Show Us Your Math

Pennsylvania just passed a law that boils down to: show us your math. Buried in the new state budget is a requirement that data centers report their actual water and power draw every year, and that PJM, the grid operator forecasting demand across thirteen states, give Pennsylvania’s regulators a real look at how it builds those numbers. The bill’s own language calls out that “the current process… lacks transparency for policymakers, regulators and stakeholders.” That’s a strange thing to have to legislate into existence: the operator running your grid should have to show its work to the people overseeing it.

New York picked the blunter tool. No big data centers for a year, full stop, while the state figures out what all this actually costs in energy and climate terms. And Texas, just yesterday in this same story, went the engineering route, forcing data centers to ride through voltage dips instead of yanking themselves offline en masse the moment the grid hiccups.

Three states, three completely different levers, reporting mandate, moratorium, technical rule, aimed at the same blind spot: nobody quite knows how much power these things will draw next year, including, apparently, the grid operator whose entire job is knowing that. PJM forecasts demand for a huge chunk of the country and its own state regulators are the ones asking to see the assumptions behind it. Less “AI versus the grid,” more “who actually gets to audit the number.” That turns out to be the better fight to watch.

I keep waiting for someone to just build the shared spreadsheet.