In March 2026 Liberty Utilities, which serves about 49,000 customers around South Lake Tahoe, told California regulators that NV Energy — the source of roughly 75% of its power — would stop supplying it after May 2027, citing "its own resource needs."⁷ NV Energy's own resource needs are data centers: they were 22% of Nevada's electricity in 2024 and are projected to reach 35% by 2030, with data-center requests driving about three-quarters of the utility's load growth and a plan to nearly triple its peak capacity.⁸ Building a direct connection over the Sierra to replace the lost supply would cost "hundreds of millions of dollars," according to Liberty's president; Liberty's rates had already roughly doubled between 2020 and 2025 and sit near 34 cents a kilowatt-hour.^{8 9} A local energy leader put it plainly: "We're 49,000 customers. We have no leverage."^{8 10}

Two honest notes. NV Energy says "there will be no disruptions in power" and that "data centers did not influence this decision"; California's regulator says supply continues until replacement transmission is built, and the deadline has since slipped to 2028.^{11 12} Nobody's lights went out. What happened is quieter and fully documented: a small community's contract was not renewed by a utility whose growth is data centers, and the cost of replacing it lands on the community. That is what "outbid" looks like.

The mechanism is the capacity market: every year the grid buys enough standby power to cover the worst hour, and when data centers announce they are coming, the price of standby power jumps for everyone — years before the data center runs. That is how families in Ohio saw $16 a month appear on their bills for computers in Virginia.¹ New York is not in PJM, but it runs the same kind of market, and its operator's queue holds more than 12,000 megawatts of large-load requests — roughly the output of a dozen Ginnas — concentrated upstate.² The Public Service Commission opened a case in February 2026 to decide who pays for the wires and standby power those loads need; the Governor's stated goal is that "those profiting from data growth pay their share."¹⁵ The federal Department of Energy went further, projecting that plant retirements plus data-center growth could raise outage risk in some regions a hundredfold by 2030, with 50 gigawatts of new peak demand attributable to data centers — a report critics say overstates the risk, and the honest reading is that both the number and the argument about it are on the record.^{16 17}

Closer to home, the pattern is already visible. At the STAMP site in Genesee County a 500-megawatt data center is seeking about $801 million in tax incentives for 125 permanent jobs.¹⁸ Towns from Lysander to Perth have passed their own moratoriums while proposals of 180 to 635 megawatts stack up in Tonawanda, Massena, Ilion and Albany.¹⁹ The 130th sits between two of the largest lakes in the country, on a transmission corridor, next to a nuclear plant. We are not on the list yet. We will be.

Greenidge Generation in Dresden, on the west shore of Seneca Lake, was a coal plant that closed in 2011. A Connecticut private-equity firm, Atlas Holdings, bought it in 2014 and converted it to natural gas with a $2 million state economic-development grant, a new 4.6-mile pipeline, and PILOT agreements that cut its payments to Yates County, the Town of Torrey and the Penn Yan schools from $968,006 in 2010 to $146,150 in 2020.^{3 20} At the 2016 reopening the company promised "60 to 100 new positions" and power for the grid.²¹ By 2019 it had "ceased producing power for the public grid entirely"; by 2020 it was a full-time Bitcoin mine running behind its own meter, and by its own count had about 50 employees.^{20 4 22}

The AI pivot is not a rumor; it is in the company's filings. Its March 2026 results said it was "actively exploring options for AI/HPC datacenter development" at Dresden and had started a grid study to draw an additional 200 megawatts.²⁹ In July it renamed itself Vulcan Infrastructure and Power, took $39.4 million from investors, and described itself as a platform for "energized sites that support artificial intelligence and high-performance computing data centers."⁵ Its Bitcoin business was losing money — mining at 171.5% of the coins' value in the first half of 2026 — and it carries a $17.3 million coal-ash cleanup liability due in 2028.^{31 32} Its president told a reporter: "We're simply pivoting what the data center computers will be used for, from cryptocurrency to high-performance computing," and the company's position is that the Governor's new data-center moratorium "does not apply to them" because they are an existing facility.⁶ DEC says it "has not received any new applications relating to the reported change of use."³³ Seneca Lake Guardian's Yvonne Taylor: "A new name doesn't mean a clean slate."³⁴ At a Geneva rally in August, organizers put it at 106 megawatts becoming 260; Assemblymember Anna Kelles: "They take 130 million gallons from the lake every day. We say, 'No more.'"³⁵

Follow the money. The public paid to bring the plant back. The power went to a private ledger instead of the grid. The community got 15 cents on the dollar of the tax revenue it used to get and a fraction of the jobs it was promised. When the state tried to enforce its own climate law, the company litigated for three years and got its permit back. Now it wants two and a half times the power and a new name. That is the pattern the energy brief calls privatized gains, socialized losses, and it is the model that will be pitched to Wayne County next — with a lake to cool it and a nuclear plant to power it.

There are three things in Albany people mean when they say New York "stopped AI," and only one of them is law. Executive Order 62, signed July 14, 2026, tells DEC to hold every permit application for the "construction or expansion" of a data center of 50 megawatts or more until a statewide environmental study is done — about a year.^{36 37} The Governor said in the Finger Lakes two weeks later: "we're not letting residents foot the bill while data centers come in."³⁸ The Responsible Data Center Development Act (S.10642 / A.11560) passed both houses in June — a one-year moratorium at 20 megawatts, a separate rate class so data centers pay their own grid costs, renewable-power requirements, prevailing wage and host-community benefits — and has been sitting on the Governor's desk since, with reporting that she "believes data center decisions should be left to municipalities."^{39 40 41 42} And the RAISE Act, signed in December 2025, is an AI-safety law for the companies that build frontier models — it says nothing about data centers or power.⁴³

Here is the hole. The executive order covers "construction or expansion," and the Act exempts the "modification, renewal, reissuance, or recertification of previously issued approvals." Greenidge already has the building, the gas plant, the water permit and — after the November settlement — the air permit. Its position is that switching the computers from Bitcoin to AI is not construction, and that it is an existing data center the moratorium "does not apply to."⁶ DEC's answer, so far, is that no application has been filed.³³ If that reading holds, the first AI data center in the Finger Lakes will open through the side door while every new project waits at the front. And every retired or half-used gas plant in the state — there are dozens — becomes a candidate to do the same.

An opponent will try to make this an argument about scare stories, so the campaign does not tell one. The documented reality is that residents are being outbid, displaced and charged more — not that utilities are deliberately blacking out homes so AI can run. In fact the rules are moving the other way on that narrow point: federal regulators ordered PJM in December 2025 to create "non-firm" service so co-located data centers are the first thing curtailed when supply is tight, Texas gave its grid operator the power to disconnect large loads in an emergency, and at least a dozen states are moving to charge data centers a higher rate.^{44 45 46 47} Protection exists. It is uneven, it is new, and it depends entirely on regulators acting for residents against the best-funded lobby in the country. Lake Tahoe shows what "uneven" means: the contract simply was not renewed.

The other honest word is about AI itself. This brief is not against computing, research or the Empire AI consortium the state exempts from its own order; it is against a business model in which the public pays for the plant, the lake and the wires, and a private ledger — Bitcoin yesterday, AI today — takes the power. A data center that pays its own grid costs, runs on power it builds, hires at prevailing wage and returns full taxes to the school district is a factory. One that does none of that is a toll booth on the grid. The law should be able to tell the difference.

Power the community owns and generates locally cannot be outbid for and cannot be redirected to a distant buyer. A district that produces its own solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, hydro and storage — and owns it together, town by town, school by school, on the distributed model in the energy brief — converts "hope the regulator protects us" into "we control our own supply."⁵¹ That is the whole argument, and it does not depend on any forecast being right: whatever AI demand turns out to be, a megawatt-hour made on a Wayne County barn roof is one no data center can buy out from under you.

The campaign's community energy model puts rough numbers on the exposure. If a data-center-driven rate shock like the one already on bills in Ohio and Maryland — about $17 a month — hit the roughly 58,000 households of Webster and Wayne County, it would drain about $11.8 million a year out of the district, about $118 million over a decade, and roughly double that in a severe case. At about 90% local self-supply, roughly $10.7 million a year of that exposure disappears, because the power is not for sale on the market that sets the shock.^{52 1} Over thirty years the model's all-in cost to the community — build, financing, fuel, maintenance, grid rebuild, investor profit, subsidy and administration — comes to about $4.4 billion for a privatized, centralized system, $2.6 billion for privatized distributed generation, and $1.2 billion for public, distributed — the shortest bar because it carries no shareholder profit, no subsidy feeding profit, lower administration and municipal-rate financing, and it keeps about $13 million a year circulating in local wages, contracts and farm feedstock.⁵²

The resilience is the bonus. About 80% of major U.S. outages are weather-related, and the last decade had roughly double the weather outages of the one before; when the lights go out it is almost never a shortage of power, it is downed lines — and a plant two hundred miles away runs while your house sits dark.⁵³ Power made and stored locally can island and keep the fire station, the water plant and the shelter on. A data center in Dresden cannot do that for Sodus.

Street power gets the DEC comment and the county resolution. People power builds the coalition across the lake. Electoral power puts a vote in the Assembly that cannot be outbid either. It is a matter of when. Let it find us ready.