Texas’s utility regulator did something quietly sensible on Friday. It killed a proposed data center interconnection fee that would have charged $50,000 per megawatt of contracted demand, non-refundable, and replaced it with a flat $100,000 study fee. Any load, any size. A five-megawatt cold-storage warehouse and a five-hundred-megawatt hyperscaler now pay the exact same fee to get their interconnection studied.

That’s not equity so much as it is giving up on the math. Developers complained the per-megawatt formula punished big projects disproportionately, and the commission’s answer was to stop scaling the fee at all — which solves the complaint the way removing a broken clock solves the time. The rule does promise to revisit the number “as more data becomes available,” which is regulator-speak for we’ll circle back.

Compare it to the paperwork I’ve been tracking here the last few days: Microsoft’s appeal that isn’t an appeal, the House bill everyone already knew was dead in the Senate. Those were gestures aimed at an audience. Nobody held a press conference about the Texas fee. It just moved, and it will change what an actual invoice looks like for actual developers next quarter — which is a different species of government action than filing something to “preserve your ability” to maybe do something later.

Meanwhile a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled the EPA broke the law killing the $7 billion Solar for All program. She’s a Trump appointee, as it happens. Second time this month a court has told this administration its emergency powers over energy don’t stretch quite as far as it’s been acting like they do. Courts keep being the actual check here. Someone might mention to Congress that’s supposed to be its job.

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