Five commissioners voted in April 2025 to ask one question.
Now your power bill is the answer.
In April 2025 the Pennsylvania PUC held an en banc hearing on who should pay for Big Tech's power. Amazon, Google, and Vantage Data Centers sent witnesses. Four electric utilities sent witnesses. Two state advocates spoke for sixty million household members. The comment window closed on June 23, 2025. Now the actual large-load tariffs are filing one by one, each with its own intervention window, and almost no one outside the docket knows.
It is a Thursday afternoon at the Commonwealth Keystone Building in Harrisburg. Five commissioners sit at a curved desk in Hearing Room 1. There is a livestream nobody is watching. Outside the city, in Allegheny County, a substation hums for the city of Pittsburgh, the same hum it has made for 60 years. Across the Susquehanna, transformers are being measured for an expansion that does not yet exist on any map.
A motion has been filed. The motion asks: when a data center the size of a small town wants to plug into the grid, who pays for the grid?
By 5:00 PM, ten people will have answered. Two of them will be speaking for you.
So if the hearing already happened, where is the clock?
Most regulatory clocks have a visible deadline. A bill is introduced, hearings are scheduled, you can mark a date on a calendar. The PUC large-load tariff clock is different. It runs in the gap between when commissioners decide a thing in principle and when each electric utility translates that decision into an actual tariff filing. During that gap, the public has roughly 60 days per filing to formally intervene. By the time the higher bill shows up, the window has closed and the docket is decided.
The en banc identified 15 tariff design questions. Each becomes a separate proceeding at a separate electric utility. Each has its own intervention window. There is no master calendar. Most ratepayers will not know the proceedings exist until the rate change appears on a statement.
You are not the first state to do this. Most states already did it badly.
Pennsylvania's en banc is one of about a dozen state PUC proceedings on data-center tariffs that have happened since 2024. Each state's outcome depends almost entirely on who got a seat at the table. Three questions. See if the pattern is what you'd guess.
Pennsylvania's en banc had ten witnesses. Two of them spoke for households.
This is the official PUC roster of who testified at Docket M-2025-3054271. The Commission didn't pick favorites; they invited the parties most affected and the statutory advocates. The count is what it is.
- Amazon Data Services
Michael Fradette, Principal Energy Services - Google LLC
Brendon Baatz, Energy Market Development - Vantage Data Centers
Shawn Smith, VP Utility & Regulatory - Data Center Coalition
Lucas Fykes, Director of Energy Policy
- Duquesne Light Co.
C. James Davis, Director Rates & Energy Procurement - FirstEnergy Pennsylvania
Kelly Gower, VP State Finance & Regulatory - PECO Energy Company
Richard Webster, VP Regulatory Policy & Strategy - PPL Electric
Joe Lookup, VP T&D Planning & Asset Management
- Office of Consumer Advocate
Darryl Lawrence, Acting Consumer Advocate - PA PUC Bureau of Investigation & Enforcement
Allison Kaster, Chief Prosecutor
How big is a "large load," really? Drag the dial.
The PUC's en banc spent considerable time on a definitional question: at what megawatt threshold does a customer become "large load" for tariff purposes? Different states pick different numbers. The number matters because everything above the threshold gets the new rules. Here's a sense of scale.
If you live in Allegheny County, the utility at that table is your utility.
Duquesne Light Co. sent C. James Davis to the en banc.
He is Director of Rates, Energy Procurement, and Federal/RTO Affairs. He spoke about interconnection economics for large customers from a utility operations standpoint. He did a good job at his job. His job is to argue for Duquesne's preferred rate design.
His job is not to argue for the household in Lawrenceville running a window AC and a fridge. That job belongs to the Office of Consumer Advocate, who also showed up, with Acting Consumer Advocate Darryl Lawrence. The OCA represents every residential customer of every PA utility, which is, at last count, several million people.
The math here is not subtle. If you live in Allegheny County, you are paying Duquesne Light. Duquesne Light has a witness specifically arguing for what is good for Duquesne Light. You have one shared witness arguing for what is good for every residential customer in Pennsylvania. When the actual tariff files, the intervention window is ~60 days. It does not extend itself if you didn't see the email.
Each of the 15 questions decides one thing: does the data center pay, or do you?
This is the PUC's own published agenda for the en banc. The framing is neutral; the consequences are not. For each question below, the practical answer points either toward the ratepayer absorbing the cost or toward the large-load customer absorbing it. The PUC is in the middle of answering all fifteen in actual tariffs right now.
The Harvard paper's argument, in one sentence: in jurisdictions where questions 9, 10, and 11 default to "ratepayer pays," the household subsidizes the data center build-out, sometimes by hundreds of dollars per year. The en banc is the proceeding that decides whether Pennsylvania defaults that way too.
So who should pay? You decide. Then we'll show you what the PUC is actually doing.
Below: fifteen capacitors, one for each en banc question. Click BIG TECH or YOU on each capacitor to record your vote. The capacitor charges as you vote. When you're done, your pattern gets compared to where the PUC's actual answers are trending.
YOUR PATTERN
PUC TRAJECTORY · INFERA FORECAST
Two quick checks. You'll know in 15 seconds.
This is the third clock. We are starting to see the pattern.
Volume I of the Mechanism Briefs is called The Hidden Clocks. Each brief in this volume names one statutory window that decides who pays for what, that the public has no way to see. The pattern is not coincidence; we picked it because it kept showing up.
For the longer arc, see Episode 07 · The Physical Plant (the data center mechanism this brief sits inside) and The Capital Stack (how the financial layer that builds these data centers also funded Vogtle). Brief 003 is one piece. The Series is the chassis.
The en banc is a closed proceeding. The downstream tariff filings are not. You can intervene. Most people don't.
The Office of Consumer Advocate is your second line of defense; you are your first. Four concrete steps, in order of effort.
Read the en banc record once.
The PUC's published page on the hearing has the agenda, every witness's testimony, and the Harvard paper. It is the entire case file in one place. You don't have to read it carefully; just see what's there.
EN BANC PAGE →Subscribe to the docket.
The PUC's document search lets you watch a specific docket for new filings. Save Docket M-2025-3054271. When anything new posts, you'll be notified. This is how lobbyists know things; it costs nothing.
DOCKET M-2025-3054271 →Find your utility's filings.
Search the PUC document search for your electric distribution company by name (Duquesne Light, PECO, FirstEnergy, PPL). When they file a large-load tariff, the case docket will say so in the title. Note the intervention deadline.
DOCUMENT SEARCH →File a comment when it's time.
When a tariff files, the PUC accepts public comments through its eFiling system. You don't need a lawyer. A short, specific comment from a residential ratepayer is on the record forever, and the OCA cites volume.
EFILING SYSTEM →Friday is the quiet day for PA energy governance. That's when the procedural work happens.
The Mechanism Series tracks public meetings in 14 PA + NC counties through the Desk operational layer. Here's what's on the calendar for the week of Brief 003 across PA energy-relevant venues. Not all of these touch the en banc directly; together they show how dense the rhythm is.
| Day | Time | Body | Where | Issue cluster |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| THU 6/11 | 2:00 PM | PA PUC Public Meeting | Harrisburg | Tariff & rate cases |
| MON 6/15 | 5:00 PM | Allegheny Co. Council | Pittsburgh | County operations |
| TUE 6/16 | 10:00 AM | PA PUC Hearing | Harrisburg | UGI gas rate case (in progress) |
| WED 6/17 | 9:30 AM | Pittsburgh City Council | Pittsburgh | Municipal ops + utility rights-of-way |
| WED 6/17 | 1:00 PM | Philadelphia City Council | Philadelphia | PECO franchise oversight |
| THU 6/18 | 10:00 AM | PA House Consumer Affairs Cmte | Harrisburg | Utility regulation oversight |
Sourced from PUC calendar, Allegheny County Council Legistar, Pittsburgh City Council Legistar, Philadelphia City Council Legistar, and PA General Assembly committee schedules. The Tomorrow Board operational layer at /desk/ ingests this daily.
"Pennsylvania has the densest electric tariff filing system in the country. There is no way for an ordinary person to track it. This is the system working as designed; the question is who designed it."
METHOD · HOW WE BUILT THIS BRIEF
Source layer. All facts in this brief are from PA PUC primary sources (the en banc page, Docket M-2025-3054271, posted testimony PDFs, the PUC website's calendar) and one peer-reviewed academic exhibit (the Harvard Electricity Law Initiative paper). No anonymous sourcing.
Allegheny coverage. Allegheny County Council's Legistar instance (alleghenycounty.legistar.com) was confirmed live and added to the L2 county infrastructure layer on June 7, 2026. Pittsburgh City Council's Legistar instance was already live. Both feed the Desk's Tomorrow Board.
Cross-state DYK figures (Exhibit B). The "12 states with active large-load proceedings" count is an Infera compilation from NARUC, individual state PUC websites, and the Harvard paper. The "zero proceedings with equal residential representation" finding is also from that compilation. We will revise if a state we missed has equal representation; please email corrections.
Cost allocation classifications (Exhibit F + G). The "ratepayer pays / Big Tech pays / mixed" labels on the 15 agenda questions and the PUC trajectory forecast (6 BT / 3 RP / 6 mixed) in the Capacitor Bank are our reading of the practical impact based on the Harvard frame and existing tariff jurisprudence in PJM. The PUC has not yet ruled on any of them. This is a reasoned forecast, not a finding. We will revise if the PUC's actual tariff orders diverge.
SOURCES · ALL PRIMARY
- PA PUC En Banc Hearing on Interconnection and Tariffs for Large Load Customers. Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, Docket No. M-2025-3054271. Hearing held April 24, 2025. Comments closed June 23, 2025. Hearing page · Docket summary · DeFrank Motion convening en banc (March 27, 2025)
- Martin, E. & Peskoe, A. "Extracting Profits from the Public: How Utility Ratepayers are Paying for Big Tech's Power." Harvard Electricity Law Initiative, March 2025. Entered as exhibit at en banc by Vice Chair Barrow. Full paper
- Large Load Customer testimony. Amazon Data Services (Fradette), PDF · Data Center Coalition (Fykes), PDF · Google LLC (Baatz), PDF · Vantage Data Centers (Smith), PDF.
- Electric Distribution Company testimony. Duquesne Light (Davis), PDF · FirstEnergy PA (Gower), PDF · PECO Energy (Webster), PDF · PPL Electric (Lookup), PDF.
- Statutory Advocate testimony. Office of Consumer Advocate (Lawrence), PDF · PA PUC Bureau of Investigation & Enforcement (Kaster), PDF.
- Secretarial Letter extending comment deadline. PA PUC, May 15, 2025. PDF
- Allegheny County Council Legistar instance. Granicus-hosted at alleghenycounty.legistar.com. Confirmed as L2 source on June 7, 2026.
- PJM Interconnection Queue. Pending large-load (data center) requests in PA territory; figures referenced in Exhibit D Load Calculator. PJM Queue
- Cross-state large-load tariff compilation. NARUC Center for Partnerships & Innovation; individual state PUC dockets. Referenced in Exhibit B DYK quiz.
- PA PUC homepage and document search. puc.pa.gov · Document search · eFiling system