Regulators in Louisiana waived competitive bidding on the largest utility investment in state history — then voted to let Meta keep its electricity demand and job figures out of the public record.
When the U.S. House of Representatives voted 417-3 on Sept. 16 to pass the Ratepayer Protection Act, the lopsided margin obscured what the bill leaves untouched. H.R. 9340 directs state utility regulators merely to consider whether customers drawing 100 megawatts or more should pay the full incremental cost of the generation and transmission built to serve them. It sets a one-year clock to begin that consideration and a two-year clock to finish it. It does not require any state to adopt the standard. And it says nothing at all about whether the public gets to see the numbers regulators rely on when they decide.
That silence is the more consequential story. Across more than a dozen states, public utility commissions are approving the largest single-customer infrastructure commitments in their histories on the strength of applications in which the load forecasts, load factors, fuel-cost projections and contract termination terms are blacked out as trade secrets. The utilities filing those applications earn a regulated rate of return on every dollar they build. The residential customers who may absorb whatever costs are left over are not permitted to check the arithmetic.
Louisiana offers the clearest test case now in progress, and its schedule runs out in December.
A $21 Billion Application, Partially Blacked Out
On March 25, Entergy Louisiana filed an application with the Louisiana Public Service Commission seeking certification of generation and transmission resources tied to a 20-year electricity supply contract with Evest LLC, a Meta Platforms subsidiary building an artificial-intelligence data center campus in Richland Parish. Public radio station WWNO reported the package at $21.37 billion, the largest proposed investment in the utility’s history.
The filing, docketed at the LPSC as Docket 32728, asks for seven new gas-fired combined-cycle units beyond the three the commission approved last year for the project’s first phase. According to expert testimony filed in the docket by Current Energy Group on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Alliance for Affordable Energy, the capital items placed before the commission in this proceeding include:
- Richland gas units 1-4 — 3,016 MW, estimated $7.109 billion
- Pointe Coupee gas units 1-3 — 2,262 MW, estimated $5.802 billion
- Bogalusa West battery storage — 200 MW / 800 MWh, estimated $367 million
- Cypress Harvest battery storage — 200 MW / 800 MWh, estimated $367 million
- WFC-St. Landry 500-kV transmission line — roughly 150 miles, estimated $1.395 billion
- St. Landry switching station — estimated $67 million
The intervenor testimony notes that not all proposed projects appear in the public version of the filing, because their details are confidential.
Two procedural decisions shaped how much scrutiny that $15-billion-plus request would receive. First, the commission voted 4-1 to let Entergy proceed under an expedited review that sidesteps the competitive solicitation ordinarily required before major generation is certified — meaning the utility need not demonstrate that its proposal is the least-cost way to meet Meta’s demand.
Second, on Aug. 4, LPSC Administrative Law Judge Melanie Verzwyvelt rejected Meta’s motion to quash a subpoena sought by Earthjustice on behalf of the two consumer and science groups. The subpoena would have required Meta to substantiate two claims Entergy had repeated in its filings without independent support: the level of Meta’s investment and permanent job creation, and the amount of electricity the campus will actually demand. Because Meta is not a party to the proceeding, intervenors have no other formal mechanism to question the company directly.
Eight days later, the commission overrode its own judge. On Aug. 12, after roughly 90 minutes of public testimony, commissioners voted 3-1 to kill the subpoena, with Republicans Eric Skrmetta, Jean-Paul Coussan and Mike Francis in the majority, according to the Louisiana Illuminator. Meta has maintained in its filings that disclosure would expose trade secrets. Neither company addressed the commission at that meeting; when a commissioner invited Meta’s counsel to speak, the attorney declined, citing the company’s non-party status.
The commission’s final vote on the seven plants is scheduled for Dec. 16.
Following the Money Through the Redactions
Entergy’s case rests on a benefit calculation the company filed with the commission: roughly $28.5 billion in total costs over 20 years against roughly $30.4 billion in revenue, producing a net benefit to other ratepayers of about $1.9 billion, or 6.5 percent. If Meta declines to renew at the end of the term, Entergy’s own figures put the benefit at $991 million — about 3.5 percent.
That margin is the load-bearing wall of the entire application, and it is thin. A cost overrun or revenue shortfall of 3.5 percent erases it. Filings in the already-approved first phase of the same project show the risk is not theoretical: as documented in the docket record, projected capital costs for that phase rose in May from $3.9 billion to $4.4 billion — an 11.7 percent increase, more than triple the cushion protecting ratepayers in the current case.
Several structural features of the deal push risk toward existing customers rather than away from them. Meta’s contractual “minimum charges” cover annual capital cost, the authorized return to Entergy’s shareholders and debtholders, fixed operations and maintenance, taxes and insurance. They do not include the utility’s fuel adjustment clause, or FAC — a charge spread across all customers that captures not only fuel but major maintenance at the new plants, estimated in testimony at roughly $10.3 million per year per unit, and firm pipeline capacity reservations that must be paid whether or not the gas flows. Entergy has also acknowledged that the three Pointe Coupee units will likely require new pipeline infrastructure, with those costs recovered through the same all-customer mechanism.
The depreciation schedules do not line up with the contract either. The Pointe Coupee units would not be fully depreciated until 32 years after entering service, against a 20-year supply agreement that begins in 2028. Entergy estimates the new generation and storage will be roughly 75 percent depreciated when the contract expires. Twenty-five percent of the proposed capital total is approximately $3.4 billion.
If Meta terminates early, filings describe a “retained generator” provision under which Entergy may seek to keep the plants in rate base and recover remaining costs from ratepayers. Because the utility earns an authorized return of roughly 9.7 percent on that capital, intervenor testimony estimates shareholders stand to collect on the order of $8 billion in additional profit across 20 years — an incentive that points toward retention rather than toward pursuing Meta for unrecovered costs. The Current Energy Group testimony concludes that under this structure ratepayers appear to bear essentially all of the financial risk of plants they did not request.
The corporate finance side of the transaction is not redacted. Entergy Corporation disclosed to investors that the Meta agreement drove it to raise its 2026-29 capital plan from roughly $43 billion to roughly $57 billion, and management lifted its 2029 adjusted earnings-per-share target accordingly. Investors, in other words, received a considerably more specific picture of the deal’s economics than the customers who may guarantee them.
A Pattern Larger Than One Docket
Louisiana is not an outlier so much as an early, unusually well-documented instance. In the PJM Interconnection — the grid operator serving 13 states and the District of Columbia — the independent market monitor, Monitoring Analytics, attributed $6.5 billion, or 40 percent, of the $16.4 billion in costs from the December capacity auction to data center load. Across PJM’s last four base capacity auctions, the monitor put data-center-driven capacity charges at $29.4 billion of $63.6 billion in total charges. Capacity prices over that stretch rose from $28.92 per megawatt-day to $329.17 — the FERC-approved cap.
Those are wholesale costs that flow into retail bills. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Short-Term Energy Outlook projects average residential electricity prices of about 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2026, up from roughly 17.3 cents in 2025 — an increase outpacing general inflation and driven principally by capital spending on the grid.
State regulators have moved faster than Congress. Only 13 states lack any tariff setting requirements for data centers and other large loads, according to the large load tariff database maintained by the Smart Electric Power Alliance. Newer tariffs increasingly require upfront payment for system impact studies, minimum ramp schedules and exit fees. ClearView Energy Partners told clients that the House bill is “somewhat behind the regulatory curve” and would “largely reinforce” a transition already underway, Utility Dive reported.
What almost none of those tariffs address is disclosure. A cost-allocation rule cannot function if the inputs it depends on — projected demand, load factor, the probability a customer walks away — are sealed. The Current Energy Group testimony observes that the load factor assumed for the Richland campus is confidential but “very high for any load, leaving no room for upside in the analysis but resulting in significant downside exposure if actual operations fall short.” Entergy did not model lower demand scenarios; the utility relied on the figure Meta supplied, and the subpoena that would have tested that figure is now dead.
The disclosure gap is familiar. TIJ reported in April that the roughly $200 billion in annual hyperscaler capital expenditure has outrun the reporting frameworks investors and utility regulators use to evaluate it. The Louisiana docket shows what that gap looks like when it collides with a rate case.
What the Record Shows, and What It Doesn’t
Nothing in the public record establishes that Meta or Entergy has violated any law or regulation. Both are operating inside a process the Louisiana commission itself designed, and the confidentiality they obtained was granted by elected regulators acting within their authority. Entergy’s position is that the project will benefit existing customers; that claim is pending and has not been adjudicated. Meta’s position is that the withheld figures are competitively sensitive.
What the record does establish is an asymmetry. Entergy’s shareholders have a quantified, disclosed and SEC-reported expectation of return. Meta has a contract whose termination terms are partly sealed. Louisiana’s residential ratepayers have a commission-approved projection of benefit that its own authors concede disappears on a 3.5 percent variance — computed from inputs the public is not allowed to inspect, in a proceeding that waived the competitive test normally used to validate them.
Three things are worth watching before Dec. 16. Whether the commission staggers its review of the seven units rather than voting on all of them at once, as intervenors have requested. Whether any commissioner conditions approval on shareholder risk-sharing for retained generation. And whether the Senate takes up H.R. 9340 or Sen. Martin Heinrich’s competing GRID Savings Act, which would push cost-allocation and cost-estimate disclosure rules down from FERC rather than leaving them to state discretion. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has indicated that floor time before the midterms would require unanimous consent — a threshold that, on this issue, no longer looks routine.