Moratorium Nation

The September picture

The list more than doubled in one update. Most of that is not new activity. These are towns and townships that had already voted for a pause, and that earlier searches missed. The list now holds 1291 moratoria in 47 states, and 1063 of them are in force.

What changed in this update

• We rechecked every row that was out of date. On September 23, 296 rows needed a fresh look. Some had passed their end date. Others were old proposals or had a fact we had not confirmed. We changed the status of 84, fixed facts in 141, and confirmed 75. Six could not be settled. Today 897 are active and 166 extended. Another 93 were replaced by permanent rules, 50 ran out, and 8 were cancelled early.
• We searched every state, then checked the results four ways. The search added 520 moratoria. We re-read each one against its source. We also checked a random sample blind and compared our list with nine others. That comparison added 243 more, including 127 New York town pauses on battery storage. We removed 14 rows that turned out to be permanent bans or proposals that never passed. Only Hawaii, West Virginia, and Wyoming have none.
• We saved a copy of every source. That is about 3,700 pages and documents. We will not add a fact unless its source has been saved. A link can break, but the record behind each row no longer depends on it. We publish the copies of public records. News stories belong to the papers that wrote them, so for those we publish only the link, the date, and a fingerprint of our copy.

State rules are a separate layer

States act too. We track 438 state bills, 84 of which became law, plus 2 state actions that are not bills. New York Executive Order 62 holds some state permits while the state studies the effects of data centers. Texas's August 3 order pauses new hookups to the state's main power grid while it is audited. In Pennsylvania, SB 1345 would let towns pause data centers, and SB 1359 would pause them statewide. Both are still only proposals. This update did not recheck the state bills.

How to read the counts

For May through July, we searched all 50 states month by month. Even that search missed many small towns, as this update showed. This time we searched each state as a whole. So the August and September counts are far better than before, but they are still the fewest there could be. September counts stop at the 23rd. Counts before May came from scattered searches and are low too. Known gaps explains what the list may be missing.