Maryland’s power problem showed up long before the first server rack did. A moratorium treats the symptom and protects the disease.
A coalition is forming in Maryland around a very tidy idea. Stop building data centers, and the electric bill stops climbing.
On July 28, Montgomery County’s all-Democratic Council voted unanimously for an 18-month moratorium on data center permits, along with a zoning amendment barring large facilities anywhere in the county. Prince George’s had gone further three weeks earlier with a two-year pause. Frederick and Baltimore County have paused too.
Now the Republican nominee for governor has joined the parade. Dan Cox told WBAL NewsRadio in July that he would impose a moratorium of his own if elected, citing rural land consumed by transmission lines.
Republicans ought to think hard before signing that petition.
WE ARE THE PARTY THAT BUILDS THINGS
We believe in private investment, property rights, technological progress, and the expansion of American productive capacity. We do not usually greet a growing industry by suggesting it try Ohio. Yet that is what a blanket moratorium does, whatever its sponsors intend.
Look at how the other side frames it. Prince George’s Council Chair Krystal Oriadha announced her county’s pause by saying she was putting people before profits. She has since said she would prefer a full ban. Think about it: no data centers at all. That is a coherent position. It is a progressive argument about economic development, and it should not become ours by accident.
If the Republican response is the same as the one offered in Rockville and Largo, we are not giving voters a choice. We are giving them an echo.
THE SCARCITY CAME FIRST
Data centers consume staggering amounts of electricity. The harder question is why Maryland had so little slack.
Maryland imports roughly 40 percent of the power it uses, according to the Office of People’s Counsel. That is not a fact about Amazon. It is a fact about years of policy choices that treated building power plants as somebody else’s problem.
Let’s look at the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (this is domestic Kyoto Accords nonsense),, which requires fossil-fuel generators to buy allowances for their carbon emissions. In June, those allowances cleared at $35 a ton, up 40 percent from March, and the reserve meant to cushion such spikes had already been drained. Generators pay that price. So do ratepayers.
So Maryland made dispatchable generation more expensive, declined to replace what it retired, and then met rising demand by freezing permits.
A town refuses to widen its roads for twenty years. Traffic backs up. Population growth explains the cars. It does not explain the missing road.
Data centers are the cars. Maryland’s failure to build is the road.
THE ANSWER IS MORE POWER, NOT LESS DEMAND
Suppose a manufacturer wanted to open in Hagerstown, hire two thousand people, and draw an enormous load. Would Republicans say the plant should not exist? Of course not. We would like to know how to power it.
Now lets apply the same instinct here. Build gas. Expand nuclear. Keep reliable plants running. Accelerate transmission, fix the PJM interconnection queue. Reform permitting so projects stop dying of old age. Then revisit RGGI, which raises the marginal cost of the generation the grid now needs most.
The cure for scarcity is abundance. Rationing is what you do when you have given up.
AND BIG TECH PAYS ITS OWN FREIGHT
Being pro-development does not mean writing checks to trillion-dollar corporations—quite the opposite. If a hyperscale campus requires a new substation due to its own load, the developer should bear that cost. No family in Silver Spring should absorb another hundred dollars a year so a company larger than most national economies can run a 500-megawatt facility.
This is a stronger position than a moratorium. Yes to data centers, no to corporate welfare. Require power before approval. Many data centers are willing to bring their own power. Make developers pay what they cause. Shield ratepayers from cost shifting. Protect farmland through honest zoning rather than statewide prohibition. We can do what Tennessee does: use data center revenue to eliminate the property tax here in Maryland.
MARYLAND CAN SAY NO. THE MARKET WILL SAY FINE.
Ask Calvert County how leverage actually works. On August 4, Amazon withdrew its application for a campus of more than 2.4 million square feet beside the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant, six weeks after primary voters ousted three commissioners who had opposed a pause. The company says the decision was about infrastructure planning, not politics.
However you look at it the megawatts did not vanish. They relocated.
Maryland remains inside PJM. Capital crosses state lines, and the grid does not care about county lines. A server farm in Virginia can push regional costs onto Maryland bills while Maryland collects nothing. No payroll. No jobs. No tax base. Just the invoice.
The developer of Montgomery’s paused Dickerson campus valued its fifteen-year county tax contribution at roughly $758 million. Zero is what a moratorium collects. This is from a county that just took away the homestead tax credit.
IS COX IS ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION?
Republcian candidate for Governor Dan Cox deserves credit for raising real concerns. Transmission lines do cross working farms. Bills are rising. Families notice. But he has turned a legitimate complaint about cost allocation into an argument against an industry. Power line issues can be solved with technology. The question is not how to stop data centers. It is how to build enough energy without mailing the invoice to a retiree in Cumberland.
The stakes run past Annapolis. America is in a serious technological contest with Communist China, and nobody wins an artificial intelligence race without compute. Compute requires data centers. Data centers require power. China is not answering rising demand by deciding it needs less technology. Neither should we.
B U I L D·P O W E R·P R O T E C T
Build the plants. Build the lines. Build the data centers. Make large loads pay their own way, protect the ratepayer, and let Maryland be a place where things get built. Let the tax revenue from Data centers roll in, and use it to eliminate property taxes in Maryland.
Energy scarcity is the problem. Data centers only turn on the lights.
Our answer should not be no. It should be build it right.
ENDNOTES
1. Council Approves 18-Month Data Center Moratorium and Places Limitations on Data Center Development, Montgomery County Council, July 28, 2026. https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/news/council-approves-18-month-data-center-moratorium-places-limitations-data-center-development
2. Montgomery County Council approves 18-month moratorium on data centers, WTOP News, July 2026. https://wtop.com/montgomery-county/2026/07/montgomery-county-council-approves-18-month-moratorium-on-data-centers/
3. Prince George’s County extends pause on hyperscale data center development, Maryland Matters, July 8, 2026. https://marylandmatters.org/2026/07/08/prince-georges-county-extends-pause-on-hyperscale-data-center-development/
4. Chair Oriadha Announces Two-Year Moratorium to Prevent New Data Centers from Operating in the County, Prince George’s County Council. https://pgccouncil.us/m/newsflash/home/detail/2073
5. Prince George’s County Council approves 2-year data center moratorium, The Baltimore Banner, July 8, 2026. https://www.thebanner.com/politics-power/local-government/prince-georges-county-council-data-center-moratorium-CKGTDP5ZNFBFRNF3NGTTA5UARI/
6. Greens take on data centers, a literal hat trick by Kagan, Tablada retires, in political notes, Maryland Matters, August 14, 2026. https://marylandmatters.org/2026/08/14/greens-take-on-data-centers-a-literal-hat-trick-by-kagan-tablada-retires-in-political-notes/
7. Maryland Resource Adequacy FAQs, Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, February 3, 2026. https://opc.maryland.gov/Portals/0/Resource%20Adequacy%20FAQs%20update%20February%202026%20(1).pdf
8. CO2 Allowances Sold for $35.00 in 72nd RGGI Auction, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, June 5, 2026. https://www.rggi.org/sites/default/files/Uploads/Auction-Materials/72/PR060526_Auction72.pdf
9. AWS Withdraws Proposed Calvert County Data Center Project, Calvert County Government, August 4, 2026. https://www.calvertcountymd.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=3192
10. Amazon abandons plans for data center campus at Calvert Cliffs, Maryland Matters, August 4, 2026. https://marylandmatters.org/2026/08/04/amazon-abandons-plans-for-a-data-center-at-calvert-cliffs/
11. Amazon Explains Calvert Data Center Withdrawal, Says Decision Wasn’t Political, The Southern Maryland Chronicle, August 9, 2026. https://southernmarylandchronicle.com/2026/08/09/amazon-explains-calvert-data-center-withdrawal-says-decision-wasnt-political/
12. Maryland County Adopts a Two-Year Moratorium on Data Center Development, Inside Climate News, July 9, 2026. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09072026/maryland-county-adopts-data-center-moratorium/
13. Time for an 18-Month Moratorium on Data Center Moratoriums, Policy Arena, August 2026 (Atmosphere Data Centers revenue estimate). https://www.policyarena.org/p/time-for-an-18-month-moratorium-on
14. Why the data center industry came to Dickerson, Bethesda Today, April 6, 2026. https://bethesdamagazine.com/2026/04/06/why-the-data-center-industry-came-to-dickerson/
Andrew McConnell writes on energy policy and regulatory reform for Direct Line News.
Direct Line News is a Maryland-based free-access publication committed to the Republican reform tradition.
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