Energy policy and regulatory news in 2026 has been all data centers, all the time. A new database shows 77 large load tariffs either in place or being considered at utilities around the United States.
As you might expect, the data center business is booming in places like Texas, Louisiana, California and Ohio. Regulators are scrambling to catch the wave.
As RTO Insider ISO-NE correspondent Jon Lamson reported recently, even New England is grappling with potential data center expansion because of perceived affordability issues. New England has few data centers in the pipeline, in part because of the region’s high electricity costs. (See Data Center Interest, Opposition on the Rise in New England.)
All of this signifies a big shift in a brief period of time. RTO Insider’s James Downing recently reported that before 2025, most tariffs the Smart Electric Power Alliance tracked were for smaller customers — applying to facilities with demand of 5-10 MW.
“Now we’re seeing that load threshold increase sort of in parallel with the emergence of hyperscale and frontier data centers,” said SEPA’s Ann Collier. (See SEPA Tracks 77 Large Load Tariffs Nationally with DELTa Database.)
As Downing reported: “Most of the tariffs characterize large loads by their size and load factor, but some get more specific and are aimed at specific types of customers, such as data centers or crypto miners. Other changes are designed to require data center projects to provide upfront interconnection deposits meant to weed out speculative projects shopping for the best, cheapest connections to the grid.”
Making Your Voice Heard
What do you make of all this? Are the tariffs an overreaction, an underreaction or an appropriate response? We’d like to hear from you.
We regularly publish opinion pieces in our Stakeholder Forum feature. We ask contributors for around 800 words, on a topic relevant to our RTO/ISO readership. We like to use a photo or a graphic to accompany the op-ed, as well as a mug shot of the writer(s).
Submissions or questions should be sent to forum@rtoinsider.com. Please use the format contained in this downloadable Word document. (See Stakeholder Forum Submission Guidelines for more details.)
Meanwhile, our data center coverage will continue, as we examine these large load tariffs and whatever emerges from stakeholder meetings in the various ISOs and RTOs. Stay tuned.
