Watch what they do, not what they say.

The Public Service Commission held a technical conference today on guidelines for large data center customers.

I didn’t go.

I’ve been to enough of these to know what they are. Most Commissioners skip it because the real decisions don’t get made in those rooms. They get made in private meetings with utility companies, where expensive lawyers and engineers (that we pay for) simplify their 800-page filings, sweet-talking Commissioners into us picking up the tab.

Here’s the backstory.

In December, the LPSC passed the “Lightning Initiative” on a 4 to 1 vote. It tells a data center customer that if they cover only 25 percent of the cost of new power plants, they can skip the competitive bidding process the Commission normally requires for new generation. We pay 75 percent. That is before fuel. Before transmission. Before water.

In February, after a huge public outcry, the LPSC released non-binding guidelines for a better deal for us. Three months in, they are still working through a 14-section agenda of basics, one discussion at a time. Nothing has been finalized. Nothing has been adopted. Nothing has been required of any utility.

In April, while those guidelines were still being “discussed,” the same Commission fast-tracked another massive deal for Meta, a 1,200-page Entergy application. The procedural vote was 4 to 1 again. The deal moved under the binding Lightning Initiative, not under the guidelines they’re still talking about.

The state’s own pitch to data centers is speed. Last November, Susan Bourgeois, Louisiana’s Secretary of Economic Development, told the Senate energy task force:

Speed costs money. The data centers just are not the ones paying for it.

Meta wants these gas plants built fast. The market for new gas turbines is the worst it has been in a generation. Prices are up 195 percent since 2019. Lead times have stretched from two-and-a-half years to as long as seven, and the order books at the major manufacturers are sold out into 2029. Whoever wants a plant first pays a premium. Meta is willing to pay it.

But because of the Lightning Initiative, Meta covers 25 percent of that premium. We pay the other 75.

And the scale just keeps growing. The first Meta agreement was three gas plants. The second adds seven more. Five thousand megawatts of new generation. Two hundred miles of new high-voltage transmission lines. Entergy raised its capital spending plan by thirty-three percent on this one deal alone. The Lightning Initiative makes this the template for every deal that follows.

Big infrastructure projects this size routinely run fifty to a hundred percent over budget.

Here’s the kicker. Entergy makes a guaranteed ten percent return on every dollar of new infrastructure they build, paid by Louisiana ratepayers year after year for the life of the asset. On a buildout this size, that adds up to roughly thirty billion dollars in guaranteed profit over the next three decades. The bigger the cost overruns, the bigger their profit. They are not the ones bearing the risk. We are.

Whatever the final number, the rule says ratepayers eat seventy-five percent of it. We are not signing off on a known cost. We are signing a blank check.

Then there is the gas itself. The Plaquemines LNG terminal, right here in Plaquemines Parish, is now the second-largest LNG export facility in the United States and accounts for nearly a quarter of every cargo this country ships overseas. It ships to global markets where natural gas sells for three to four times what we pay here. As that export capacity expands, US gas prices follow them up. Your power bill rides every dollar through the fuel adjustment clause.

It does not have to work this way.

Data centers can be a net win for Louisiana. They are a chance to build energy that’s cheaper, more reliable, and not at the mercy of global gas markets. But only if they pay 100 percent of their direct costs and pick up their proportional share of the fixed infrastructure we already maintain. Then the bill goes down for everyone, because the same fixed costs get spread across a bigger base.

Right now, we are doing the opposite.

Thirty-year contracts, locked in by people who take campaign contributions from the utility companies they regulate. Decisions made in private rooms while public technical conferences run cover. Your bill goes up. Your grandchildren pay it.

Watch what they do.