27 STORIES / PSV ORIGINAL REPORTING
Regulatory moves, legislation, and grid policy that reshape CRE underwriting, from data center moratoriums to housing acts.
THE LEAD / CRE POLICY NEWS
Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on September 21 to pause the issuance of all permits related to data center projects until ERCOT completes its review, and said no state agency should move forward with data center approvals until the audit information is in. ERCOT’s responses are due October 12 and its report by December 10. No end date is set.
PSV ORIGINAL REPORTING & ANALYSIS
Every Policy & Regulation story PSV has filed, newest first. Each one is written in-house and traced to a primary record.
DEVELOPING STORY / 01
CRE POLICY NEWS
01 / 04The House passed H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, by 417 to 3 on September 16, 2026. It would add a federal standard to the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act making data center campuses of 100 megawatts or more pay the full incremental cost of the grid upgrades built for them. On September 17 Senator Martin Heinrich blocked fast passage in the Senate.
DEVELOPING STORY / 02
CRE POLICY NEWS
02 / 04Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality has proposed a consent order requiring Microsoft to pay a $2,499,000 civil charge after its Leesburg data center ran 62 emergency diesel engines for seven days during a 2025 substation failure and exceeded its permitted fuel and emissions limits. Public comment runs through October 14, 2026. All but $99,000 goes to air quality monitoring for data center areas.
DEVELOPING STORY / 03
CRE POLICY NEWS
03 / 04Loudoun County’s Board of Supervisors voted 7-1-1 on September 15 to direct staff to draft a resolution pausing new data center applications for up to 12 months while it rewrites its data center zoning rules, over a staff recommendation to take no action. A final vote is reported for October. The Planning Commission is not expected to take up the new rules until February 2027.
DEVELOPING STORY / 04
CRE POLICY NEWS
04 / 04SpaceX has sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Grimes County to stop the county releasing records behind the incentives for Terafab, its planned chip plant, including its tax abatement application. Much of the deal is already public: eight state JETI filings with an estimated $1.66 billion in school tax benefit, and county agreements that set its county tax payments at $20 million a year for a decade, then cap them there through 2061.
17 STORIES / NEWEST FIRST
CRE POLICY NEWS
Governor Maura Healey signed Executive Order No. 658 on September 8, barring MassDEP, the Energy Facilities Siting Board, the MEPA Office and other permitting agencies from issuing any permit to a data center above 25 megawatts of peak demand until it conforms with her June 25 framework and files a community benefits agreement reviewed by the state’s environmental justice office. It also orders a clean energy mandate with a payment alternative.
CRE POLICY NEWS
PJM told this desk’s readers in July what its Board had directed. The filings themselves are now at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in dockets ER26-3380-000 and ER26-3515-000, and the comment window closed on September 3. They contain terms the Board letter never stated, and the most consequential one is what a site has to promise to keep firm power.
CRE POLICY NEWS
WEC Energy Group filed a Form 8-K on September 4 attaching the investor deck that finally puts numbers on Wisconsin’s Very Large Customer tariff. The Public Service Commission approved it in docket 6630-TE-113 and made it mandatory for any customer with 100 megawatts or more of annual demand. WEC now forecasts 3.9 gigawatts of new electric demand through 2030, and two data center campuses are all of it.
CRE POLICY NEWS
Closing briefs in the Arizona Public Service rate case were docketed on August 27, and they carry a fact no site selection memo in metro Phoenix can ignore. Microsoft, an intervenor, told the Arizona Corporation Commission that APS has been unable to commit to serve any new large load customer since January 1, 2024. APS’s own brief describes a large queue of uncommitted customers. PSV read the briefs.
CRE POLICY NEWS
The Court of Appeals of Virginia held on March 31, 2026 that Prince William County’s three Digital Gateway rezoning ordinances are void from the beginning, because the county advertised the December 2023 hearing defectively. The county chose not to appeal on April 14, 2026. Compass Datacenters withdrew on April 29, and QTS told the Supreme Court of Virginia on July 2 that it was terminating the project.
CRE CAPITAL NEWS
Fervo Energy filed an 8-K on Tuesday morning disclosing that a wholly owned subsidiary signed a 15-year power purchase agreement with Google Energy for 396 megawatts of enhanced geothermal capacity at Cape Station in Beaver County, Utah, plus an option that would take the total to roughly 950 megawatts. Fervo calls the power a building block for a potential Utah data center. No building has been announced. PSV read the filing and the statute behind it.
CRE POLICY NEWS
Governor Greg Abbott directed a verification and audit of every data center advancing through ERCOT’s interconnection process on August 3. The Public Utility Commission of Texas made it operative on August 20, granting ERCOT good cause exceptions that suspend Batch Zero classification deadlines. ERCOT then told the market it intends to issue conditional classifications by August 31. PSV read the letter, the order and ERCOT’s filed presentation.
CRE POLICY NEWS
Two EPA proposals now sitting in the docket would change data center permitting from opposite ends: one narrows what counts as starting construction, so site work could begin before an air permit issues, and the other drops the federal floor requiring public notice on minor source permits. PSV read both rules. Neither is final, and neither says “data center” once.
CRE POLICY NEWS
Five federal class actions filed since April accuse data center operators of pushing unreasonable noise onto neighboring homes, and a sixth case runs the other direction: a developer suing Nashville over a permit moratorium. PSV read all six dockets. Two of the five have already ended, neither of them on the merits, and the pattern is not the one the trade press is describing.
CRE POLICY NEWS
The Federal Trade Commission and five state attorneys general filed a stipulated final order on August 24 resolving their antitrust case over the February 2025 agreement in which Zillow paid Redfin $100 million to leave apartment advertising. Redfin has six months from entry to relaunch. Zillow’s own SEC filing says the syndication partnership continues, with no admission of liability.
CRE POLICY NEWS
The TVA Board voted in Memphis on August 20 to move data centers out of the manufacturing rate class and onto a rate of their own. Officials at the meeting described an October 1 start, a roughly 10 percent increase, a three-year phase-in for existing sites, and an upfront capacity commitment charge on new load above 5 megawatts. TVA’s own release names none of those terms.
CRE POLICY NEWS
Governor Josh Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05 on August 18, directing Commonwealth agencies to hold every data center proposal with peak demand over 25 megawatts to the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development Requirements. Data centers come out of the Permit Fast Track Program entirely, and the Department of Environmental Protection will not issue a permit until a project has its local and municipal approvals in hand.
CRE CAPITAL NEWS
The Department of Energy said on July 29 that it selected Brookfield to lease land and develop a data center campus at its Paducah Site in western Kentucky, and selected NextEra Energy to build and own the power behind it. The partners put the privately funded investment above $100 billion, with up to 1.8 gigawatts of utility capacity and more than 1.2 gigawatts of compute. No tenant has been named.
CRE POLICY NEWS
The PJM Board of Managers issued a decisional letter on July 27 directing two filings to FERC by the end of July. One creates a Reliability Backstop Procurement to backfill a 6,831 megawatt capacity shortfall. The other creates an Interim Resource Adequacy Service, under which new large loads that have not brought their own new capacity by June 1, 2027 are cut before anybody else is.
CRE POLICY NEWS
Effingham County, Georgia announced on July 22 that OpenAI will build a $20 billion, 3.2 gigawatt campus inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub. Five days later the county published a second statement: the only document it has received is a Development of Regional Impact cover page, no completed application has been submitted, and the site plan circulating online is a blank state template someone filled in.
CRE POLICY NEWS
Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order 62 on July 14, pausing state environmental permits for new hyperscale data centers of 50 megawatts or more for up to one year while New York writes a statewide environmental study and new development standards. It is the first statewide freeze in the country, and it lands on the hottest development pipeline in commercial real estate.
CRE POLICY NEWS
The broadest federal housing law in years took effect on July 11 without a presidential signature. It restricts large-scale purchases of single-family homes while exempting build-to-rent development, and it ships a supply-side stack most coverage is skipping.
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