Alabama Just Promised a Public Vote on Every Big Data Center Deal. The Price Tag Still Never Makes the Page.

For most of this year, Alabama Power had a standing option when it filed a power contract for a data center needing 150 megawatts or more: say nothing and wait. Under the review procedure state regulators first proposed in July, a contract sitting in front of the Alabama Public Service Commission for 60 days without action was simply deemed approved. No hearing, no commissioner's name on a vote, no public record of anyone actually deciding the deal was a good one for the rest of the state's ratepayers.

On October 6th, that changed. The three-member commission voted unanimously to adopt a revised version of the rule, and on an amendment from Commission President Cynthia Almond, added something the July draft didn't have: a requirement that commissioners cast an actual, public vote to approve or disapprove every contract covered by the state's new data center law, rather than let a silent clock do the approving. Almond said the step mattered given the sheer scale of the projects now moving through Alabama Power's territory and the level of public concern attached to them.

That's a real, specific improvement, and it didn't happen by accident. Attorney General Steve Marshall's office spent the preceding months pushing commissioners past the original proposal, arguing in writing that "the PSC has the responsibility to protect ratepayers and there must be a procedure in place for commissioners to understand the impact of large load electric contracts on ratepayers." Consumer and environmental groups made the same case in public comments. The commission's final rule is the version that came out the other side of that pressure, not the version regulators started with.

From a 60-day rubber stamp to a 90-day vote

The underlying law is Senate Bill 270, sponsored by state Sen. Lance Bell and enacted in April, which took effect October 1st as Act 2026-610. It's Alabama's first statute written specifically for data center power contracts, and the core of it is a cost-recovery test close in spirit to the large-load tariffs other states have adopted: the commission can approve a contract only if Alabama Power shows its pricing and terms are expected to recover the incremental cost of serving that customer and are expected to produce a positive benefit for everyone else on the system. The law also requires the utility to account for what happens to those costs if the data center walks away or sharply cuts its usage after the infrastructure is already in the ground, the scenario that turns a single customer's gamble into a stranded-asset bill for everyone else.

The Public Service Commission opened the implementing docket, Docket 33709, on July 8th to work out exactly how that test would get applied. The rules adopted October 6th extended the review window from the 10-day informal review that had been standard practice since 1996 to 90 days, with Alabama Power's own filings required to name the counterparty and its parent companies, the county or municipality where the data center will sit, and the project's maximum contracted capacity, alongside the full contract and a financial analysis for commission staff to work through. Alabama Power itself agreed to a transitional 45-day window for contracts it had already filed when the new law took effect, so the first real test of the full 90-day, public-vote process is still ahead of the commission, not behind it.

The number that still never reaches the page

Here's the part a public vote doesn't fix on its own. Alabama Power has already filed three data center contracts with the commission, and in all three, it redacted the pricing paragraphs in full. The commission and the Attorney General's office, which the law makes the state's dedicated ratepayer advocate, can see the unredacted numbers. The public, including the ratepayers whose bills the cost-recovery test is supposed to protect, cannot. In a Kill Test, that's a claim sitting on the bottom rung of the evidence ladder no matter how reasonable it sounds: a number nobody outside the deal has checked. It's also the same move utilities in Georgia and Minnesota made on their own hyperscaler contracts earlier this year, in both cases prompting a public fight over the redactions months after the deals were already signed. Alabama's version of that fight is starting before the ink is fully dry, not after.

Advocates who pushed for the October 6th rule are open about how far it does and doesn't go. Energy Alabama's policy manager, John Dodd, said the result still falls short, calling the deemed-approved backstop "a rubber stamp at the end of the day" even with a public vote layered on top of it: if commissioners simply never schedule that vote inside the 90-day window, the contract goes through exactly as it would have under the original proposal. The Southern Environmental Law Center's Jaclyn Brass struck a more measured note, crediting the commission with real movement while naming what's still missing. "The process that was adopted is better than what we had before," she said, pointing to the absence of any required public hearing and the lack of a minimum floor of ratepayer protections that every contract has to clear, as opposed to a case-by-case judgment call commissioners make behind closed doors.

What's riding on that judgment call keeps growing. Alabama Power's largest known data center customer today is Meta, whose Montgomery campus has expanded to four buildings and more than $1.5 billion in announced investment. The commission separately approved two Baldwin County solar projects, Stockton I and Stockton II, 80 megawatts and 180 megawatts respectively, built specifically to supply that load under a deal where Meta holds the renewable energy rights and sells the output back to Alabama Power. A statewide tracker counted roughly 764 megawatts of operating data center capacity in Alabama Power's territory as of midyear, with another 2,704 megawatts of planned projects somewhere in the pipeline behind it. Every one of those future contracts will run through the process the commission just rewrote, for better and for worse.

One real gap in that process is geography. Act 2026-610 and the October 6th rules only reach contracts with Alabama Power. North Alabama runs on power from the Tennessee Valley Authority instead, a federal utility the state legislature has no authority to regulate at all, and it's already home to Meta's older Huntsville campus and Google's $1.5 billion expansion at the former Widows Creek coal plant site in Jackson County. Whatever cost-recovery test, disclosure requirement, or public vote Alabama builds for Alabama Power's customers, it stops at the TVA service boundary. A resident in Huntsville watching a data center go up next door has no equivalent commission docket to read, no matter how this one turns out.

There's also a bill still moving through Montgomery that would tighten the other half of this picture. Senate Bill 265 would cap the length of Alabama's data center tax incentives at 20 years instead of 30 for any deal signed after January 1, 2027, on the theory that a ratepayer protection without a matching limit on the state's own giveaways is only half a deal. It hasn't passed yet, and it wouldn't touch anything already on the books. For now, the real test isn't the rule the commission wrote on October 6th. It's the first full contract that comes through under it, with the 90-day clock running and a public vote required at the end of it, and whether a unanimous yes on a number nobody outside Alabama Power's own building can see still counts as oversight, or just moves the rubber stamp from a silent clock to three names on a transcript.