Data centers have become the new top scapegoat in American energy politics. Towns are freezing data center building projects, governors are piling on conditions, and Senate candidates are promising a pause, all while the argument stays fixed on the data center itself. What almost no one is fixing is the reason bills are rising in the first place.
The United States still cannot zone, permit, and interconnect new power fast enough to match what artificial intelligence is asking of the system. Until that changes, a ban and a “yes, but bring your own electricity” rule end up in the same place. The project waits either way.
In August, Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers called for a one-year freeze on new data centers in Michigan. Two days earlier, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) signed an order that keeps Pennsylvania from even beginning permit review until a developer has already won local zoning approval and secured incremental new power of its own. Grid operator PJM, covering 13 states, is heading in the same direction. Starting in mid-2027, new large loads that haven’t lined up their own capacity would be cut off first when the grid gets tight.
Shapiro calls his order the nation’s strictest guardrails. The order does not mention that zoning in Pennsylvania is a local authority, not something a governor controls, and his own order requires developers to secure local approval before the state will even look at their permit. It routes companies through the exact veto point Harrisburg has no power over, then calls the result a guardrail. Even a company that signs on to Shapiro’s terms still has to build the power itself. That takes years, no matter what the state calls the arrangement.
Companies that try to leave the grid entirely run into the same wall from a different direction. In New Mexico, Oracle and OpenAI’s Project Jupiter was designed around on-site generation, specifically to avoid the utility queue. But the state land commissioner has rejected the pipeline meant to feed that plant twice this year, pushing the in-service date into 2027.
In Vineland, New Jersey, a data center campus linked to a Microsoft contract tried the same workaround with fuel cells and on-site fuel storage. The city issued stop-work orders in August over equipment installed without local permits, and the state has issued no air permit for the generators on the site. Both companies were willing to fund and build their own power, but neither could get it approved fast enough to matter.
These blocks are not unique to those two projects. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s latest queue survey found more than 2,000 gigawatts of generation and storage sitting in interconnection queues nationwide, more than the country’s entire installed fleet. Projects that actually reached commercial operation in 2025 had a median wait of over five years from request to operation. Of the capacity that entered queues between 2000 and 2020, only about 13% had been built by the end of last year, and most of the rest had already withdrawn. Even the projects that do make it through are taking years longer than AI-driven demand can wait.
That same bottleneck is driving the bills everyone’s angry about. PJM’s independent market monitor estimates data-center demand accounted for $29.4 billion in capacity-auction charges across the last four auctions, 46% of the total, because too little new supply has cleared the process to meet demand. Fix the process, and both problems shrink. Leave it broken, and a freeze still hasn’t built the power that would bring the charges down.
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Federal regulators have started to move. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ordered grid operators to justify or overhaul their large-load interconnection rules. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission finalized a faster licensing pathway for advanced reactors this spring. Those steps matter, but they don’t touch local zoning at all, and they aren’t enough on their own to offset a township freeze in one state, a pipeline denial in another, and a multiyear review for every new megawatt in between.
A freeze or an executive order gives a politician something to announce. Fixing the zoning boards and the permitting queues underneath it takes longer and wins fewer headlines, which is why most officials keep reaching for the first option instead of the second. Until that changes, the country will keep arguing about data centers and wondering why the power never arrives.
Iulia Lupse is the founder of I&A Communications Solutions and a contributor with Young Voices.