Oregon didn't vote for a data center moratorium. The governor just stopped the permits. If you're Amazon in Boardman, that's the same thing. You're listening to The Data Center Daily, and it's Wednesday, October 14th. After Oregon, it's an October heat emergency for PJM, a four-to-one FERC vote on Duke's large-load transmission rules, and Microsoft promising gigawatts for its own inference silicon.
Alex Baumhardt, writing for the Oregon Capital Chronicle:
Oregon’s governor has effectively issued a moratorium on new data centers and data center expansions in the state by ordering environmental regulators to pause approving new state and federal air and water pollution permits for data center projects until next July.
Governor Kotek put it in a letter last Friday to Leah Feldon, who runs the Department of Environmental Quality. State and federal air and water permits are paused until July 1, 2027. And nobody heard about it until Oregon Rural Action emailed it around on Tuesday. That was also the night of the final debate with Christine Drazan. Funny timing. Kotek keeps saying she can't order a statewide moratorium without the legislature. So she used the lever she does have. The letter calls it a time-limited pause so she can digest her Data Advisory Committee's recommendations and line up reforms for the 2027 session. Comments on that committee's preliminary report are due October 24. And the first real project caught in this is Amazon's proposed hyperscale facility in Boardman. Oregon Rural Action says its air permit is under review at DEQ, and approval is Feldon's call. Seven hundred people signed a petition asking for an in-person hearing. Amazon spokesperson Adrienne Talbot says the pause would halt billions in planned investment and wipe out thousands of construction jobs. Both sides have a stake, so weigh both claims accordingly. What nobody disputes is that Oregon is a top-ten U.S. market, per Pew, and eastern Oregon hosts most of Amazon's data centers. If your Oregon project still needs a new air or water permit, next July is now the earliest you'll get one, and the rules after that are up to the legislature. She already paused data centers on state land for about a year, and her office says nobody's even applied there. That one was symbolic. This one isn't.
Melissa Koenig, writing in the Daily Mail with Reuters:
But in the meantime, the US Department of Energy (DOE) issued a short-term emergency order allowing PJM Interconnection to push past normal pollution limits in an effort to keep the lights on for its 67 million customers.
A heat emergency. In October. AccuWeather has the Ohio Valley and the Mid-Atlantic hitting the seventies and eighties, and PJM already had plants and lines down for seasonal repairs. The order took effect Tuesday and runs through Friday. Utilities schedule maintenance in the shoulder season precisely because nobody's supposed to need the capacity. Secretary Wright says the order makes more generation available as needed, including backup power. He also blamed the previous administration's policies for a weaker grid. That's his framing, not a finding. So the pollution limits get waived to keep the lights on, on a grid the piece says is 6.8 gigawatts short. PJM forecasts data center demand tripling to about 29 gigawatts by 2030. And since FERC threw out the curtailment plan last Friday, there's still no rule for who gets cut first. A week before this, at an October 6 hearing in the Pennsylvania House, PJM's Stephen Bennett told lawmakers the grid has entered an era of managing scarcity. The Pennsylvania PUC's consultant, Synapse, puts 2030 outage risk at nearly six times PJM's planning standard in its central scenario. A four-day waiver doesn't prove much on its own. But this is what thin margins look like, and it's months before next summer.
FERC Commissioner Chang, in a dissent posted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission:
DEC’s stated goal is laudable, but I am not persuaded on this record that the proposal meets it. DEC proposes to impose substantial 15-year payment obligations on specific LSEs that serve large loads, but proposes no specific security requirements to backstop those obligations.
Some context first. Last Friday, October 9, FERC voted four to one to approve Duke Energy Carolinas' large-load transmission rules, per Utility Dive. For loads of 100 megawatts or more, the utility serving the load commits to pay for at least 75 percent of the scheduled megawatts for fifteen years, or else pay the shortfall. Take-or-pay. I like take-or-pay. But Chang's point is that nothing backs up the promise. If the data center walks, what's left to collect? The dissent's other worry is visibility. Network upgrade costs, including the ones large loads drive, get rolled into transmission rates once the upgrades are in service. And the individual agreements go through electronic quarterly reports, so those upgrades and what they cost generally won't be filed for review or public disclosure. So the cost lands in everybody's rate, and nobody outside sees the receipts. That's the same gap the senators' report flagged, the one we covered Monday. Commissioner Rosner voted yes and called the plan meaningful, if imperfect, new protections, while saying consumer protections are inadequate across the country. Glowing. This is the wholesale side of the Duke story we covered last week, when Duke settled with North Carolina's Public Staff on upfront payments and security, with Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft on board. Chang would have sent this filing back for that same kind of security.
Scott Guthrie, on the Official Microsoft Blog:
As we move into the era of Super Intelligence, Microsoft is entering a new phase of infrastructure. We will scale our Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, making Maia the primary inference system for Microsoft products and services.
The era of Super Intelligence. Sure. Minus the poetry: Maia 200 is in production now, serving Copilot, and deployed in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Maia 300 starts production deployments in 2027. That Monday post is the news. The facilities people should care about the specs. A Maia 300 rack puts 96 accelerators inside a 167-kilowatt envelope. Each accelerator has a 950-watt TDP and eight HBM4 stacks, with compute chiplets on TSMC's N2P. And scale-up runs over Ethernet-based networking. One hundred sixty-seven kilowatts a rack. Your facilities team plans for that years out. And multi-gigawatt with no site named, no utility, no in-service date? Who's supplying the gigawatts? The efficiency numbers are Microsoft's own, too. Maia 300 claims 40 percent more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems, and Maia 200 claims up to 1.7 times the tokens per watt for AI features in Teams and Copilot. Nobody's checked those independently yet. Still, if Maia becomes the primary inference system, a real chunk of Microsoft's future load gets designed around its own silicon instead of somebody else's GPUs. More's promised at Ignite next month.
If today's PJM emergency got you wondering what lands on the household side, our sister show Power Bill covers residential electric rates and utility cost shifts every weekday. It's built so you know what hits your bill next month before it does. Search for Power Bill in your podcast app.
On our radar: DOE's emergency order for PJM runs through Friday, and comments on the Oregon data center advisory report are due October 24. Each story we covered today is linked in the show notes. Thanks for spending part of your Wednesday with us. The Data Center Daily is back tomorrow, and we're proud to be a Lantern Podcast.