Series Parts

The data center scorecard for Tuesday night

Ten questions to take to any data center hearing. If the developer cannot answer them in writing, the county has a rendering, not a proposal.

Todd Ruffner-Schoenfeld Editor in chief. A knack for the fine print, and likes it. 15 Sep 2026 4 min read 3 sources E.G. v4.17

A red-brick county courthouse with white columns and a clock tower under a blue sky. — The vote that decides a data center happens in a building like this one, a county courthouse in Virginia. Photo by Taber Andrew Bain, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Power Plant Next Door · Part 7 of nine. Start at the series hub. Reporting current as of September 2026.

Every part of this series has ended at the same kind of place: one specific number a developer would rather keep out of the record. This part turns those numbers into a tool. Print it, or copy the ten questions onto an index card, and take it to the hearing. If the developer cannot answer them in writing, the county is looking at a rendering, not a proposal.

How to use it

None of these ten questions is a gotcha. Each one has a real answer a developer can know, and someone negotiating in good faith will have it ready. The ones that get a shrug, a “proprietary,” or a “we will get back to you” are the ones that tell you where the risk was quietly parked. Ask them out loud, on the record, and watch which ones the room does not want to answer.

The scorecard · ten questions for the dais

Load. How many megawatts at opening, and at full build? Who pays if phase two never arrives?
Tariff. Is there a large-load rate with a minimum bill that survives a cancellation, like Virginia’s GS-5, and is it in force before the slab is poured?
Queue. Where does this site sit in the interconnection queue, and what study year is attached to it?
Water in. Gallons per day, drawn from where, potable or not, evaporated or recycled? The meter, not the brochure.
Water out. Where do the cooling blowdown and the stormwater go, under which permit, and who tests it?
Jobs. Permanent full-time roles on site after construction, counted as people and not job-years, with contractors listed separately.
Abatement. Dollars of tax break, over how many years, with how many jobs required, and a clawback if the headcount misses.
Nuisance. Noise levels, diesel-generator run hours, and who pays to bury the new transmission line.
Exit. What happens to the land, the substation and the water line if the tenant leaves in year eight?
Veto. Which government can still say no after tonight: the county, the state, or neither?

A HeadLines Decoded checklist, built from the reporting in this series. Reuse it freely.

Reading the answers

The pattern in the answers matters more than any single one. If the load, the tariff, the queue position, and the water meter all come back public and specific, a town can look at that deal and say yes and mean it. Plenty of communities have, and done fine. But if the load is “flexible,” the water figure is “proprietary,” the jobs number is quietly a construction total, and the veto has already been promised away in the development agreement, the county is not hosting the future. It is signing up to host someone else’s depreciation schedule, and to hold the substation when the depreciation is done.

None of the ten questions asks the developer to prove the project is bad. Each asks the developer to prove it is real, and to name who carries the risk if it is not. That is a fair thing to ask of any customer that wants a decade of tax revenue and a substation sized for a small city. The tax break alone can run past a million dollars for every permanent job the campus keeps, which is reason enough to make the developer show the arithmetic before the county signs. A good actor answers them in an afternoon.

The cloud has an address

Across this series the same shape keeps showing up. The cloud is not weather and it is not magic; it is a building with an address, and the address has a meter and a water line, a payroll and a seat at a county hearing. The scorecard is just a way to make the building show all of that before the vote instead of after. The last part of the series is where the author stops reporting and says how he comes out on the whole thing, in his own words.

Sources and further reading

The scorecard draws on the reporting in the earlier parts of this series: PJM market-monitor cost findings, Virginia’s GS-5 large-load tariff, data-center water disclosures, jobs and abatement data from Brookings and Good Jobs First, and interconnection-queue data from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. See the full series hub.
Virginia SCC data-center initiatives, including the GS-5 tariff and collateral requirements, as a model for the “make the tenant go first” question. Virginia SCC.
Good Jobs First on abatement disclosure and clawbacks, for the tax-break questions. Good Jobs First.

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Written by Todd Ruffner-Schoenfeld Editor in chief. A knack for the fine print, and likes it.

Todd Ruffner-Schoenfeld has spent his working life being handed things he did not yet understand. He started at the bottom, a developer in a bullpen, and worked his way up to running IT. The places were a strange assortment: consulting firms, accounting firms, a biotech startup, a tech startup in Silicon Valley and, of all places, Chiquita. Four small businesses of his own along the way. The work never really changed. Get into something unfamiliar, find out what is actually going on, and help someone make a hard decision with it. HeadLines Decoded is that job, pointed at the news.