On August 18, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05, establishing the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development Requirements, known as GRID, for all data center development in the Commonwealth. Under the order, the Department of Environmental Protection will not review permit applications from data center developers unless they have made a legally binding commitment to meet the GRID standards and have secured local community approval. Pennsylvania is open for business, the Governor said, but not at the expense of everyday Pennsylvanians.
The order is the most comprehensive state-level data center regulation in the country. It follows New York’s statewide moratorium in July and arrives one week after Meta announced a $1 billion community fund in response to the backlash its projects have generated. Taken together, these are not isolated events. They are a pattern.
What GRID Actually Requires
The GRID Requirements cover five areas: energy affordability, environmental protection, workforce and economic development, transparency, and community engagement. Each is substantive. Developers must pay the full cost of any new electricity generation, transmission, distribution, and related infrastructure required to power their project. The requirement is explicit: no shifting those costs to Pennsylvania households and businesses. Developers must conduct transparent community outreach early enough to allow meaningful input. They must hire local workers and sign community benefit agreements. They must meet strict water conservation standards and submit annual energy and water consumption disclosures to DEP. Nondisclosure agreements with communities are prohibited. Fast-track permitting for data centers is eliminated entirely.
The order also directs Pennsylvania’s Special Counsel for Energy Affordability to work with the Public Utility Commission to ensure that during grid stress events, data centers lose electric service before other customers, and that costs from PJM’s reliability backstop auction — the emergency capacity procurement we wrote about in July — are charged to data centers, not to other ratepayers.
Governor Shapiro put the underlying logic plainly: “These are some of the biggest companies in the world. They can afford to be good neighbors, follow the rules, and do this right.”
The Most Contested Requirement
The infrastructure cost provision is the one that will define which projects move forward in Pennsylvania and which do not. A grid-connected facility that draws hundreds of megawatts from the shared system requires new transmission and distribution investment. Under GRID, the developer pays for all of it. That is a material shift from the model that has driven community opposition in Pennsylvania and across the country: the model where a large data center connects to the grid, utility infrastructure gets upgraded to serve it, and those costs get socialized across ratepayers who had no say in the project.
For an islanded facility that generates its own power on-site, this provision is structurally satisfied by the architecture itself. There is no new grid infrastructure to pay for, because there is no new grid draw. The power plant comes with the project.
A Standard NCP Was Built Around
Next Century-Power’s model satisfies the GRID Requirements not as a compliance exercise but as a matter of design. Our Phase 1 deployments are 1 GW and above of gas turbine generation in fully islanded, single-tenant configurations. The facility generates its own power. It does not draw from the shared grid during operation, so there are no ratepayer cost shifts to compensate for and no new transmission or distribution infrastructure to fund. The curtailment-first risk Pennsylvania is building into its grid rules does not apply to a facility that is not a PJM load.
The community engagement and workforce requirements align with the operating philosophy we wrote about last week in the context of Meta’s community fund. We have operated from the start on the principle that the communities where we build are partners. Pennsylvania is now requiring every data center developer in the state to operate the same way.
New York moved first with a moratorium. Pennsylvania moved next with binding operational requirements. More states will follow. The question for developers navigating this environment is not whether they can negotiate compliance state by state, because the standards are converging and the leverage is shifting toward communities and regulators. The question is whether the power model they are building on satisfies the standard the states are converging on. For the grid-connected model, that is a growing compliance burden. For an islanded facility, it is the starting point.
