On August 25 and 26, 2026, a hearing room in Tallahassee spent two days on a rate schedule. No cameras. No crowd. The witnesses were lawyers and utility analysts, and the question in front of the Florida Public Service Commission was what a power company is allowed to charge a customer that wants roughly a gigawatt of electricity to run a building full of computers.

That is the whole data-center fight, and it is not happening where you would look for it. Not on a ballot. Not in a signing ceremony with a pen and a photographer. It is in a docket, filed under a number, on a state website nobody has a reason to visit.

Florida already passed the law that is supposed to settle this. The Legislature put the protection in the statute books in February and March, and the Governor signed it in May. But a statute is a sentence, and a sentence does not enforce itself. What a hearing decides is whether the paperwork a utility actually filed lives up to the words.

The Receipt

The law is CS/CS/SB 484, signed May 7, 2026, effective July 1, and it sits in the statute books now at § 366.043(3)(a), Florida Statutes. Here is the part that matters, word for word:

"The minimum tariff and service requirements must reasonably ensure that each large load customer bears its own full cost of service and that such cost is not shifted to the general body of ratepayers. […] The risk of nonpayment of such costs may not be borne by the general body of ratepayers."

Read "the general body of ratepayers" as what it is. That's you. That phrase is the Legislature admitting, in statutory language, exactly what the danger is: a customer big enough to require a new power plant, and a bill that quietly finds its way to everybody else.

The paperwork is Docket No. 20260064-EI, and the order of events matters. Duke Energy Florida first went to the Commission on September 5, 2025, in a different docket, 20250113-EI. Then the Legislature acted: the Senate passed SB 484 on February 26, 2026 and the House on March 11. Duke re-filed on April 22, 2026, in the new docket, as Document No. 02327-2026, with the changes it made to comply with the law. The Governor signed the bill on May 7. The Commission suspended the tariff by order on June 19 and set the whole thing for hearing on August 25 and 26.

Nothing has been decided. Post-hearing briefs come next and an order is expected sometime after the middle of September. Anybody who tells you how the data-center fight in Florida came out is telling you a story, not a result.

Why It Costs You

The arithmetic is not complicated, which is why it gets buried in vocabulary.

A single large-load customer can require a utility to build new generation and new transmission. That construction goes into the rate base, and the rate base is recovered from customers on their monthly bills. If the tariff is written tightly, the customer who caused the spending pays for the spending. If it is written loosely, the difference spreads across every other account in small monthly increments that nobody notices and nobody itemizes.

Now here is the thing I can't tell you, and won't pretend to.

There is no residential bill-impact number in this case. From anyone. Not the Public Service Commission. Not Duke. Not the Office of Public Counsel, whose entire job is representing residential customers. Not the intervenor arguing against the tariff. It was searched for across all four, and it does not exist in the record. No dollars, no percentage, no range.

That absence is not a gap in this article. It is the story. A cost-shift argument with no published cost estimate is an argument the public has no way to check, and it means the people being asked to trust the tariff cannot audit the promise it makes. Every number you have seen in a headline about data centers and your power bill came from some other state, some other utility, some other tariff. It is not this one.

Which is the oldest feature of a fixed cost. It lands hardest on the household with the least room to absorb it, and it shows up without a label saying what it was for. This show has traced that same shape before, in the poverty tax: the charge is never itemized, and the person paying it is never told it's there.

How a Large-Load Tariff Actually Works

A tariff is a rulebook for one class of customer. Four questions decide everything in it. Who is big enough to be in the class. How much of the construction they pay for up front. How long they are locked in. What happens if they leave anyway.

The revisions are in the filing itself, and they are worth reading in the utility's own words. Duke's April 22 petition lists what it changed to comply with the new law. It pulls the applicability threshold down to 50 megawatts from 100, so a smaller campus lands inside the class. It withdraws the original LLC-1 schedule from consideration. It removes, in the filing's own phrasing, the "flexibility from CIAC provision, such that all customers must pay CIAC up front, subject to refund over five years" (construction money in advance, refunded over five years). And it changes the minimum term "from 15 to 20 years, with all customers required to give a two-year notice." The Florida Trib, the Jacksonville nonprofit newsroom covering the case, reported the same terms on August 25, 2026.

Every one of those four is a lever, and each one moves money.

The threshold decides who has to play by the rule at all; drop it from 100 megawatts to 50 and a whole tier of campuses that could have sat outside the class is suddenly inside it. Paying up front decides who carries the risk while the concrete is curing. The term length decides what happens if the buildout cools in year seven and the campus goes dark: either there are 20 years of contract still running, or there is a half-used power plant sitting in the rate base with your name on the payment plan.

The objection came from the room. Florida Rising was granted party status over Duke's objection, and WUSF reported that its Earthjustice attorney, Bradley Marshall, told the Commission the record holds no analysis demonstrating that these customers will in fact cover their own cost of service, and that residential bills could "go up substantially."

The other side of this has a real argument and it deserves to be stated straight. A twenty-year minimum term and an up-front construction payment are ratepayer protections, and the utility is the one that asked for them. Counties chasing capital investment and tax base are not being stupid; they are being poor. And a tariff hostile enough will move the campus to Georgia, where the tax base goes too.

Fine. Then say the number. If the filed tariff makes these customers carry their own weight, the cost-of-service study that proves it can be put in the file where anyone can read it. The intervenor standing in that hearing room says it isn't there.

The Part Florida Isn't Arguing About

While Tallahassee argues about who pays for the power, other people are working several steps upstream.

The Lever reported on August 25 that a political action committee backing the reelection of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo took in two separate million-dollar contributions. The first came from an artificial-intelligence investor and his wife. Three days later, by the outlet's count, Lombardo came out publicly for Nevada's data-center buildout. A week after that, the same committee banked the second million, this one from the wife of a developer putting those facilities up in the state. All of that is The Lever's reporting and the three-day interval is The Lever's finding, not this show's. The outlet does not name the donors, so neither does this piece. By the same reporting, Nevada has around seventy data centers operating, under construction or planned, and has given out roughly $340 million in tax abatements since 2021.

There is a federal thread too, and it needs a caveat attached. On July 7, 2026, the EPA published a proposed rule at 91 FR 41591, Docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-1212, on public-participation requirements in state minor New Source Review air permitting. Advocacy coverage has pushed it into the news as the rule that lets data centers get air permits without telling the neighbors. Read the proposal and it is nothing of the kind on its face: it is a general minor-NSR rule that applies to whatever a state permits under that program. The data-center framing comes from advocates, not from the text. Which does not make them wrong about the effect, and does mean you should read the docket rather than the press release.

What You Can Actually Do

The Florida decision is not made yet, and that is the only reason any of this is worth your afternoon.

Watch the docket, by number. It is 20260064-EI, in front of the Florida Public Service Commission, and every filing in it is public. The order is expected after mid-September. A rate case is the rare fight where the entire record is downloadable and almost nobody downloads it.

Ask the one question the intervenor asked. Not "are data centers good." Ask where the cost-of-service study is, and ask whoever wants your vote or your trust to point at the page. A tariff that protects ratepayers can survive being shown.

Look at a city council instead of a statehouse. Savannah, Georgia just ran one. On Thursday, August 27, its city council approved a 155-day moratorium on data centers of at least 10 megawatts, and on industrial buildings of at least 200,000 square feet built or converted for that use. Mayor Van Johnson's stated reason was that the city does not yet know the answer: "We need to fully understand how many jobs one can create, what public resources are required and whether the economic benefits are worth the long-term impacts." A vote like that happens in a room with maybe forty chairs in it, and the people who show up decide it. Local money and who it actually serves is a fight this show has counted before, in what happened to JTA's budget and who rides the bus.

The machine here was never hidden. Nobody encrypted it. It was filed, on a Wednesday, in a docket, under a number, in a proceeding open to the public and attended by almost nobody. That is the trick, and it keeps working because reading a tariff is boring and paying for one is easy.

Read next: They Called It Hurricane Relief. Florida's SB 180 Cancels Votes That Already Happened., on what a single sentence in Tallahassee can do to a vote you already won.

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We do this every week. The noble-sounding title on top, the money underneath, every number traced back to the filing it came from so you can go check it yourself. Pour something cold, pull up a chair, and let us send you the receipts before the next round of nonsense clears your feed. Subscribe to The Long Pour. The free newsletter where the week's little robberies and the one big one land in your inbox together.

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The Receipts

Every claim above traces to a source you can open yourself.