Communities across the country are being asked to approve large data centers, often on short timelines and with limited information. The projects are unfamiliar, the numbers are large, and the questions that matter most are not always the ones on the agenda.
This page is a starting point. It sets out what to ask, what a local vote actually settles, and why these projects do not fit the economic development math most communities have used for decades.
This page does not argue that your community should approve a data center, and it does not argue that your community should reject one. That decision belongs to the people who live there and the officials they elect.
What it does is lay out the economics clearly enough that the decision can be made with open eyes. A community that approves a project after asking these questions is in a stronger position than one that approves without asking. So is a community that declines.
It is written for county commissioners and planning staff who have to evaluate an application, and for residents who want to understand what is in front of their board. It is not legal advice, and it does not address any specific pending project.
Thirteen questions, grouped by subject. Each one includes why it matters and what an incomplete answer sounds like. The second part matters as much as the first, because most of these questions get answered in a way that sounds responsive without being specific.
This distinction is the most common source of confusion in local data center debates, and it changes what a community should do after a vote in either direction.
Your county commission and planning board control land use. That includes:
Your state's public utility commission controls cost allocation. That includes:
A community that votes down a project has settled the first column and not the second. A community that votes one through has done the same. In both cases the cost question is decided elsewhere, by a different body, on a different timeline.
This matters practically. A county that spends its energy exclusively on the zoning fight, and none on the utility commission proceeding, has engaged only half the question that affects household bills. Public utility commission dockets are open to public comment, and comments from local governments carry weight there. In most states that participation window is a specific, findable date.
Communities that want to affect the cost side often have more influence in the utility proceeding than in the zoning hearing, and far fewer people show up to it.
Communities are evaluating these projects with a framework built for a different kind of employer. The framework is not wrong. It was built on assumptions that these projects fit imperfectly.
For most of the last century, recruiting a large facility to a community followed a familiar logic. A manufacturer or processor would arrive, hire locally in significant numbers, and become physically rooted in the place. Its equipment was heavy, its workforce was trained on site, and its supply relationships were local. Moving was expensive and slow.
The utility math followed from that. When the plant required new grid capacity, the cost of building it was recovered over decades, spread across a customer base that the plant itself helped to grow. The employees became ratepayers. The suppliers became ratepayers. Growth in the base absorbed the cost of serving the new load, and the arrangement worked because the load stayed.
Large data center loads differ from that model in three ways that matter for the arithmetic.
Scale relative to the local base. A single large campus can require a meaningful fraction of the electricity an entire county currently uses. When the new load is that large relative to the existing base, the cost of serving it cannot be quietly absorbed by ordinary growth. It is large enough to be visible in rates.
Employment relative to capital. These are capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive facilities. That is not a criticism, it is a description of the technology. But it means the second half of the old bargain, in which the facility's workforce expands the local ratepayer base, arrives at a smaller scale than the electricity demand would historically have implied.
Rootedness is contractual rather than physical. This is the part most different from the old model. A steel mill was held in place by its own weight. A computing load is held in place by a contract. Contracts have terms, renewal dates, and renegotiation clauses. The commitment can be strong, and often is, but it is a legal commitment with a defined length rather than a physical fact with an indefinite one.
Grid infrastructure is financed on a thirty to forty year horizon. Service agreements are typically shorter. In the old model that mismatch was manageable because the load was not going anywhere and the customer base was growing underneath it.
When the load is very large relative to the base, and its continued presence rests on contract terms, the mismatch becomes a question that has to be answered on purpose rather than absorbed by default. The question is not whether these facilities should be built. It is who carries the cost of the infrastructure built to serve them, and under what circumstances that allocation changes.
Under most existing cost recovery rules, written before any of this, the default answer when a served load departs is that remaining ratepayers absorb the cost. That default was reasonable for the world it was written in. Whether it remains the right answer is the question now in front of utility commissions in a number of states, and it is a question with more than one legitimate answer.
It is not a forecast. Nothing here predicts that the data center buildout will fail, slow, or prove smaller than expected. That is a question about the future of an industry, and this page takes no position on it.
It is not a claim that utilities are overbuilding. Whether current construction plans turn out to be right-sized is a separate empirical question that will be settled by events.
It is a question about allocation. The argument is narrower than it may first appear: the rules that determine who bears the cost were written for a different kind of customer, and they should be examined deliberately rather than applied by default. That examination is worth doing whether the buildout proves larger or smaller than anyone expects.
Legislatures and utility commissions in a number of states are actively rewriting how the cost of serving very large electricity customers is allocated. Some have enacted rules. Others have opened proceedings, imposed pauses, or ordered studies. The approaches differ, and the differences are instructive for a community trying to understand its own state's posture.
A state-by-state reference, with each entry linked to its primary source, is maintained on the tracker page.
Every factual claim on this page can be checked against a public source. Start with your own state, since the rules that govern your community's decision are set there.
Dr. Mark R. McNees directs the MS in Social and Sustainable Enterprises at Florida State University's Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship, where he is Sustainability Entrepreneur in Residence. His work covers the economics of who pays when data centers connect to the grid: utility rate structures, ratepayer cost shifting, and the state laws now reshaping who funds the buildout.
He tracks large-load tariff dockets across eleven states and has been quoted in national outlets on data center electricity costs. He holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from George Fox University and a graduate certificate in innovation and entrepreneurship from Harvard University.
Local officials, planning staff, and community groups are welcome to make contact with questions about the material on this page. Views expressed here are his own.