The Data Center Resistance Is Winning — and the Dirtier Power Is Still Coming

In July, during a record heat wave that pushed the PJM grid to 168,158 megawatts of peak demand, the Department of Energy granted emergency authority to force data centers onto their backup diesel generators ^[1]. The Sierra Club's Tom Schuster put the trade plainly.

They’re even worse than coal. — Tom Schuster

Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan, whose county hosts some of those facilities, was blunter.

The billionaires that are driving this AI revolution that we hear about all the time in the news, they want communities like Lackawanna County to bear the burden while they reap all the rewards. — Bill Gaughan

That episode is the whole argument in miniature. The people who fought to keep data centers off the grid won, and the federal response was to put them on something dirtier. The resistance is real, and it is working. This week, Pennsylvania's governor ordered data centers above 25 megawatts to procure their own power and pay their own interconnection costs ^[2]. Texas paused permitting while it audits 474 gigawatts of requests ^[3]. Oklahoma's legislature passed a ratepayer-protection law unanimously, Wisconsin's public service commission ruled that existing customers should not subsidize data centers at all, and Oregon imposed a surcharge on the largest facilities ^[4]. In Ohio, both candidates for governor are running on restricting them ^[5]. The buildout has slowed to a crawl: more than $130 billion in projects blocked or delayed, only 802 of 3,969 announced facilities under construction. The boundaries that make all this possible are real and known. When FERC ordered six regional grid operators to reform how they charge large power users, it explicitly excluded Texas, because ERCOT operates outside federal jurisdiction ^[6]. If a grid can sit outside Washington's reach, then a power plant can sit outside a state's. That is the geometry. A governor can block a grid connection. But the administration has been building pathways that never ask a governor for anything. The EPA proposed rolling back coal plant wastewater standards, and Administrator Lee Zeldin framed the move explicitly around the AI race.

Changing the rule is critical to making electricity more affordable and reliable, while advancing the economy. — Lee Zeldin

Then it exempted islanded power plants — those not connected to the grid — from the Acid Rain Program ^[7]. And Chevron signed a 20-year deal to build 2.67 gigawatts of gas generation behind the meter for Microsoft in Texas, power that never enters the grid and so never crosses a state regulator's desk ^[8]. Every battle the resisters can fight is a battle the administration can route around. A governor can block a grid connection. He cannot block a diesel generator the federal government orders on, or a coal plant whose wastewater rules Washington just relaxed, or a gas plant that never asks his permission because it never enters his jurisdiction. The fight is being won at the statehouse and lost at the power plant.