Build the data centers. Just not in the living room.

The demand is already here

We are not going back to a world without big computing. The models run on it. So does hospital software, so do the freight systems, so does the boring old cloud that has been holding your photos for ten years. That demand exists today, and a county vote does not make it go away. Refuse every site and, I expect, the company builds in the next state instead. I think our bill can still go up, because in a regional market such as PJM capacity is priced for the whole grid at once, whatever one county’s zoning map says (the market monitor’s July 27, 2026 report attributes $29.4 billion of capacity charges, 46.2 percent of the total, to data center load over four auctions; Part 1 shows the step from that wholesale charge to a retail bill is not measured). I would rather plan for the building than pretend the demand is optional. Pretend, and you get the worst version of it: the one you first hear about when the concrete trucks arrive.

Plan it before you vote on it

Planning is the thing that keeps getting left off the table. It should not be a surprise annexation on a residential road. Nor should it be a building whose cooling fans run around the clock next to a school, with diesel generators on the property. The federal rule for emergency engines, 40 CFR 60.4211(f), sets the limits. An emergency engine may run without a time limit in an emergency and up to 100 hours a year for maintenance checks and readiness testing. Tests that a government, the manufacturer, the vendor, the grid operator or the insurer recommends all fall within that 100. Going past it takes federal, state or local standards that require more, with the owner keeping records. Up to 50 hours of non-emergency operation count inside that 100, and those 50 cannot be used for peak shaving or to earn income, except when the local grid operator dispatches the engine to avert a voltage collapse or line overload. An engine run outside those paragraphs “will not be considered an emergency engine” and must meet the rules for non-emergency engines. That section covers diesel (compression-ignition) engines; gas-fired emergency engines fall under a parallel rule, 40 CFR 60.4243(d), with the same hour limits. So the question for a hearing is how many hours, for what, and who is counting. The water draw is just as real. And a substation sized for a town may not be able to carry a building full of computers. Push a town’s power, its water and its quiet to the limit, and the town does not get the future it was promised. It gets a ribbon-cutting and three broken things.

Put them where the wire can take them

So pick sites with the land and the transmission to carry them. Industrial parks. Retired power plant sites, where a grid connection may already exist. Places that are already loud, where one more loud building does not change anybody’s evening. Require the study before the rezoning, not after the pile driver shows up. That is not a left-or-right question. That is a county doing its homework before it votes. Part 7’s Guadalupe County example shows what the wrong order costs. With no zoning power in Texas (Part 4), the county’s leverage was the abatement and the contract terms. The commissioners voted 3-2 on April 21 to approve a development agreement (the posted copy is an unsigned draft, and Part 7 found no signed one) that bars the county from imposing a moratorium on the project (section 2.04) or any rule that limits the rate or timing of its approvals, and it supersedes conflicting county rules (section 3.02). The pause button went in the same vote that said yes.

Make the load bring the power

Where there is land for it, put solar and batteries on the site. Write a rule that a customer this big has to build new power, rather than take a share of the plants we already have. Small modular reactors are not a near-term answer: the Department of Energy describes them as ranging “from tens of megawatts up to hundreds of megawatts,” says the light-water designs are under Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing review, and expects deployment in the late 2020s to early 2030s, per its page on advanced small modular reactors. The page carries no date and describes a program begun in fiscal 2019, so read it as the department’s stated expectation, not a current schedule. Fusion is further out still. So do not take a promise about either one. Put a date in the rezoning conditions, and put money behind the date. The deal should be simple for the company: help build power that runs around the clock, on a published timetable, or lose the tax break.

“Bring your own power” can mean six different things, and a county that writes the phrase into a rule without choosing among them will get the weakest one. The table sets them out so a rule can say which it means.

My proposal is the additional generation, hourly matching and deliverable supply rows together: additional generation, matched hour by hour, deliverable to the campus’s own grid zone, with the company reporting hourly and the county or state holding the report. A rezoning condition could read: the applicant shall contract for new generation, deliverable to the zone that serves the site, equal to the site’s hourly load, report the match each month to the county, and post escrow that is forfeited if the timetable is missed. The escrow is the penalty for missing the timetable. I am not proposing a dollar figure, because the right amount depends on what the replacement power would cost, and I have no estimate to base one on. Backup diesel is a separate limit: cap non-emergency hours in the permit and require the company to report them.

Test the proposal on the Guadalupe County project from Part 7, because that company has already chosen to bring its own power. Section 3.06 of the development agreement says the power for the data center equipment “will be generated behind-the-meter by natural gas via turbines and fuel cell technology,” and the company’s April 2026 presentation lists its power as “Behind-the-Meter Generation.” Measured against my condition, that plant is new generation, but it is not delivered to a grid zone and it does not match the load with carbon-free energy hour by hour, so the condition as I wrote it would not describe it. A county facing that plan needs a different clause: name the air permit the plant must hold, say where the gas and the water come from, and say what the campus does to the grid when the turbines trip. The agreement lets the company buy grid power later if it becomes available, which is a door left open that a rule could close or price. The emergency-engine hours above cover standby engines, and engines that run a campus as its main supply fall outside them.

What I would do

The obvious objection is that a county asking for all this loses the project to a neighboring county that asks for none of it. There is also a legal question: what a county can require turns on state law. Under Dillon’s Rule a local government has only the powers the state grants, while under home rule it can act unless state law forbids it, as Ballotpedia explains. That is why a state has to back the county up. A county still holds the rezoning and the tax break and should use both where state law lets it, but a state rule is what keeps that neighbor from undercutting it. Virginia’s State Corporation Commission wrote its large-load tariff at the state level; its November 25, 2025 order sets minimum charges, collateral, an exit fee and a 14-year contract term (Part 6 has each term). That order charges a customer for the capacity it contracts, which is different from requiring it to build new supply. Nothing earlier in this series shows a rule that does the second, and the rules outside it, set out next, do not do what I propose. What I propose here is a proposal, not a description of existing practice.

The closest existing rules, as of October 29, 2026. PJM told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that its one-time Reliability Backstop Procurement is meant to buy capacity for new large loads that did not bring their own, and that utilities in its fixed-resource-requirement option must bring new capacity for all new load or pay a charge. FERC accepted the filing on September 29, suspended it until February 28, 2027, set a paper hearing and found that PJM’s proposed way of splitting the cost may be unjust and unreasonable (order, printed pages 1, 60 and 62). That is the nearest thing to bring-your-own-supply in a regional rulebook. It differs from my proposal in three ways: it binds utilities and not a rezoning, it buys capacity after the load is coming and then argues over who pays, and it asks for no hourly match or delivery to a zone. The White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, as FERC quotes it, says new large loads should “build, bring, or buy” the new generation they need and pay its full cost; FERC cites a July 2026 White House count of 282 utilities, cooperatives and developers and 23 governors that have joined. It is a pledge, not a rule, and it names no timetable, hourly match or penalty. Texas Senate Bill 6, signed in June 2025, requires loads of 75 megawatts or more that connect to the state grid to accept curtailment in a grid emergency and sets a $100,000 minimum interconnection fee, Utility Dive reported; the report does not say it requires new supply. Measured against these, my proposal would change the timing and the venue: the obligation would be written into the rezoning, before the load connects, with a date and a forfeit. A company can cross a state line too, and a state rule narrows its choices only where the state has the grid access, land and water the company wants. Nothing here is free, and none of it is guaranteed. It is still a better deal than saying yes and leaving the neighbors to find out about their own wells on their own. I would rather spend the next decade making new demand pay for new power. The alternative is what we have been doing: calling every server building a patriotic duty, and then acting surprised when the meter moves. If we treat this boom as a planning problem, it is a good decade to be alive. The machines are coming either way. The real question is where they go: the outskirts, on power built for them, or a residential street where somebody is trying to sleep. I am for the outskirts. The last part, Part 9, is not opinion. It rechecks the series’ figures on bills and tariffs.

Update, October 29, 2026: This column is an opinion, and its facts are rechecked. Earlier versions said backup generators run “all night, every night” (they serve emergencies and tests), relied on a law firm’s summary of a 100-hour limit on non-emergency operation (the rule allows up to 50 such hours inside a 100-hour maintenance and testing allowance), called small modular reactors “trailer-sized” (the Department of Energy gives tens to hundreds of megawatts), said a data center signs a power contract “lasting decades” (Virginia’s GS-5 term is 14 years), and described a closing part as an AI essay (Part 9 is rechecked figures). Claims we could not source were softened or cut. This update qualifies the county’s zoning power by state, replaces the unsupported claim that the fights in this series came from a reversed sequence with the Guadalupe County terms, softens two premises, notes that Part 1 does not measure the link to retail bills, adds the rules that come nearest, states the generator-hour limits here in full, and adds the Guadalupe County on-site gas turbines to the bring-your-own-power test. It also corrects a sentence on Guadalupe County’s leverage, which ignored that Texas counties have no zoning power. Later on October 29: the extra-hours exception now follows the rule’s words (a manufacturer’s or insurer’s recommended tests fall within the 100, and only a government requirement allows more), the page notes that the section covers diesel engines and that gas engines have a parallel rule, and the development agreement is described as voted on, with its unsigned status stated.

Editor written. AI used for spelling and grammar only.