Powerstack: New York's accidental data center pipeline audit

Hi there,

Of course we have to talk about New York this week! Knicks in five! Yes, that’s right, we’ve got a deep dive into NY’s new data center moratorium. 

Speaking of New York, if you’re in town on Monday, we’re hosting a special event on Monday, 15 June: our ​Energy & AI Summer Party. Sightline and Foley Hoag are hosting a rooftop happy hour for investors, hyperscalers, developers, utilities, and operators at the center of the AI-power buildout. Drinks, bites, and more on a perfect summer evening. Request a spot here.

And the following week we’ve got another banger – during London Climate Action Week on 23 June, we’re hosting an event we’re calling Building & Financing AI in the UK. We’ll share the latest Sightline analysis, and hear from Ofgem, Octopus, GE Vernova, and Deep Green. ​Join us!

This is Sightline’s weekly newsletter on the moves and motives shaping the load growth era. 

New York is pushing ahead on a data center moratorium. The state legislature just passed a one-year freeze on new permits for 20MW+ data centers (S10642, the Responsible Data Center Development Act), and the bill now heads to Gov. Kathy Hochul's desk. If signed, it would be the first statewide data center moratorium in the US.

On top of the one-year freeze, the bill attaches a few additional strings. And post-moratorium, for data centers 20MW+ it stands up a permanent, dedicated electric and water rate class and a host-community benefit program. Projects 5MW+ also get clean-energy standards (90% renewable by 2040), prevailing wage, and US iron and steel. It applies to new construction only, with anything already under construction or any renewal of an existing approval exempt.

State Sen. Kristen Gonzalez, who sponsored it, says it takes aim at 28 large data centers on the interconnection waitlist representing 9.7GW of power demand. Compare that to NY’s peak load, in the 30GWs for the past several years and forecasted at 31.6GW for this summer, according to NYISO. So layer 9.7GW of additional demand on top and you've lifted the load by nearly one-third. 

Gasp. Or did it?

A number that big is either a generational rebuild of the NY grid or a mirage. This is actually a mirage. NYISO just released its annual 2026 grid and markets report that said that NYISO’s full large-load queue has 51 large-load projects for 12.7GW in total seeking interconnection by 2030. Just one is under construction. So it’s not really pushing it to change its demand forecast at all.

The moratorium is a free audit of the queue.

When NYISO put out Power Trends this week, it tallied 51 large-load projects worth 12.7GW lining up to connect, and forecast that only about 2.9GW of it would ever get built.

So bill or no bill, NYISO never really believed this demand would materialize.

Gigascale developers are chasing cheap power, fast interconnects, and a welcome mat in the form of tax breaks and friendly regulators. Upstate New York has a lot of cheap Niagara Falls hydropower and decommissioned industrial sites with grid connections, which would seem to make it attractive. But transmission bottlenecks trap the cheap power upstate and make it harder to site downstate infrastructure. On top of that, the state recently scrapped rigid 2030 emissions goals, but still maintains an ultimate target to eliminate fossil fuels by mid-century. That target makes the default gas backup (or even primary energy source) we’ve been seeing a tough sell for a multi-billion-dollar AI factory meant to operate for thirty years. So, hyperscalers are staying away. And the result is the New York queue is really an opportunistic merchant crowd, with real estate firms and former cryptocurrency miners submitting proposals.

So is the New York moratorium symbolic? Not entirely, but New York can shoot this mid-court three because it doesn’t have a whole lot to lose. 

Even in Maine, where the legislature passed a moratorium, Gov. Mills vetoed it because it would cut jobs and revenue to Jay, a small town that could really use both. A sort of rock and hard place situation, causing the Governor to use the power of the pen. But New York doesn’t really seem to have that rock or hard place.

New York isn't losing the game. It's opting out of one it had mostly already lost to Virginia, Texas, and other markets.

If it’s not all that impactful for New York, the question becomes whether New York will start a cascade of moratoria, rate classes, or clean energy requirements where such moves would carry more of a bite. Some of it already has.

Virginia, as we noted here, built the GS-5 rate class last year, where loads 25MW+ sign 14-year contracts and pay for 85% of their reserved capacity whether they draw it or not. GS-5 is designed to squeeze the speculative load out of Data Center Alley. And earlier this week, FirstEnergy asked FERC to bill large loads directly for the transmission they trigger. Even Wyoming, which rolled out the red carpet, is bolting on oversight.

New York shot its shot, but the arena is kind of empty. Shots are going up in markets that are still very much in the game, and we’re watching for where those land.

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

$850m // New US DOE funding for coal infrastructure, across two announcements. Leveraging the Defense Production Act, the DOE is backing 13 existing coal plants, greenlighting two brand-new facilities (the first in over a decade), restarting a shuttered plant in MD, and building out West Coast export capacity in Oakland. It’s a controversial move and a confusing one, as many of the plants due for retirement are expensive to operate and, given the Oakland export terminal, the move looks less like a grid reliability play than a coal trade policy.

5% // The safe harbor cost threshold for wind and solar projects restored by a DC District Court judge, vacating a prior Treasury Department rule. The decision strikes down the Trump administration's August guidance, which had eliminated the ability for large-scale renewables to prove they had "commenced construction" simply by spending 5% of total project costs. The ruling lands just weeks before the OBBBA's July 4 cliff, giving developers a restored path to potentially lock in 45Y and 48E credits. But it’s shaky – the decision will likely be appealed, and the IRS could rewrite the rule with stronger legal framing.

$2.2bn // Panasonic’s investment in battery and capacitor manufacturing capacity, including in the US. AI workloads are notorious for microsecond-scale power swings. Panasonic is going for this use case instead of joining a crowded market of OEMs offering multi-hour lithium-ion systems for peak capacity.

760MW // The capacity interconnection rights Constellation just unlocked for its Crane Nuclear restart, after FERC approved a transfer from its Eddystone gas plant. The move sidesteps transmission upgrades that weren't due until 2030, potentially letting the 835MW unit deliver full output when it comes back online -- now targeted for second half of 2027. The CIRs were available because DOE had ordered Eddystone to keep running as an energy-only resource, stripping its capacity status and freeing the rights to move. Constellation has a 20-year deal to sell all of Crane's output to Microsoft.

2.1m SWU // Enrichment capacity Urenco is adding at its facility in New Mexico, the only commercial uranium enrichment plant in North America. The expansion brings total facility capacity to over 7m separative working units (SWU). With the US’ ban of Russian enriched uranium imports starting in 2028, and Russia currently supplying up to 25% of US demand, it’s getting a lot of contracts. But it’s slow going, with construction starting in 2029 and full operation by 2036, showing how hard it is to spin up a domestic supply chain. On top of that, it will be used for standard LEU, not the HALEU that advanced reactors run on, so it backstops today's fleet more than the SMRs coming behind it.

Explore more Signals on Sightline here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

Microsoft’s Ratepayer Protection Tariff with Nevada's PUCN. Microsoft's filing proposes requiring hyperscale data centers to bear 100% of dedicated grid upgrade costs, a "Hyperscale Energy Users" rate class, a 2% cap on residential rate increases, and a cost-split structure separating customer-specific infrastructure from upgrades with demonstrable system-wide benefit. Worth watching alongside Google's Clean Transition Tariff, already approved by PUCN in 2025, which tackles the same ratepayer protection question from the supply side.

Illinois’s CRGA, requiring utilities to file initial VPP tariffs by June 1 for ICC approval by June 30. The short-term program, scheduled to launch no later than June 30, compensates participating storage customers at a floor of $10/kW of average dispatch. The long-term program (effective December 31, 2028) expands eligibility to smart thermostats, EV batteries, and other behind-the-meter devices.

Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 microreactor being first to achieve initial criticality under the DOE’s rapid Reactor Pilot Program. It used DOE's site authorization framework at Idaho National Laboratory instead of the slower NRC commercial licensing track to validate its liquid-sodium heat-pipe physics in under a year, aiming for electricity production by 2027. Watch if this type of regulatory speed-run from the administration can help more advanced reactor startups, even though the sector’s whole fuel supply chain still lags at scale.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Sightline Climate platform.

Robots for asset inspection are here, and moving 5 to 25x faster than human crews while cutting lost-time injuries by up to a third. Our new briefing maps the use cases, business models, and most advanced players in inspection robotics; clients can read it here.

Three new case studies on inspection robotics. We went deep on three of the leading players actually shipping, from drones and quadrupeds testing and inspecting. Read them here, here, and here.

Fusion investment keeps breaking records, but the elusive breakeven may be slipping even further away. The industry's average expected timeline is now a year further out than it was three years ago. Our new benchmark tracks five years of company claims to show who's hitting targets and who's moving the goalposts. Clients can read it here.

Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅​ Energy & AI Summer Party // New York City, 15 June, 2026 // Sightline and Foley Hoag are hosting a rooftop happy hour for investors, hyperscalers, developers, utilities, and operators at the center of the AI-power buildout.  Drinks, bites, and a summer evening at the Planeteer rooftop. Request a spot here.

📅 Building & Financing AI in the UK // London, 23 June, 2026 // Held during LCAW, join us for our flagship London event. This year we’ll focus the discussion on the data center buildout (what else?!) and the pathways to the fastest MW. Mark your calendars! Register here.

Attending an event? Connect with our team.

Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and leverage the tactical intelligence that hundreds of energy and investment decision-makers like Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital and others use to stay ahead in the energy transition. 

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