Will Parker

This is coming in response to not so much a boom in AI in Maine, but a larger explosion of these projects nationally, the effects on electricity grids.

the effects on the cost of electricity for rate payers.

So losing access to Maine for 18 months may not be that big of a deal, but if this snowballs and starts to affect bigger states where there is more data center business, you'll see much more of a response to that.

Swelling community opposition kind of shrinks the map of where they are likely to try to go and do business.

So it's a mounting concern for data center developers.

It shows momentum, especially for Democrats who at the state level seem to be the ones introducing these bills most often.

The polling on voter opinions of data centers and AI is increasingly negative.

And I think you're likely to see more politicians try to respond to that with various legislative proposals.

Yeah, so Maine has a bill that would temporarily freeze the construction of large data centers for more than a year.

And this is a bill proposed by a Democratic legislator in the House where there's a Democrat majority.

And the plan is to pause data center construction while the state studies the impacts on the environment and the electricity grid.

So this bill targets data centers that would be more than 20 megawatts, which is the power load cutoff.

It's the data centers over that size where you start to start talking about artificial intelligence, hyperscalers, which is the kind that is growing really fast and that have the largest demands for power and water.

It's also the kind that is not proposed for Maine at the current time.

There are some larger data center projects, but none of those big tech companies that have been building out data centers in places like Virginia and Texas are yet in Maine.

Yeah, there have been projects proposed in different parts of Maine, some of which have been crushed by community members who have been really upset about it and really concerned about the possible effects on the grid or on the environment.

But it's really that's a handful of projects at this point.

The bill currently, though it looks very likely to pass in some form, the legislature is considering a couple of carve-outs for planned projects that are in the works, and the governor supports some of those exceptions as well.

Yeah.

So the bill in Maine looks like the first one that will likely pass, but there are several other states, South Carolina, Oklahoma, New York state have seen these bills introduced in the last year.