Summary
- Pennsylvania’s new executive order applies enhanced review to data centres with peak demand above 25MW.
- Local planning and municipal approvals are tied more closely to state environmental review, while state agencies are barred from using project NDAs.
- From July 2027, covered facilities face annual reporting on energy, water, peak load, generation, efficiency, waste heat, and other operational impacts.
Pennsylvania has introduced a new regulatory framework for large data centres that links environmental permitting to local approval and requires greater disclosure of power, water, and operating impacts.
The Pennsylvania Governor’s Office issued the executive order on 18 August, applying enhanced state review to data centres with peak electricity demand above 25MW.
For projects above 25MW, the order ties the state environmental review process to documented local planning and municipal approvals, with different processing treatment depending on whether the developer enters the state’s GRID consent framework.
Data centres have also been removed from Pennsylvania’s fast-track permitting programme.
The measures represent a marked shift in how the state is treating large digital-infrastructure loads as proposals multiply around its electricity network.
The order says more than 100 data centre proposals have been reported in Pennsylvania, while environmental permit applications have so far been submitted for 20. Fourteen existing or developing locations are associated with the state’s data centre tax exemption programme.
Many proposals remain speculative, but the potential scale of future demand has become a power-system issue. The order cites PJM projections of roughly 74GW of additional summer peak load through 2045, driven primarily by data centres.
It also says data centre demand accounted for $29.4bn of capacity charges over the past four PJM auctions, representing 46% of total auction costs under the state’s analysis.
Those figures have pushed the debate beyond conventional economic-development incentives. The state is now treating data centre development as an infrastructure decision with consequences for electricity customers, generation requirements, environmental permitting, and local communities.
The executive order also restricts confidentiality around projects. State agencies under the governor’s authority are prohibited from entering non-disclosure agreements relating to data centre developments, while the environmental department is instructed to create a public map covering relevant projects.
Annual reporting requirements are due to begin by 1 July 2027. Covered facilities will be expected to report information including electricity and natural-gas consumption, peak load, water use, efficiency, on-site generation, pollution prevention, and waste-heat arrangements.
The reporting framework is notable from a European perspective because several of the same issues are moving into formal policy on this side of the Atlantic.
The EU has already introduced data centre energy reporting requirements, while national and local governments are becoming more involved in how large electrical loads interact with grids, planning systems, water, and surrounding infrastructure.
Scotland, for example, has recently moved to require ministerial notification of planning applications for data centres above 50MW. DataCentral reported that change in Scotland’s new oversight regime for large data centres.
The Pennsylvania approach goes further in tying environmental permitting explicitly to local approval and in banning state-agency NDAs around developments.
Its 25MW threshold is also relatively low compared with the scale of many current AI campuses. A single large hyperscale development can require several hundred megawatts, meaning the framework would capture projects well below the upper end of today’s pipeline.
That makes the state a useful comparator for European policymakers considering how to handle concentrated data centre demand. The policy question is moving away from whether the industry should be allowed to grow and towards what evidence, infrastructure commitments, and public disclosures should accompany that growth.
The rules will not remove the underlying demand for compute. They will, however, increase the amount of information developers need to provide and the number of interests that need to be addressed before a large facility can move through permitting.
For operators, that can add development work and potentially extend consent timelines. For grids and local authorities, it creates a clearer route to assess whether the power, water, environmental, and community consequences of a project have been addressed before construction advances.
Pennsylvania’s experiment will now show whether stronger disclosure and consent requirements can be incorporated without turning permitting itself into another major infrastructure bottleneck.
