A Governor Just Wrote Your Framework Into Law
Best practices live a long, quiet life as recommendations before anyone writes them into code. Most of them never make that jump at all. I have previously suggested that developers should bring their own power, that secret deals corrode approval, that benefits and costs belong in the same document. A sitting governor recently wrote nearly all of it into an executive order.
What Shapiro Actually Signed
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro issued Executive Order 2026-05, creating a formal two-tier permitting system for any data center project with peak demand above 25 megawatts. Developers who sign a Consent Order and Agreement that binds them to the state's new GRID requirements get their applications reviewed by the Department of Environmental Protection on a rolling basis. Developers who decline get frozen. Their applications will not even be considered until every local permit and every water withdrawal or discharge authorization is already secured elsewhere, effectively placing them last in line behind everyone who signed.
The order does two more things worth sitting with. It bans state agencies from entering nondisclosure agreements involving data center projects. And it ties the state's sales tax exemption on data center equipment directly to GRID compliance, meaning the tax benefit itself now depends on meeting the same standards that unlock faster permitting.
Why This Is GTSQT Written Into Statute
I use GTSQT to describe how power feasibility actually behaves, and this order takes the Queue and Timeline letters and turns them into an explicit legal choice rather than an implicit market outcome. Bring new power supply of your own, and your Timeline moves on a predictable, rolling schedule. Rely on existing generation instead, and your Queue position effectively resets to the back, contingent on every other approval clearing first. That distinction used to live inside informal industry expectations and PJM's own emerging reforms. Pennsylvania just made it the actual rule a developer has to choose between on day one.
Why This Is DLPT Written Into Statute Too
The Approvals side moves just as directly. Discretion, who decides and on what basis, used to sit with individual reviewers working through a general process. Now it sits explicitly with whether a developer signed the Consent Order and Agreement, a binary choice that determines which track a project sits on before a single reviewer even opens the file. Process depth, how many layers a decision has to clear, has been formally shortened for compliant projects and formally lengthened for everyone else. That is not a subtle shift in emphasis. That is Approvals risk being converted into a documented, two-lane system.
Why the NDA Ban Matters More Than It Sounds
I have written before that secrecy is what turns manageable disagreement into permanent opposition, that a community negotiating in the dark tends to negotiate worse, later, angrier. Pennsylvania just decided its own state agencies should not be party to that dynamic anymore. Banning state-level NDAs on these projects does not eliminate confidentiality between private parties. It does remove the state itself from the practice of quietly agreeing not to disclose what it knows, which is a meaningfully different posture than simply asking developers to be more transparent and hoping.
Why This Is Bigger Than One State
Pennsylvania is not acting in isolation. FirstEnergy's own Pennsylvania utilities already carry nearly a gigawatt in data center contracts, and analysts have already flagged that this order should close the door on the idea that independent power producers can simply sell existing generation under long-term contracts to new data center customers instead. At least 81 cities and counties nationally already have some form of data center moratorium in place. What Pennsylvania did differently is skip the blunt tool entirely. Instead of pausing development the way a moratorium does, it built a functioning lane for developers who meet a real, specific standard, and left the slow lane open for everyone else, which is a meaningfully more sophisticated tool than most of what state and local governments have reached for so far.
What This Means for Anyone Developing in Pennsylvania Right Now
Model both tracks explicitly before choosing one by default. A developer who assumes existing generation contracts will move at the same pace they did a year ago is not making a neutral choice anymore. They are choosing the slower, more contingent path, whether or not they realize that is what signing nothing actually means now.
If you are evaluating a specific Pennsylvania project and want to know exactly where it lands on both tracks, Consent Order compliant versus not, before that choice gets made by default rather than on purpose, I would rather work through that with you now.
If that's where you are, whether you're modeling this yourself or bringing it to a board that's about to make this choice without realizing it's a choice, grab 15 minutes on my calendar and I'll walk through exactly what I'd want to see on each path.
PLUS:
Grab the guide. Before advancing a data center site, there are 12 questions I make sure I can answer. I wrote them up here: [The 12 Questions Every Real Estate Professional Should Ask Before Advancing a Data Center Site].
