The Bill That Puts Benefits and Costs in the Same Document

A lease that discloses the rent in one document and the pending increase in a separate one, mailed later, is not really disclosing anything. It is delaying the disclosure until the tenant has less leverage to do anything about it. I think a lot of data center cost structures have worked exactly that way for years, and Pennsylvania just decided to stop letting them.

What the Ring-Fencing Actually Requires

My earlier piece covered the permitting side of Governor Shapiro's Executive Order 2026-05. The cost side deserves its own look. Under the GRID requirements, data center developers must pay 100 percent of the interconnection costs their projects create, and bear direct financial responsibility for any costs tied to PJM's reliability backstop auctions rather than having those costs blended into the general rate base every household pays into. PJM's own Independent Market Monitor found that data center demand was responsible for $29.4 billion in capacity charges to ratepayers across the last four base residual capacity auctions alone, 46% of the total. That number was sitting inside everyone's bill already. Almost nobody paying it could see where it actually came from.

Pennsylvania Utility Law Project attorney Patrick Cicero made the stakes plain at the governor's press conference, noting that in 2025, almost 290,000 Pennsylvania residents had their electricity shut off for nonpayment. That is not an abstract accounting question. That is what happens when a cost nobody can see gets paid by people least able to absorb it.

Why This Is a Local Balance Sheet Requirement, Written Into Policy

I have said every data center project should present a clear, single accounting of what flows into and out of its host community. Benefits and costs belong in the same document, in plain language. Not scattered across separate filings that a community has to fight to reassemble. Pennsylvania's ring-fencing does exactly that at the state level. Interconnection costs and reliability auction costs, the money side that used to disappear into a blended rate base, now has to be traced directly back to the project that created it. DEP has also built a public map of every proposed Pennsylvania data center that has engaged with the agency, including permit status, which is the same principle applied to visibility rather than cost, one place to look instead of a dozen separate filings.

Why the Fayette County Comparison Matters

Compare this to what happened in Fayette County, Georgia earlier this year. An internal county letter found two additional water lines installed at a data center site without county staff's knowledge or inspection. The county then walked back its own letter, blaming a smart meter technology discrepancy. The data center's own public statements described a facility that consumes no water once operational. Three sources, one project, three different pictures, and it took an internal document leak and outside reporting to force any of it into public view at all.

Pennsylvania just required, by executive order, on day one, what Fayette County residents had to essentially litigate their way toward discovering months later. The information in both cases was the same basic category, what a project actually costs and consumes, set against what it claims to provide. The difference is entirely about timing and default. One state decided costs get disclosed before construction starts. One county found out costs had been hidden after the fact, and only because someone went looking.

Why This Pattern Is Spreading, Not Isolated

Pennsylvania is not alone in reaching for this tool. Louisiana's Governor Landry issued a similar executive order in June conditioning the state's data center tax exemption on detailed compliance attestations. Florida passed a law in May explicitly prohibiting utilities from shifting data center infrastructure costs onto residential and small business customers. New York and Illinois have each paused parts of their own approval processes to build comparable frameworks. None of these states appear to be coordinating directly with each other. All of them are converging on the same underlying idea, that costs and benefits belong in the same place, disclosed before the fact rather than discovered after it.

What This Means for Utilities and Public Sector Teams Building Their Own Standard

Disclosure standard design like this is genuinely board-level and policy-level work, not a communications fix bolted on after a project draws criticism. The states moving fastest right now are building the structure before a Fayette County style crisis forces their hand, which is a materially better position to design from than reacting after the fact.

If you are building or updating a disclosure or cost allocation framework for data center development, whether inside a utility, a state agency, or a public sector team, I would rather help design that structure directly with you than watch another jurisdiction find out the hard way that the gap was always there.

If that's where you are, whether you're the one drafting the framework or bringing this to a board that's about to adopt one, grab 15 minutes on my calendar and let's talk about what a real ring-fenced, single-document standard would look like inside your specific process.

PLUS:

Grab the guide. Before advancing a data center site, there are 12 questions I make sure I can answer. I wrote them up here: [The 12 Questions Every Real Estate Professional Should Ask Before Advancing a Data Center Site].