Issue No. 1 • September 2026
The Record You Will Be Judged On
What a city needs in the file before it votes on a data center. Free to read, free to circulate for government and educational use. Open the full 32 page report through the reports access page.
The national power estimate went up and got less certain at the same time. Berkeley Lab's 2025 update says 11.8 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030, inside a range of 9.5 to 15.3 percent. Quoting the middle number alone misrepresents it.
Both sides of the power bill argument are wrong, and one study proves it. Virginia's audit commission found data centers are currently paying their full cost of service, and that a typical Dominion residential customer could still see 14 to 37 dollars a month more by 2040.
Washington has not finished. FERC Docket No. RM26-4-000 on connecting big loads was open the day I read it, with the Commission directed to act by June 2026.
Opposition is organized nationally now. Data Center Watch reports at least 75 projects worth about 130 billion dollars blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with active groups across 49 states.
Missouri already adopted protections. Senate Bill 4 produced approved tariffs at Ameren Missouri and Evergy, with commitments up to 17 years and collateral equal to two years of minimum bills.
The failure closest to home was about drafting. Peculiar, Missouri reversed its own approval by deleting a data center definition it had dropped into its light industrial code.
Twelve questions to ask yourself
This is Chapter 6. Answer it with your planning director and your attorney in the room. About fifteen minutes. It is professional judgment, not a tested instrument, and it carries no score with statistical meaning. What it does is show you your gaps while they are still cheap to close.
- Does your code define data center as its own use, with its own standards, instead of borrowing a definition written for warehouses or light industrial?
- If a resident asked tonight which section of your code covers this, could staff say it without looking?
- Do you know whether your state has adopted large load protections, and can you say what they require?
- Is the revenue number in your packet built from your own rates and your own assessor's method?
- Can you say the permanent job number and the construction job number separately, and say where each came from?
- Has anybody on your staff read a primary source on this, not just the applicant's packet and a trade article?
- Do you know what your residents think from a representative sample, not just the hearing room and an online form?
- Have you published, in advance, what this process can and cannot decide, and who is paying for it?
- Is the strongest argument against the project in your own file, from a credible source?
- Do you have noise, water and decommissioning standards in writing, instead of a plan to negotiate them deal by deal?
- Does your file say the federal rules are unfinished, and explain how your text is written to survive them?
- If somebody sued you tomorrow, could you hand a judge the file and be comfortable?
Ten to twelve yes. You are deciding. Your file can carry the weight either way you vote.
Six to nine yes. You have gaps and you probably already know which ones. Cheap to fix now. Expensive to fix later.
Five or fewer yes. You are not deciding, you are reacting. The best thing you can do is buy time to build the file.
Eleven of the twelve are about your record, not about the technology. That is the whole report in one line.
How it was built
Ten sources, every one opened and read at its origin on 20 September 2026, every figure cited where it appears and again in a verification log at the back. Nothing was estimated, modelled or rounded. Where a figure could not be verified at its source, it was left out.
Get the report, PDF, 32 pages Ask a question about it If you are a city or county
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