Erasing the Rules Made the Buildout Harder

Rowan County, Kentucky, has no zoning code. The county's judge-executive explained what that means.

It's a necessary evil without a doubt. — Harry Clarke

So the county did the only thing it could think of: it banned data centers for two years ^[1]. That is the whole story of the past year in miniature. Washington has spent it erasing the rules that used to govern AI infrastructure — Clean Air Act exemptions for power plants built to serve a single data center, a Defense Production Act invocation to skip "regulatory delays," and emergency orders keeping coal plants open ^[2][3][4]. The point was to clear the path. Instead the path filled up with new rules, written in a hurry by people who had never expected to write them. Some of those rules answer a specific erasure. Others answer the buildout itself — the water, the power, the property values — which Washington accelerated but did not create. Rowan County's ban is the second kind: the county had no zoning to lose. So is Texas. The state blocked all new data center grid connections after discovering its water plan contains no projections for how much water data centers would use ^[5]. No federal rule was erased to open that gap; it was simply never filled. The local bans are the most visible layer, and they keep getting stricter. Independence County, Arkansas, imposed a five-year ban; Green Township, Ohio, twelve months; Oakville, Ontario, a year ^[6]. Pennsylvania's governor paused data centers that don't bring their own power, and Texas's governor blocked new ones from the state grid ^[2]. All told, local moratoriums have now blocked nearly $100 billion in proposed projects ^[7]. Where states didn't ban, they legislated. Maine passed the first statewide moratorium and created a 13-member council to study the impacts ^[8]. Pennsylvania wrote model ordinances and mandatory water and electricity reporting, with $10,000-a-day penalties for noncompliance ^[9]. Colorado legislators answered the federal coal-plant orders with a bill mandating pollution controls ^[10]. New York banned certain data centers outright and moved to repeal their sales-tax breaks ^[11]. The courts have been the sharpest counterweight, and the latest blow landed today. The DC Circuit struck down the emergency order forcing a Michigan coal plant to stay open, ruling the Energy Department "overstepped its authority" ^[12]. An administrative judge halted a $3 billion Nevada data center after finding the government had tried to reuse a small solar project's environmental review to authorize a 167-megawatt data center ^[13]. Colorado's attorney general sued over the Craig Station order.

There is no energy emergency, and stopping the Craig unit’s retirement would not ease any imagined energy need. — Philip J. Weiser

Even the grid operators — the least political actors in the system — started writing rules no one asked them to write. PJM, the largest US grid operator, proposed that data centers without their own generation be first in line for power cuts during shortages, and required them to "Bring Your Own New Capacity" by 2027 ^[14]. MISO proposed a new "computational load" category with mandatory monitoring and ramp requirements ^[15]. And where no government moved, citizens did. In Kansas, residents are using ballot initiatives to force public votes on data centers.

Basically the people are creating a picket line around data centers, and they’re actually self-mobilizing. — Brooklynne Mosley

In Butte, Montana, a coalition is seeking a two-thirds voter approval requirement ^[16]. None of this reached the constraints that actually matter. NERC, the grid's reliability watchdog, warned that data center growth is raising winter blackout risk, with demand running 20 gigawatts higher than the year before ^[17]. Texas's water plan has no data-center projections at all ^[5]. Those answer to physics, not executive orders. The administration did not deregulate the buildout. It removed one coherent framework and watched a patchwork of improvised, legally vulnerable rules grow up in its place — some written to answer a specific erasure, some to answer the buildout itself, and nearly all of them stricter than what they replaced. The water and the grid were never listening.