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