Reading a jurisdiction
On July 14, 2026, New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued Executive Order No. 62, which paused certain state environmental permits for new data centers designed to draw 50 megawatts or more. The pause runs until the state's Department of Public Service completes a generic environmental impact statement on data center development, a process expected to take up to a year. It was widely described as the first statewide data center moratorium in the United States. A few weeks earlier, on June 4, 2026, the state legislature had passed a broader bill, the Responsible Data Center Development Act, with a lower 20 megawatt threshold; the governor chose to act by executive order while that bill was considered.
New York's step came after a period in which pauses had been adopted locally. On August 22, 2025, the city council of St. Charles, Missouri, voted unanimously for a one-year moratorium on applications and permits for new or expanded data centers, after residents objected to a large proposed project. Other counties and towns followed with pauses of their own. The National Conference of State Legislatures began tracking data center moratorium bills in state legislatures, many of which did not pass.
What does a moratorium actually do? It is worth reading each one closely, because the word covers very different instruments. Some pause zoning applications. Some pause building permits. New York's order pauses state environmental permits for projects above a size threshold. The ones described here do not shut existing facilities, and most are framed as time-limited pauses to allow a study or a new set of rules. A pause that ends with clear standards can leave a jurisdiction more predictable than it was before, even if it is slower.
With that in mind, reading a jurisdiction becomes a sequence of questions this course has already introduced. Who runs the grid here? Name the utility, the regional operator or balancing authority, and the state commission. How long is the wait? Look at the interconnection queue for supply and at whether the operator has a published large-load process. Who pays? Find the large-load tariff, if there is one, and the capacity or reserve market the region relies on. What does the law say? Check the state statutes on large loads, any executive orders, and the local zoning code. And what is the direction of travel? Read the most recent commission orders and the bills filed in the last session, not just the ones enacted.
No single answer settles the matter. A state with a moratorium bill that failed may be more hostile in practice than one where a bill passed with clear rules. A county with generous tax incentives may sit behind a transmission constraint that makes them irrelevant for years. The signals must be read together, and they must be dated, because many of them change within a single legislative session.
This is also where the policy conversation and the investment conversation meet. Moratoria usually reflect real local concerns about water, noise, land use, electricity prices and tax fairness. An investor who dismisses those concerns as noise will misjudge where the next pause comes from. A policymaker who treats every data center as identical will misjudge which projects bring the benefits the community wants.
Faraday's read is that location has become an advantage because it bundles things that cannot be bought quickly: an operator's transmission plan, a utility's willingness to sign, a commission's settled tariff and a community's consent. Each takes years to build, and each can be lost faster than it was earned. The jurisdictions that hold their advantage will be the ones that make all four legible to outsiders.
None of this requires technical training to begin. It requires the habit of asking which institution decides, and then reading what that institution has actually published. The documents are public. Most people simply do not read them, which is why those who do tend to see changes in a market before the market prices them.