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The screens went dark an hour ago, the desk chatter faded with them, and one number from today is still sitting on my notepad. Evening.
Wall Street is racing to build the data centers. The neighbors just froze $130 billion of them.
The thing that stalls a data center isn't the grid. It's the power bill.
Every forecast this year sings the same note. Demand is destiny. Build, and keep building.
The ground disagrees. In the first three months of 2026, local opposition blocked or delayed 75 data center projects. Their combined value: $130 billion. That is as much as all of last year. Packed into one quarter.
This is not a coastal tantrum. It turned up in 49 states. The count of opposition groups doubled in a year, to 833. The anger runs both ways, red towns and blue towns, the same yard signs. Ask them why, and the answer is rarely abstract. It's the electric bill, the water table, the hum that never stops.
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I can model megawatts. I can model turbines and gas. What nobody models is the quiet thing that actually kills a project: the person holding the electric bill.
And that bill is climbing. Take PJM, the grid that runs from Chicago to the coast. Its latest capacity auction rang up $16.4 billion. The market monitor pins $6.3 billion of that on data centers. That's 38 percent.
The charge doesn't stay with the data center. It spreads across every meter on the system. And the auction cleared at its ceiling again, the third year running.
"If hyperscalers and other Big Tech developers need expensive new facilities and more energy, they should pay for it."
He said that while killing a bill meant to help. A measure to make data centers cover their own grid upgrades passed the House this week. In the Senate it stalled on Thursday. One senator called it too soft. Another blocked the fix. So the mildest version of "make them pay" couldn't clear the room.
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The cost: data centers drove 38 percent of PJM's latest capacity bill, the slice everyone else now shares. |
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The crowd: 833 organized opposition groups now, double the count a year ago. |
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The politics: it's bipartisan, which is rare, and it's the one thing the yard signs agree on. |
Upstairs, the money still says unstoppable. Record M&A, turbine backlogs a decade deep. Downstairs, a county commission can end a project in a single evening. Both things are true at once. Only one of them shows up in the demand curve.
The demand wave is real. The permission for it is not.
Every forecast counts the megawatts. The winner will be whoever remembers to count the voters.
— Theodore
The Capital Current ⚡
Every financial story has a power line running through it.
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