Prologue · 1822 – 1920
Power on the waterfront
Boston's first energy plants stood on land made from the harbor, where coal arrived by ship.
The lens shows the 1867 fire-insurance atlas over today's aerial photo. Move it with your cursor. Drag the map to explore; use the slider to change the atlas year.
This is the North End gas works, the city's first energy plant. Its gasholder stood here from 1828 until the works moved to Commercial Point.
Sites and method from Genna Kane, "Making Power, Making Land" (Leventhal Map & Education Center, 2025).
Prologue · L Street, South Boston
L Street Station, 1898. Built on filled flats by the Boston Electric Light Company, bought by Edison, and run for six decades.
Prologue · Sargent's Wharf
Sargent's Wharf, 1895: ferry slips and a coal shed. Next door, a cold-storage warehouse would soon build a power plant of its own.
Prologue · Lincoln Wharf
Lincoln Wharf, 1898. The atlas records the ground itself: dock, piles, solid fill. The power station that rose here in 1901 ran until 1972.
Chapter 1 · 1886 – 1900 · The first customer: lighting
The grid begins with lamps
On 20 February 1886 the Edison Electric Illuminating Company lit its first customer, the Bijou Theatre: 800 lamps from one engine. Demand came in the evening, when the lights went on.
The state counted the new system the only way it knew how. Until about 1910 the regulator reported electric companies in lamps, not kilowatts.
Decision1885 & 1887 — the state creates a board to license gas, then electric, companies+
St. 1885 c. 314 created the Board of Gas Commissioners; St. 1887 c. 382 extended it to electric light and required a city's consent before a second company could string wires. Exclusive territory starts here.verified
Chapter 2 · 1889 – 1901 · The first big customer: streetcars
A customer big enough to build its own plant
The streetcar system needed more power than any lighting company could sell it. So it built its own stations. This is the Central Power Station on Harrison Avenue, the largest in the city.
Look at the label on the 1902 atlas: Boston Elevated Railway Company (Lessee), printed over West End St. Railway Co. The biggest plant in Boston was rented.
Decision1894 / 1897 — the Boston Elevated Railway is chartered, and generates its own power+
The charter is St. 1894 c. 548, amended by St. 1897 c. 500. Whether either act granted the power to self-generate has not yet been confirmed from the text.unverified
Chapter 2 · Quincy Market Cold Storage, 1906
Boston was unusual. In 1910 its Edison company sold only 4.5% of its output to street railways. In Hyde Park the figure was 83%. Here, the traction company was its own utility.
Even a warehouse could do it. The Quincy Market Cold Storage company built a power house of its own at Sargent's Wharf. Remember this site.
Chapter 3 · 1910 – 1940 · Motors, then appliances
The grid learns to grow demand
Between 1910 and 1920, motors overtook lamps. The appliance era began on a grid that industry had already rebuilt around all-day load.
The rates were not written to reward size. They were written to reward buying a machine. A household that lit its rooms paid a flat 10½ cents a kilowatt-hour, and the schedule said plainly: no free wiring. The same household, having bought a range, a water heater or a refrigerator, dropped to 2 cents on everything above ten kilowatt-hours a month — a fifth of the price, on one condition, which was not how much it used but what it used the electricity for.
This is the thing worth holding on to. A volume discount rewards consumption you already have. An end-use rate manufactures consumption you do not: it pays for itself only once you own the appliance, so the appliance is what the price is really selling.
Decision1921 — a rate you qualify for by owning an appliance+
Edison Electric Illuminating Co. of Boston, prices as filed on 30 June 1921 and reprinted by the Department of Public Utilities. Lighting: “for electricity for any use, 10 cents net a k.w.h. plus 5%” — flat, with a $9 minimum and “no free wiring”. Then the carve-out: “When energy is used only for cooking, heating and refrigeration … a rate of 2 cents a k.w.h. on all in excess of 10 k.w.h. a month.” Declining blocks did exist — 5¢, 3¢, 2½¢ — but only inside an optional yearly demand contract, and under “miscellaneous energy” at volumes no household of 1921 reached.verified
This corrects an earlier version of this page, which called the household tariff declining-block. It was not. The correction makes the argument sharper: the price did not reward using more, it rewarded buying the machine.
DPU Annual Report for the year ended 30 Nov 1921, Part II §1, pp. 47–49 →
And the Commonwealth had already built the bookkeeping for it. The Department’s own Uniform System of Accounts, prescribed in 1922, requires every electric company to keep an account for canvassers, solicitors and demonstrators, one for “newspaper advertisements, booklets, posters, dodgers”, and one — E665, “Wiring and Appliances” — for the cost of wiring customers’ homes and appliances “furnished without charge to the consumer for the purpose of securing new business.” There are matching accounts for selling appliances and for renting them out.
Massachusetts wrote the ledger lines for demand creation before it ever had to rule on it. Load-building was not a deviation from the regulated utility here. It was a chart-of-accounts category.
Absence1923–1960 — the prices stop being printed+
The 1921 volume is the last to reprint what each company charged. The 1922 volume drops the “Prices” section; the bound 1926–1940 run carries no rate structure at all. The returns kept being filed — the Commission on Administration and Finance declined to authorise printing them. The silence in this chapter is a budget decision, not a lost archive, which is why the next four decades of this story are told with national data and photographs rather than Boston prices.verified
Chapter 4 · 1950s – 1990s · Air conditioning
The day the grid is sized for moves to July
For most of the twentieth century, New England's biggest hour of demand came on a winter evening. Around 1990, a July afternoon overtook it — and stayed ahead.
The chart shows every year we could verify. The crossing was narrow: in 1993 the two seasons were 36 megawatts apart, two tenths of one percent. Boston got there earlier. By 1986 the city's summer peak was already 12% above its winter peak.
It arrived unevenly, and the unevenness is the point. In 1960 6.2% of homes in Boston’s suburban ring had air conditioning against 3.9% in the city. By 1980 the metropolitan figure was 42.7% and the city’s 30.5%. The ring was ahead at every census — and the ring is where the wires had the most room. Massachusetts also never ducted itself: central air reached 0.5% of homes in 1960 and 5.1% by 1980, so the cooling load arrived as window units, plugged in one at a time, on circuits nobody re-sized to receive them. Each pair compares places in the same census; the 1960 figures count occupied units and the 1980 figures year-round units, so read the ring-against-city gap rather than the climb between them.
Decision1985 — Boston Edison forecasts a switch back to winter peaking by 1995. It never came.+
The Energy Facilities Siting Council's 1987 decision on Boston Edison's long-range forecast records the company as "a summer peaking system" (1986: summer 2,519 MW, winter 2,246 MW) and notes its 1985 forecast of a switchover to winter by 1995. The region has been predicting its own return to winter peaking, and mis-dating it, for forty years.verified
Chapter 5 · 1960s – 2014 · Gas heat
The second network under the street
Heating went to gas. Under Boston runs a second grid: 1,513 miles of cast-iron main and 580 miles of bare steel — more leak-prone pipe than every other Massachusetts gas company combined.
The map shows reported gas leaks per square kilometer by census tract. Switch to see where pipe is being replaced.
Decision2014 — Chapter 149 creates the Gas System Enhancement Plan: replace the pipe, bill every customer+
St. 2014 c. 149 added G.L. c. 164 §145, letting gas companies recover the cost of replacing leak-prone pipe from all ratepayers through an annual plan. In 2024 the section was rewritten so the same money can retire pipe and build networked geothermal instead.verified
The wires today · 1 of 3
How electricity reaches Boston
No power plant remains inside the city. Electricity arrives on high-voltage transmission lines — … of them at 345,000 volts, … at 115,000 — and steps down at … substations across Suffolk and Middlesex counties.
Thick lines are 345 kV, thin lines 115 kV. Dots are substations. Hover either.
The wires today · 2 of 3
The neighborhood wires
From each substation, feeders run beneath and along the streets at 13,800 volts — … circuits on this map — or on the older 4,000-volt network that still serves parts of the city, … circuits. A transformer on a pole or a pad drops each feeder to the 120 and 240 volts at your meter.
Everything in the rest of this story — the data center, the charger, the solar roof, the heat pump — plugs into one of these lines.
This is Eversource's own map of its distribution feeders. Hover any line for its circuit number, substation and voltage.
Decision1887 — one company per city: the consent rule that made the wires a monopoly+
St. 1887 c. 382 §3 required a city's consent before a second company could string wires in its streets. Exclusive territory begins here; today Eversource is Boston's only electric distributor.verified
The wires today · 3 of 3
The one number the utility publishes about each line
For every feeder, Eversource publishes how much new solar it could accept — its hosting capacity. … of … feeders have room for a megawatt or more; … have less than a tenth of that.
It publishes nothing about how much new load — chargers, heat pumps, computers — each feeder can take. That is the number the rest of this story keeps asking for.
Switch between voltage, room for solar, and the feeders that serve the downtown secondary network — the densest part of the grid, where the data centers sit. Then press Room for load. Same lines, same map, and the fourth one is blank: that figure is published for none of the … circuits.
Chapter 6 · 1997 – 2010s · Data centers, first wave
Generation leaves the city. A flat load arrives.
In 1998 Boston Edison sold its power plants — 1,987 megawatts, Mystic and New Boston among them. Since then the big Boston-area plants have closed one by one. The last of Mystic shut in 2024.
The new customer ran flat, all day, every day. Massachusetts has … listed colocation buildings; … of them sit inside this map, and two are carrier hotels shared by more than one operator — 1 Summer Street, where Markley and DataBank both sit, and 70 Inner Belt Road in Somerville, shared by CoreSite and FirstLight.
They did not scatter. … of the facilities on this map draw from feeders supplied by one substation: Mystic — which carries the name of the generating station that closed in 2024. The plant left; its substation stayed; the new load plugged into it.
Blue lines are the feeders that serve the downtown network. Gold rings mark buildings with more than one operator. Hover a data center for its operators, feeder and supply substation.
Decision1997 — restructuring: the utility sells its plants; large customers may buy power directly+
St. 1997 c. 164 (25 Nov 1997) opened retail choice and required divestiture. D.T.E. 97-113 (24 Apr 1998) approved the sale of Boston Edison's fossil fleet: Mystic 990 MW, New Boston 778 MW, Edgar, Framingham, West Medway, Wyman 4.verified
The data centres · 1 of 2 · Who they are
Twenty-seven facilities, twenty-five buildings
Massachusetts has … listed colocation buildings in the Boston market, holding … separately operated facilities. … of the buildings are inside this map. They are not hyperscale campuses; they are floors and suites inside older commercial buildings, run by carriers and colocation landlords.
The map is 2023 aerial photography. Click any dot — or any building below — to fly in over its roof and read its operators, size, tier, certifications and feeder.
The data centres · 2 of 2 · What they will not tell you
The load is the one number nobody publishes
Of the … buildings, … publish how much power they draw. Inside this map, exactly … does.
… publish a floor area, and most advertise their tier rating, their fibre carriers and their audit certifications in detail. Electricity — the thing that decides whether the feeder outside can carry them — is absent.
The four facilities in eastern Massachusetts that do publish a figure add up to … megawatts, and every one of them is outside Boston: Needham, Bedford, Northborough, Medford. (A fifth, the university consortium in Holyoke, publishes 10 MW and is across the state.) The downtown carrier hotel that anchors New England's fibre publishes its tenant count and its carrier count, and no megawatts at all.
Why it mattersA load nobody has to declare cannot be planned for+
Eversource publishes, per feeder, how much new generation it can accept. It publishes nothing about new load. Data centres publish floor area and certifications, not megawatts. Neither side of the connection is obliged to state the number that matters, so the public record cannot answer the simplest question about this map: if another one opens on that street, does the wire hold?verified
The one route to a real figure is the backup generators: diesel plant needs an air permit from MassDEP, and permits are public per site. That is the next thing to pull.lead
Chapter 7 · 2010s · Solar
Loads that run backward
Now the customer's equipment feeds the grid, or is paid to hold back. Boston has 4,466 solar installations, and a household battery enrolled in ConnectedSolutions is paid $275 per kilowatt each summer to discharge when the grid asks.
Massachusetts records every installation by ZIP code, not by address. The largest concentration is ZIP …, with … systems.
Each circle is a ZIP code, sized by its number of installations. Hover for the split between houses, multifamily buildings and commercial roofs.
Chapter 7 · 2010s – 2020s · EV charging
Chargers arrive on the curb
By April 2023 Boston had … public charging stations with … Level-2 and … fast ports — … of them opened in 2021 alone. The city's own program adds … sites: … ports installed, … planned, … of the sites at the curb, and … curbside segments scored for the next round.
Blue dots are public chargers, sized by ports. Dark dots are the city's own sites. The tint is a ten-minute walk from an existing charger. Toggle the scored candidate segments.
Decision2022 & 2025 — ratepayers fund the charger's wiring; the host keeps the charger. Batteries are paid by the kilowatt.+
D.P.U. 21-90 (30 Dec 2022) approved $188 million of Eversource EV make-ready over four years — the utility pays the wiring up to the charger, recovered from all customers at 15 to 21 cents a month. D.P.U. 24-149 (28 Feb 2025) continued ConnectedSolutions; residential batteries under 50 kW earn $275/kW of average summer performance.verified
Chapter 7 · The connection
Every charger plugs into a feeder
Each dot is a charger, coloured by the feeder it sits on. … of the … public chargers are on feeders that also serve the downtown network; the rest spread across the territories of … substations. … sit on feeders with almost no published room for solar — which says nothing about room for a charger, because that number is not published.
| Supply substation | Feeders | Chargers | Ports |
|---|
Each charger is matched to its nearest feeder from the map geometry — our computation, not the utility's. Hover a charger for its feeder and substation.
Chapter 8 · 2020s · Heat pumps
Heat moves onto the wires
Heat pumps put winter heating on the electric grid. ISO New England expects the winter peak to overtake summer again around 2036.
The transformers sized for July in chapter 4 will be the wrong size. Massachusetts publishes no map of where the wires have room for new load; the utility's public map shows where solar can connect, not where heat can.
Behind the chart, the feeders are coloured by their published room for solar. Toggle the forecast between ISO New England's central and high cases.
Decision2023 — the gas utilities must plan to electrify. The wires plan to match is still being written.+
D.P.U. 20-80-B (6 Dec 2023) required gas companies to file decarbonization plans and, by 1 March 2026, proposals to retire pipe by targeted electrification.verified
Chapter 9 · 2018 – 2026 · Compute · 1 of 8 · The premise
A belief about scale becomes a demand for power
The AI data centre begins as a sentence in a blog post. In May 2018 OpenAI wrote that the compute used in the largest training runs was doubling every 3.4 months, and that since "the world's total hardware budget is 1 trillion dollars a year," absolute limits remained far away.
Two papers turned the observation into a recipe: OpenAI's scaling laws (January 2020) said loss falls smoothly with compute across seven orders of magnitude, and DeepMind's Chinchilla (March 2022) said the field's models were "significantly undertrained." The instruction that followed was simple — buy more.
The chart is what buying more costs in megawatts. Epoch AI's estimates put GPT-3 at about … MW and $… million of amortised hardware and energy in 2020; GPT-4 at … MW in 2023; Grok 3 at … MW and $… million in 2025. The power draw of a frontier run has grown about 2.1× a year, and energy is 2–6 per cent of a model's development cost — the one line the developer can ignore.
Each dot is a model. Height is training compute on a log axis; size is the estimated power draw of the cluster; shade is Epoch's own confidence. Hover for the figures.
The sentence2018 — "absolute limits remain far away"+
OpenAI, "AI and Compute", 16 May 2018: a trend line through fifteen training runs from AlexNet to AlphaGo Zero, "correct within a factor 2–3", and the hardware-budget sentence that made the grid somebody else's problem.verified
Kaplan et al., "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models", 23 Jan 2020; Hoffmann et al., "Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models", 29 Mar 2022.verified
Chapter 9 · 2019 – 2025 · Compute · 2 of 8 · The ignition
The demand was contracted before it existed
On 22 July 2019 Microsoft put $1 billion into OpenAI and became its preferred cloud. On 19 May 2020 it disclosed what the money had bought: a single machine of 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs, in the top five of the world's supercomputers, "built exclusively for OpenAI." ChatGPT launched on that infrastructure on 30 November 2022, free, as a research preview.
The number that made it a market was an analyst's: UBS estimated 100 million monthly users in January 2023 secondary. On 23 January 2023 Microsoft made Azure OpenAI's exclusive cloud and announced a "multiyear, multibillion dollar" investment. The $10 billion figure is press only; Microsoft never published it.
The seller's ledger records the ignition. NVIDIA's data-centre revenue was $… billion in the quarter to April 2023 and $… billion in the quarter to July — a step of 141 per cent, eight months after ChatGPT. The quarter to … was $… billion, … times the same quarter four years earlier.
Each bar is a fiscal quarter of NVIDIA's Data Center segment, from its own earnings releases. The marks are ChatGPT's launch and the DeepSeek sell-off.
The buyer's word2024 — "constrained on AI capacity"; 2025 — "it's power"+
Amy Hood, Microsoft CFO, 30 Jul 2024: Azure growth "included 8 points from AI services where demand remained higher than our available capacity … we are constrained on AI capacity." Quarterly capex including leases: $19 billion.verified
Satya Nadella, Bg2 podcast, early November 2025: "the biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it's power … chips sitting in inventory that I can't plug in."secondary
The 2020 supercomputer → · Exclusivity, Jan 2023 → · FY24 Q4 call →
Chapter 9 · 2023 – 2026 · Compute · 3 of 8 · Who joined
Everyone bought the same machine
Google declared a "code red" three weeks after ChatGPT secondary and shipped Gemini on its own TPUs a year later; by 2025 it was selling "up to one million TPUs" to a rival lab. Meta told shareholders it would own 350,000 H100s by the end of 2024 — "we're playing to win here" — and in July 2025 announced multi-gigawatt "titan clusters", the largest, Hyperion, "able to scale up to 5 GW."
Amazon put $8 billion into Anthropic and lit Project Rainier in Indiana with nearly 500,000 of its own chips. xAI built Colossus in Memphis "in just 122 days" — and ran 35 gas turbines beside the Boxtown neighbourhood with a permit for none. CoreWeave's IPO filing named the asset outright: "Power is a key enabler of the AI revolution and an asset that we have managed to secure at scale."
Then, between 22 September and 13 October 2025, OpenAI announced supply agreements for at least 10 GW with NVIDIA, 6 GW with AMD and 10 GW with Broadcom, on top of Stargate's 7–10 GW — roughly 26 to 36 gigawatts for one company, and the announcements do not say which are additive. New England's entire summer peak is about 25 GW.
Each bar is a gigawatt figure as it was announced, in date order. Blue bars are a company's commitment; grey bars are a forecast or a study, not a contract. Hover for the source.
Memphis2024 – 2025 — thirty-five turbines, then a permit for fifteen+
Southern Environmental Law Center chronology: turbines installed from June 2024; a public-records request finds no permits (Aug 2024); aerial imaging shows 35 turbines (9 Apr 2025); the NAACP files a Clean Air Act notice (17 Jun 2025); Shelby County permits 15 turbines (2 Jul 2025) while imagery shows at least 24 on site; xAI applies for 41 more in Southaven, Mississippi (14 Jan 2026).verified
Chapter 9 · 2018 – 2026 · Compute · 4 of 8 · Why "necessary"
The need was asserted by the people selling it
Every claim that the compute was needed came from a seller of compute or a buyer who had already contracted for it. No utility, regulator or customer appears in the register asserting a need.
The evidence offered moved from users to revenue to spending, never to productivity: 100 million users (2023), then 700 million weekly users, Oracle's $455 billion backlog, NVIDIA's $89 billion quarter. Jensen Huang told a Dubai summit in February 2024 that the world's $1 trillion of data centres would become $2 trillion in four or five years secondary; by March 2025 the need was "easily 100 times more than we thought we needed this time last year." Stargate's launch post gave a dollar figure, a purpose — "secure American leadership" — and no customer.
The doubts are dated too. Daron Acemoglu put the productivity gain at no more than 0.66 per cent over ten years (May 2024). Sequoia asked where $600 billion of revenue would come from (June 2024). Goldman Sachs titled its report "too much spend, too little benefit?" — and in the same document put the grid need at 47 GW and asked a former Microsoft energy chief whether utilities were ready: "No." DeepSeek trained a frontier model for $5.6 million (December 2024); NVIDIA lost $589 billion of market value in a day secondary. MIT found 95 per cent of enterprise pilots returning nothing (2025). Epoch found GPT-5 used less compute than GPT-4.5. The order book overrode all of it.
Two lanes on one clock: the claims above the line, the doubts below. Hover a dot for the quotation and its source.
Read togetherThe grid entered the argument through the sceptics' document+
Goldman Sachs, Top of Mind 129, 25 Jun 2024: "Tech giants and beyond are set to spend over $1tn on AI capex in coming years, with so far little to show for it"; utilities section: "around 47 GW of incremental capacity is needed to serve data center-driven load growth in the US through 2030"; Brian Janous: "Utilities have not experienced a period of load growth in almost two decades."verified
The demand for AI data centres was manufactured upstream of the grid; the grid was the first place the manufacturing met a limit.
Sequoia, "AI's $600B Question" → · Acemoglu, NBER w32487 → · DeepSeek-V3 report, Table 1 →
Chapter 9 · 2019 – 2026 · Compute · 5 of 8 · Who funded it
Four hundred billion dollars a year, and rising
Five companies — Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Oracle — spent $… billion on property and equipment in 2019 and $… billion in 2025, on their own cash-flow statements. The first half of 2026 alone was $… billion. Microsoft's fiscal 2026 line was $… billion; its lease obligations, mostly data centres, total $443.5 billion — off the balance sheet. Stated plans for 2026 add to roughly $800–850 billion, and every revision within a year has gone up.
Whose money? Meta's $27 billion Hyperion campus in Louisiana is 80 per cent owned by a Blue Owl fund; Meta pays a $12.3 billion lease from 2029 and guarantees a residual value that "effectively begins at $28 billion." CoreWeave borrows against its GPUs at SOFR + 9.62 per cent; its debt went from $8 billion to $35.6 billion in eighteen months, with Microsoft 62 per cent of its revenue. Oracle raised $68 billion in twelve months — bonds out to 2066, preferred, $20 billion of stock — on free cash flow of −$23.7 billion. NVIDIA "intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed": the chip seller finances the chip buyer.
And public money. State sales-tax exemptions cost Virginia $1.6–1.9 billion, Georgia $1.9 billion, Texas $1.0 billion and Ohio $1.6 billion in their latest year; 37 states have one and 14 will not say what it costs. Massachusetts wrote its own in 2024, opened it in May 2026, and froze it seven weeks later.
Stacked bars: each company's cash capital expenditure by calendar year, from the XBRL facts in its 10-Q and 10-K filings. 2026 is two quarters and is labelled so.
Decision2024 — Massachusetts writes a 20-year tax exemption; 2026 — the Governor freezes it before a dollar is foregone+
St. 2024 c. 238 §§ 47 and 214 (the "Mass Leads Act", 20 Nov 2024) exempt from sales and use tax the equipment, software, construction and electricity of a "qualified data center" — at least 100,000 sq ft, $50 million and 100 jobs, certified for 20 years, approved by default if the state does not answer in 60 days. There is no megawatt threshold.verified
25 Jun 2026: "I am halting any tax incentives for data centers until we have strong protections in place for our residents and communities against higher gas and electric bills" — Governor Healey; the framework requires developers to "fund the full cost of the energy infrastructure and clean energy supply needed to support the project."verified
Federally, Executive Order 14141 (14 Jan 2025) required developers on federal land to show their build "does not increase electricity costs to other ratepayers"; Executive Order 14318 (23 Jul 2025) revoked it, offered loans, grants and tax incentives to any project over $500 million or 100 MW, and does not contain the word "ratepayer."verified
Chapter 238 of the Acts of 2024 → · The freeze, 25 Jun 2026 → · EO 14318 →
Chapter 9 · 2024 – 2026 · Compute · 6 of 8 · Who pays the grid
The cost lands on everyone else, through a market the tariffs do not reach
In the mid-Atlantic grid, PJM, the price of a megawatt-day of capacity went from $… in the 2024/25 auction to $… a year later. The market's own monitor attributed $… billion of the $… billion charged to data-centre load, and wrote that conditions were "almost entirely the result of large load additions from data centers." Across four auctions the attribution is $… billion — 46 per cent of everything charged.
The regulators passed it through. New Jersey's board certified residential increases of 17 to 20 per cent from 1 June 2025 that "largely stem from the July 2024 PJM Base Residual Auction." Maryland's consumer counsel put BGE's at about $21 a month. Virginia's commission added $11.24 a month to a Dominion bill for 2026 — and in the same order created a data-centre rate class "to help insulate ratepayers."
The instruments built since are devices for not socialising the cost: Ohio and Virginia now make a load of 25 MW or more pay 85 per cent of its contracted delivery for 12 to 14 years whether or not it consumes; Georgia does it by secret 25-year contract. Every number in the chart measures a cost that was socialised anyway, through a wholesale market those tariffs do not touch.
Each bar is a delivery year's total capacity charge; the dark segment is the share the Independent Market Monitor attributes to data-centre load. PJM's own caveat: hedged load did not pay the clearing price, so the dollars overstate what reached bills.
Decision2025 — Ohio and Virginia write the minimum bill; 2026 — FERC tells every grid the large load pays its own upgrades+
AEP Ohio Schedule DCT (PUCO 24-508-EL-ATA, 9 Jul 2025): loads of 25 MW or more pay at least 85% of contracted capacity for up to 12 years, with an exit fee of 36 months' minimum charges.verified Dominion GS-5 (Virginia SCC PUR-2025-00058, 25 Nov 2025, effective 1 Jan 2027): 25 MW or more, 85% of transmission and distribution demand, 60% of generation, 14-year contracts.verified
FERC's §206 show-cause orders of 18 Jun 2026 to all six grid operators — ISO New England's is docket EL26-72-000 — direct that the large load "bear the risk and are ultimately responsible for costs incurred to provide transmission service, including the cost of network upgrades." ISO-NE's filing is due 16 November 2026.verified
Virginia SCC fact sheet → · IMM report, 28 Jul 2026 → · NJ BPU order, 18 Jun 2025 →
Chapter 9 · 2019 – 2026 · Compute · 7 of 8 · The bill
Massachusetts pays a level. Virginia and Ohio pay a slope.
A Massachusetts household paid … cents a kilowatt-hour in 2019 and … in 2025 — … times Virginia's …. The jump came in 2022–23, a gas-price and basic-service event; there were no large loads to blame. It is the reason the region's utility resists compute: a developer who looked at Westfield in 2024 concluded that at about 24 cents "a data center does not work in Westfield or anywhere in New England." secondary
The steepest recent rises are in the data-centre states of the PJM market. Ohio went from … cents in 2024 to … so far in 2026; Massachusetts, from 2024, moved from 29.4 to …. A state price is revenue over sales and moves with gas, storms and rate cases as much as with capacity auctions — the attribution lives in the orders on the previous step, not in this line. But the line shows which way each place is going.
Residential price by state, mean of the months on file in each year; 2026 is January to July. Massachusetts is highlighted; hover for every state.
Studies2025 – 2026 — what the models say a data-centre decade does to bills+
Carnegie Mellon / NC State, June 2025 preprint: wholesale costs +8% nationally by 2030, more than +25% in Central and Northern Virginia. The peer-reviewed version (Johnson et al., Environmental Research Letters, 12 May 2026) reports a range: +6–29% nationally, up to +57% regionally, CO₂ up to +28%.verified Harvard's Electricity Law Initiative, reviewing 40 state proceedings on special contracts (5 Mar 2025): regulators approve them "in short and conclusory orders."verified
Chapter 9 · 2021 – 2026 · Compute · 8 of 8 · New England
Not one has been built here. Eighteen towns have said no anyway.
As of 24 September 2026 no hyperscale data centre has been built or permitted in the six states. The map holds … live proposals, … stopped, … operating at scale, and … municipal bans, bylaws and moratoria, most of them voted in 2026.
The largest live figure is the … MW study at the retired Merrimack Station coal plant in Bow, New Hampshire — no developer named. Westfield's 2.7-million-square-foot campus, approved in 2021, has been dormant since 2022 and its company dissolved. Waterford's 300 MW at the Millstone nuclear station was denied; Millinocket's 60 MW at a paper mill is "considered dead"; Jay's operator walked seven weeks after the Governor vetoed a moratorium to protect it. The one operating AI-scale site, Markley's 50 MW in Lowell, added 27 diesel generators in 2025; a court paused four of them in August 2026, and the city voted a moratorium 10–0.
The towns chose thresholds an order of magnitude below the state's: Mansfield 2 MW, Everett 5 MW, Holyoke 12 MW — against Executive Order 658's 25 MW, ISO New England's 20 MW forecast floor and FERC's 50 MW. They are regulating the buildings Massachusetts already has, not the ones Virginia builds. Where projects were proposed, they went to the sites with wires already in the ground: a coal plant, three paper mills, a nuclear station, an air base.
The public forecast holds … GW of large load for the whole region. The utility's inbox holds …-plus hyperscale study requests at 1 to 5 GW. Texas's queue holds … GW against an all-time peak of …. The state that has no large loads has also built no rate instrument for them: no tariff, no docket, no rate class — an executive order, a paused tax exemption, and the towns.
Circle area is the megawatts named in the record; hollow circles published none. Blue is a live proposal, red is stopped, black is a town that has restricted the use, green is operating. Hover for the status, the vote and the source.
Decision2026 — the lease, the tariff, the allocation rule. Still not written.+
Who pays when a new load needs a bigger transformer? Eversource's Terms and Conditions (M.D.P.U. No. 3D) set a cost-sharing rule for single-family homes. For a large customer there is no written rule at all; the company decides "in the exercise of reasonable judgment."verified The DPU File Room returns no large-load docket; the 2024 climate law (St. 2024 c. 239) contains no occurrence of "data center" or "large load."verified
Executive Order 658 (8 Sep 2026): above 25 MW, no state permit without local consent and a community benefits agreement; developers must "directly procure or develop the energy resources to support their operations — without raising energy costs for ratepayers," or pay into a Ratepayer Protection Fund whose mechanism MassDEP must design by 31 December 2026.secondary
Terms and Conditions for Distribution Service → · ISO-NE 2026 large load forecast → · Lowell moratorium ordinance →
Closing
The grid has always been rebuilt around its biggest customer. The bill has always landed on everyone else. The next customer is being chosen now.
Where to look
Every site in this story at once: the power plants and gas works of 1828–1930, today's substations, and the data centers. Hover a dot for its name.
- 1When a rate case is filed, ask which customer it is built for.
- 2Before you host a charger, a battery, or a compute box, ask who pays if the transformer has to grow.
- 3The dockets are public. DPU File Room →