PJM couldn't find enough power for the third year in a row — and today, three states and a county decided that's exactly the moment to make building harder. If you're just joining, data center approvals have been getting tougher locally — communities are weighing utility load, water, roads, noise, and cleanup against tax base and jobs. We've seen it in De Soto's doubled project footprint, Dubuque's potential three-million-gallon-a-day water demand, and Seward County, Nebraska, putting a twelve-month freeze on construction, permits, and special-use requests while officials write standards. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: a state moratorium, a new oversight law, unpermitted generators in Memphis, and a vote beside an elementary school. Where's the power coming from? Let's find out. Local data center bans and ballot backlash isn't over. Follow us wherever you're listening, and the next chapter comes to you. From Briefs:
The big driver is data centers, especially the ones powering artificial intelligence. Those facilities consume enormous amounts of electricity, and they keep getting built faster than new power plants can connect to the grid. PJM's independent market monitor, Monitoring Analytics, reported that power prices in the PJM region jumped 76% during the first quarter of this year, pushed higher by that data-center demand.
Third straight year PJM missed its capacity target — and this time it cleared right at the price ceiling, $325 per megawatt-day. CEO David Mills called that ceiling and I'm quoting — 'untenable.' When the price pins the cap three years running, you're past 'bad auction.' The market's saying supply still won't clear at the highest price it's allowed to charge. Thirteen states and D.C. — the biggest grid in the country — and it can't find the megawatts three years straight. So every hyperscaler with a letter of intent sitting in PJM territory: who told you the power was coming? Here's the answer to the whole LOA game. You can sign all the letters you want — the capacity auction is where the actual electrons have to show up, and they didn't. A letter of intent is not a megawatt. And Mills isn't hiding it — he's basically saying the cap blocks the price signal that'd get new plants built. So you're stuck: prices high enough to hurt ratepayers, not high enough to fix supply. And guess who eats that gap? The ratepayer in Ohio who never asked for a data center hall. That $325 doesn't vanish — it lands on somebody's bill. Meanwhile Carlyle repriced a power platform like Copia fivefold, because scarcity is a hell of a business model. Keep that in mind for the whole rundown today. New York's moratorium, Pennsylvania's oversight law — all of it sits on top of a grid that can't clear enough supply. Regulators are moving because the physics stopped cooperating. This one's from Engineering News-Record:
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on July 14 ordered state regulators to halt action on qualifying environmental permit applications for large data centers while New York develops new statewide standards governing their energy use, water consumption and community impacts. While several states have flirted with a data center pause, New York is now the first to impose a broad permitting moratorium on the rapidly expanding sector.
New York's the headline: Executive Order No. 62, signed by Hochul yesterday. It directs the Department of Environmental Conservation to hold pending discretionary permit applications in abeyance — the ones not deemed complete before July 14 — while the state writes statewide standards on energy, water, and community impact. So the local moratorium story has gone statewide. The county freezes we've seen hit zoning; this one reaches up into state environmental permitting. First state to do it. Okay, but read the fine print with me. It pauses discretionary permits that weren't complete before July 14. So anything already deemed complete? Keeps moving. And this only touches the state review layer. Which means a municipality can still wave something through while Albany's officially on pause. It's an air-permitting halt, not a stop-work order on construction. Real, but narrower than the word moratorium wants you to think. And notice what's missing — no hard sunset in the order. It runs until DEC develops the framework. Open-ended, no date. That's a pause with no clock on it. Put that against the PJM miss we just hit — third straight auction short on supply. That's why the pauses are showing up. Nobody can promise the megawatts, so states are hitting the brakes to go do the math they should've done first. Channel NewsAsia has this one. Southaven, Mississippi. Gas turbines running next to the Colonial Hills neighborhood — unpermitted. And the exhaust lands hardest on Black residents living right up against the fence line. There's a guy in that piece, Ervin Laws, who says he can't do anything about the noise because Musk has more money than he does. That's the whole story in one sentence. And note what 'unpermitted' means here — the turbines were energized before the air permits were in hand. Somebody signed off on running that equipment. So who was it? Right — utility, county, state, somebody let it turn on. And when the asthma rates show up in Colonial Hills, who do those ratepayers call? Not Memphis Light, Gas and Water. Not the guy with more money. It rhymes with the New York moratorium we just hit — Albany pausing state environmental reviews. Except here the review never happened at all, and the turbines are already spinning. From Inside Climate News:
On July 15, Palm Beach County commissioners will take a final vote on Project Tango, a hyperscale AI campus proposed for a 202-acre site north of Southern Boulevard. The commissioners will decide whether to let the developer amend its approved master site plan to build the AI campus—a request that wouldn’t rezone the land, but would transform what gets built on it.
Twelve hundred and fifty feet from an elementary school that's two years old. Nobody built that school thinking a hyperscale AI campus was going next door — because when the county zoned this in 2016, hyperscale AI data centers didn't exist. Right, and that's the exact mechanism: no rezoning required; the land stays what it is. The developer's asking commissioners to amend the master site plan so a 206,000-square-foot server farm becomes a hyperscale AI campus on 202 acres. So the 2016 light-industrial label is what lets this move, while the actual thing getting built looks nothing like what got approved. Same trick we've seen elsewhere — the paperwork describes one footprint, the reality is another animal entirely. And here's what makes today's vote watchable: the zoning commission went 6-0 to urge denial after 39 residents spoke against it — flat against their own planning staff, who recommended approval. That split lands on the commissioners at the final vote today. And notice — Palm Beach has no moratorium. New York just halted permits statewide, we hit that earlier. Here there's nothing above the county. If these five commissioners wave it through, that's the ballgame, at the edge of the Everglades no less. Utility Dive's Diana DiGangi has this one. Pennsylvania just did the thing that was missing from every LOA fight we've had. The new law makes data centers disclose their actual load and usage to the utility — before the grid commits. Right — it's a disclosure tool, not a cap. Which is why I want to know if there's a threshold trigger in it, something like the 75-megawatt floor in OG&E's large-load tariff. A law with no threshold is a very different thing from one with a number attached. Stack that next to PJM missing its supply target for the third straight year. Every hyperscaler with a letter of intent in PJM territory was told the megawatts would be there. Pennsylvania's basically saying: prove it, on paper, first. That's the second state-level tool aimed at data center load this week, and it's Tuesday. The floor moved — we're not just talking county resolutions anymore; we're talking statutes. That's the move I've wanted since the AEP discussion. Make the operator show the load before anybody breaks ground — because right now the ratepayer eats the stranded asset when the forecast doesn't show up. If you follow AI infrastructure, you might also like Anthropic Pentagon Watch: a daily briefing on Anthropic's fight with the DoD over Claude, military AI use, autonomous weapons, and AI procurement blacklisting. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
What we're watching today: Palm Beach County commissioners are scheduled to take a final vote on Project Tango.
As always, we've got links to every story in the show notes. If one of today's items is relevant to your work, you can dig into the source material there. That's The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.