bill" thread getting a zip code. We've had curtailment ranges and megawatt projections all week — now there are 49,000 named people asking whether their grid access is structurally secure, and the answer they're getting is basically, trust the handoff process. Here's Charles Paullin at Inside Climate News:
Valley Link is a 765-kilovolt system of transmission lines to be hung from towers the height of 12-story buildings by Dominion Energy, Transource and FirstEnergy. Transource is a transmission company jointly owned by American Electric Power and Evergy. Up for public discussion in Goochland at the recent meeting Blackburn attended was a segment that would start at the Joshua Falls substation in Campbell County, about 115 miles west of Richmond.
Goochland County, Virginia — Inside Climate News put Deborah Blackburn on the record, cane in hand at the Central High Cultural and Educational Complex, objecting to Valley Link: a 765-kilovolt system with towers that top out at twelve-story height, backed by Dominion, Transource, and FirstEnergy. So the "will communities push back on transmission" question we flagged earlier this week now has a named objector, a named venue, and a named rural-character grievance on the record. And the same week LS Power breaks ground on $2 billion of underground HVDC in San Jose, Goochland residents are being told to accept twelve-story towers so Northern Virginia data centers can keep the lights on. Same infrastructure category — totally different community reception. I'd argue the difference is who gets named as the beneficiary in the project documents. Worth flagging that Valley Link is still in the public-comment phase — that's a different evidentiary tier than LS Power's shovel-in-ground $2 billion line with a named twelve-mile underground route in San Jose. Goochland residents are at a hearing; California has a hard dollar figure and a construction start. The Dickerson brownfield argument from Monday was about skipping the queue — LS Power just showed what the greenfield price tag actually looks like. The complaint pipeline here looks exactly like what we saw in Morgan County — residents making a credible rural-character argument at a public meeting, transmission developers on the clock, and the window for local input closing the moment a substation segment gets filed. Nobody at that hearing in Goochland has a federal escalation path that moves faster than the permitting timeline. Construction Front writes:
LS Power Grid California has broken ground on the Power Santa Clara Valley and Power the South Bay transmission projects in California’s Bay Area. The construction start forms part of a $2 billion Power the Bay investment across three transmission projects serving Alameda and Santa Clara counties.
LS Power broke ground this week on the Power Santa Clara Valley project — twelve miles of underground HVDC connecting the Skyline and Grove terminals in San Jose, part of a $2 billion, three-project Bay Area transmission program selected by CAISO back in 2023. It's rated at 1,000 MW and serves Alameda and Santa Clara counties. Worth holding that next to the Valley Link fight in Goochland County — residents at a public hearing pushing back on a transmission line they say exists to feed Northern Virginia data centers. LS Power has a shovel in the ground in San Jose, a named route, a dollar figure, and nobody seems to be blocking the road. The difference isn't the infrastructure category; it's who the community thinks is getting the power. And keep that in frame when somebody pitches transmission reuse at a brownfield site as a queue shortcut — the Dickerson argument is, skip the line by recycling corridors. The LS Power approach is, spend $2 billion and build the line. Both get to the same destination; only one has a price tag attached. This one's from The Record Herald:
Several townships in Franklin County that lack zoning are looking into or moving ahead with proposed ordinances to regulate data centers. The developments come as the county commissioners this week adopted an amendment to the county's subdivision and land development ordinances, collectively known as SALDO, meant to help municipalities set rules for companies that may seek to develop data centers in the area.
Franklin County, Pennsylvania, this week — no data centers proposed yet, but Fannett Township is drafting an ordinance that would require any that come in to generate their own electricity on-site. That's not a demand cap, and it's not an operational noise standard — it's a self-sufficiency mandate, and it's a different regulatory instrument than anything Longmont or Little Rock put on the table. That ordinance, if it holds, is the first local mechanism that actually cuts the wire between a data center's load and the surrounding ratepayer base. Longmont set a threshold; Fannett is saying you don't touch our grid at all. St. Thomas Township separately voted to advertise its own ordinance, and the county itself just amended its SALDO framework to give non-zoning municipalities a template to work from. So we're watching a county-level scaffold go up in real time, before a single data center is in the pipeline. That's the front-running scenario, answered. And the geography matters — this is the rural, non-zoning western half of the county, about 20% of 160,000 people. No hyperscaler is in the room yet, which means the community actually has leverage right now. The window Goochland County residents are fighting to keep open? Franklin County townships just walked through it. From William Harris at citybiz:
Cogent Communications has agreed to sell 10 data center facilities for $225 million in cash to an entity sponsored by infrastructure investment firm I Squared Capital, continuing the network provider’s shift toward a more focused connectivity and fiber infrastructure strategy. The facilities are located across major U.S. markets including Phoenix, Anaheim, Burbank, Stockton, Atlanta, Chicago, Elkridge, Kansas City, Nashville, and Houston.
Cogent Communications, selling ten facilities — Phoenix, Anaheim, Burbank, Stockton, Atlanta, Chicago, Elkridge, Kansas City, Nashville, and Houston — to I Squared Capital for $225 million cash. Closed transaction, named price, named buyer. That's the secondary market, not a press release about a future intention. I Squared is an infrastructure fund, not a hyperscaler. So the buyer here isn't AWS or Google gobbling up overflow capacity — it's institutional capital picking up second-tier colo assets at what works out to $22.5 million a facility. That's the non-hyperscaler side of this market finding its price. Worth flagging as a calibration point given what we said earlier this week about announced versus signed: this is what a completed deal actually looks like — cash consideration, a named subsidiary, ten addresses on the deed. Compare that to a disclosed customer relationship buried in an S-1. If The Data Center Daily helps you stay on top of the industry, take a moment to subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. It really helps other people find the show.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes. If something caught your ear, that's the place to dig in a little deeper.
That's The Data Center Daily for this Wednesday, May 27th. This is a Lantern Podcast.