A legislative hearing in Austin laid out the bargain that allows data centers to grow without passing the bill to homeowners. Annapolis and Rockville should be taking notes.
Somewhere in a hearing room in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday, two policy analysts said something Maryland’s political class has spent all year avoiding. Growth and affordability are not enemies. They can be reconciled, and reconciled without a single moratorium.
Max Gulker and Steven Gassenberger of the Reason Foundation walked into the House Committee on State Affairs and told lawmakers there was no need to choose between the data center boom and the family paying its BGE bill. Texas can have both, they argued, if it holds to one simple rule. Whoever builds the facility pays for the power it requires. Everyone else keeps their rate. That is not a radical idea. It is the oldest idea in American infrastructure finance, dressed up for an AI economy.
The scale of the problem in Texas dwarfs anything Maryland has faced. ERCOT is sitting on more than 474 gigawatts of proposed grid connections. That is more than five times the state’s record peak demand. Roughly 90 percent of those requests come from data centers. Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered a full audit of every project in that queue before it can connect. It is an information-gathering exercise, not a ban, and Reason’s testimony endorsed exactly that distinction. Ask hard questions. Do not stop building.
Maryland has chosen a different road. Montgomery County’s council voted 11-0 in July to impose an 18-month moratorium on new data center permits. That came on top of the six-month freeze County Executive Marc Elrich had already ordered by executive action.
Prince George’s County followed with its own two-year pause. Meanwhile, a gubernatorial candidate is now promising a statewide version of the same idea.
None of these policies produces one additional megawatt. None lowers a single electric bill.
Instead, they tell investment to go elsewhere. They send jobs and tax revenue with it. And that is precisely what has already started happening.
Here is the part Maryland’s moratorium crowd keeps skipping. Maryland does not generate enough electricity to meet its own needs.
About 40 percent of the electricity Marylanders use comes from outside the state, including power generated in neighboring states. That problem existed long before the current fight over data centers.
And pushing a data center across the Potomac does not make its electricity demand disappear. A facility built in Loudoun County or Prince William County still operates within the same regional power system Maryland relies on.
So what does Maryland accomplish by chasing these projects away? Not much.
The electricity demand is still there. The regional grid still has to serve it. Maryland simply loses the investment, jobs, and tax revenue while doing nothing to fix its own shortage of power generation.
The Reason Foundation’s actual policy is not complicated, and it happens to be one Republicans should be first in line to claim. Do not single out data centers for special restrictions; hold them to the same rules as any other large commercial customer. Make developers pay the incremental cost of the substations and transmission their projects require, instead of spreading that cost across residential rates. Build new generation rather than merely restricting who is allowed to consume it. And where possible, give operators an incentive to bring their own power. That is a conservative platform in three sentences: private investment, cost accountability, and a state government that gets out of the way of energy production rather than standing in its way.
Reason Foundation’s approach is pretty simple. Treat data centers like other large businesses and make developers pay for the infrastructure their projects require, rather than sticking homeowners with the bill. At the same time, build more power and encourage companies to bring new generation to the table when possible. For Republicans, the principle should be straightforward: welcome private investment, protect ratepayers, and get government out of the way of producing more energy.
Texas is not perfect, but at least it is asking the right question: How do we produce enough power to meet growing demand? Maryland seems more interested in stopping that demand. One approach attracts jobs, investment, and critical technology. The other produces another press release.
ENDNOTES
1. Max Gulker and Steven Gassenberger, “Texas Can Expand Data Centers Without Raising Electricity Costs,” Reason Foundation, August 19, 2026.https://reason.org/testimony/texas-can-expand-data-centers-without-raising-electricity-costs/
2. “Abbott Orders Full Audit of Texas Data Center Interconnection Queue, Threatens to Deny Grid Access,” POWER Magazine, August 2026.https://www.powermag.com/abbott-orders-full-audit-of-texas-data-center-interconnection-queue-threatens-to-deny-grid-access/
3. Paul Cobler, Carlos Nogueras Ramos and Emily Foxhall, “Residents and Industry Leaders at Odds Over Transmission Lines at Legislative Hearing,” The Texas Tribune, August 19, 2026.https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/19/texas-house-meeting-data-centers-transmission-lines-backlash/
4. “Montgomery County Council Approves 18-Month Moratorium on Data Centers,” WTOP News, July 29, 2026.https://wtop.com/montgomery-county/2026/07/montgomery-county-council-approves-18-month-moratorium-on-data-centers/
5. “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
Rusty Sullivan writes on energy, fiscal policy, and Maryland governance for Direct Line News.
Direct Line News is a Maryland-based free-access publication committed to the Republican reform tradition.
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