Pennsylvania closed a $50.8 billion budget in mid-July with exactly one new data center rule on the books, according to Spotlight PA's coverage of the Capitol fight that killed nearly everything else. Facilities pulling 10 megawatts or more of peak demand now have to report electricity and water use to the state every year, plus projected future demand and any onsite or offsite generation. Miss the filing and the fine runs $10,000 a day. That's it. Cost recovery rules, a clean energy sourcing schedule, local pause authority, opportunity zone restrictions: all of it died before reaching Governor Josh Shapiro's desk.
The reporting mandate is the only line item that made it into law. Every qualifying facility now has to file with the state Department of Environmental Protection every year, and DEP in turn publishes an annual statewide accounting of aggregate energy and water trends. Environmental advocates called it incremental, a data point more than a deterrent. For anyone tracking cooling method by site, the real change sits upstream of that aggregate number: every operator over 10 megawatts now has to measure its own water draw and put it on file with a regulator, on the record, for the first time. A tower running evaporative cooling shows up differently in that column than a closed-loop or dry-cooled system does. That gap is exactly what the water fight next to a Pennsylvania nuclear plant already turned on, minus the public numbers to prove it.
State Rep. Rob Matzie's HB 1834 would have done the real work. It barred utilities from passing data center infrastructure costs onto ratepayers, made operators responsible for transmission upgrades and PJM emergency capacity procurement, and set a clean firm energy sourcing schedule starting at 10% in 2027, rising to 14.5% by 2030 and 32% by 2035. It passed the House 104-95 in March, then sat without a Senate vote through the rest of budget season. HB 2496, which would have let local governments impose temporary development pauses, and HB 1667, which would have barred data center developers from opportunity zone tax breaks, stalled alongside it.
Bradford, the House Majority Leader, pushed for a bipartisan deal and said the Senate needed to come to the table. Pittman, his Senate counterpart, said Bradford had mischaracterized his position and that Senate Republicans preferred handling the issue holistically instead of bill by bill. Shapiro's office separately faulted Senate Republicans for not acting on the governor's own plan to tie the state's data center tax credit to environmental compliance. Pennsylvania still runs a sales tax exemption on data center equipment projected to cost the state roughly $2 billion by mid-2031, with nothing in it tied to how that equipment gets cooled. Sixty-four percent of Pennsylvanians called data centers a problem in spring polling, discontent that already spilled into a two-hour town hall confrontation with Shapiro.
Nothing in this budget forces a Pennsylvania operator to internalize the cost of the infrastructure their thermal load requires. That was the actual function of HB 1834's cost recovery bar, and it stays dead until at least September, when the Sierra Club's Tom Schuster wants lawmakers back at the table instead of stalling again. Without that bar, the capex case for liquid cooling in Pennsylvania stays a voluntary bet on PUE and public relations. The disclosure mandate still matters more than its incremental label suggests, even with DEP publishing the results only in aggregate. Every operator pulling 10 megawatts or more now has to measure its own water draw and file it with the state every year, the same category of number that turned North Carolina's fight over evaporative cooling into a fight over actual gallons instead of estimates. Harrisburg only publishes that number rolled up statewide for now. The filing itself is the lever Schuster and the rest of the disclosure camp will spend September trying to pry open.