Senate Block Leaves Large-Load Cost Rules to PUCT Timing and Early Filers

The House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act 417-3, and the Senate blocked companion action the same day, leaving large-load cost rules to state commissions with no federal floor. The bill amends PURPA to add a large-load standard for sites at 100 MW or more, directing commissions to consider making those loads cover incremental generation, transmission, substations, and stranded costs if a campus scales back or leaves.

Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, sought unanimous consent; Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., objected and offered a harder mandate; Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, then blocked that alternative. If any version eventually clears, each state commission must open a proceeding within one year and decide within two whether to adopt, modify, or reject.

Texas developers should treat PUCT docket timing, financial-assurance language, and offtake structure as live site-selection variables now, not after a campus posts capital.

Out-of-state policy is tightening around cost allocation, local process, and operational incidents. Colorado shows the permitting vacuum problem: Vantage Data Centers’ Trident campus near Denver targets 500 MW on 143 acres in Aurora, with about 334 MW of IT capacity and 861,866 sq ft, moving as a permitted industrial use that city staff can approve without a neighborhood meeting.

Denver City Council already imposed a one-year moratorium on applications while a working group writes rules, and towns and counties covering roughly one-third of Colorado’s population have paused filings. CoreSite’s Globeville build similarly advanced three buildings without public hearings, with an 18 MW first hall nearly complete.

In New Jersey, an Equinix Secaucus site released about 5,500 gallons of diesel into a Hackensack tributary after two broken filtration valves, the state’s largest data-center spill on record, with roughly 3,500 gallons recovered and no observed wildlife or drinking-water intake impact. AFP notes New York’s year-long hyperscale moratorium and midterm ads in more than 20 races across at least 18 states, including a single multi-state grid covering 67 million customers where data-center-driven costs rose $9.3B, a 174% one-year jump.

Tucson’s Project Blue arc remains the fragmentation case: city council rejected a $3.6B, 600 MW AWS plan 7-0 over water stress, yet Pima County rezoned and sold the land, the Arizona Corporation Commission approved power with Tucson Electric Power, and state water officials cleared private wells the city utility refused. Prepared developers read these as site-selection and early-engagement tests, not as reasons to slow Texas work.

Google, NVIDIA, and Emerald AI launched the AI Energy Management Alliance with 18 founding members, including Anthropic, National Grid, AES, and NRG, on a blunt policy bet: measurable load flex during grid stress should buy faster interconnection. Brattle Group math in the Fortune piece says a 10% gain in grid utilization can cut rates about 3.4%; average utilization sits near 50%, so flexible AI load could unlock roughly 100 GW of existing capacity without new wires.

NVIDIA, Digital Realty, and Emerald plan a 100 MW power-flexible AI factory demo in Virginia later this year, and Google already runs a gigawatt-scale demand-response book nationally. That maps straight onto Texas queue pressure: one digest puts ERCOT pending near 300 GW, another at 474 GW with roughly 90% data-center driven.

Self-supplied power remains the parallel path when grid timing slips, but Enverus stripped Homer City in Pennsylvania and Fermi’s Matador in Texas from its high-confidence 2Q26 list after missing offtakers, canceled contracts, or unidentified tenants. Enverus still forecasts 22.5 GW of U.S. data-center load on behind-the-meter supply from 2026 to 2030, 36% of new additions, with gas at 29.6 GW of that stack and committed solar plus wind at 2.0 GW, concentrated in PJM and ERCOT.

South Korea’s Second Vice Minister Lee Ho-hyun used the Houston Energy Ministers’ Meeting to push a Capacity, Connection, and Supply Chain frame with U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle Housewaite, aiming transformer, cable, storage, and SMR cooperation while ERCOT’s queue stays full. Bottom line: design flex metering, fuel routing, and signed tenants before you treat generation announcements as energization dates.

Closed-loop and dry cooling can cut campus withdrawals, yet Scope 2 water for power generation dominates the ledger. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put 2023 U.S. data-center load at 176 TWh, implying nearly 800 billion liters (~211 billion gallons) of generation water; the 2025 update’s 2030 reference case hits 649 TWh, with sensitivity from 521 to 843 TWh. Holding the 2023 intensity factor of 4.52 liters/kWh implies roughly 622 billion to more than 1 trillion gallons of annual indirect use by 2030 under those scenarios.

Gas combined-cycle spans about 2 gal/MWh dry-cooled to 100 once-through to 200 recirculating; recirculating coal and nuclear run near 687 and 672 gal/MWh. A constant 1 GW load for a year is about 18 million gallons on dry-cooled gas and 1.8 billion on recirculating gas. A 2026 Ceres cut put collective freshwater withdrawals tied to data-center power in Virginia, Texas, California, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio, and Arizona near 3.4 trillion gallons yearly, with California about 1.4 trillion, Virginia 753 billion, and Arizona 520 billion; Texas sits inside that multistate footprint even when power-system boundaries blur state lines.

Texas Standard reports the institutional gap: Hays County draws can sit under TCEQ withdrawal permits, ERCOT interconnection, and local land use with no single agency aggregating consumption, while San Marcos council denied a rezoning after nearly eight hours of opposition beside Vistra’s 990 MW Hays plant. Governor Greg Abbott’s pause and measurement push remain the operative Texas frame from prior coverage; voluntary filings, water offsets, and known fuel-mix contracts are how prepared operators shorten the wait when reviews reopen.

Bottom line: lock generation water profiles and offset proof at site selection, or carry audit and sequencing delay on the balance sheet.

House passage and Senate gridlock on ratepayer rules keep midterm heat on cost, noise, water, and tax deals while White House voluntary pledges from Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI, and Amazon fail to quiet local races. AFP flags Texas as the sharpest state conflict under Governor Greg Abbott’s freeze pending power and water study work already tracked here, with Brazoria County resident Melissa Burnett describing a 17 MW site as “like a freight train always coming at you.”

Planning authority still splits city, county, utility commission, and water agency lines, so a municipal no-vote can leave land, power, and wells intact elsewhere, as Tucson showed. Capital & Main’s Colorado arc proves administrative approval without hearings can still seed statewide pauses; Texas operators who skip early elected outreach and benefit-sharing still meet stakeholders later in interconnection fights and PUCT process.

Rack density compounds the local politics of build quality: average rack load moved from 12 kW in 2024 to 26 kW in 2026, with engineering talk of paths toward 1 MW per rack, forcing liquid cooling, floor-load checks, and distribution rewires that become visible community and capital issues if left as retrofits. Bottom line: file into cost-allocation and measurement dockets early, pair local process with verified resource commitments, and price carrying cost for every quarter between capacity availability and energization.