Meta Is Putting $200 Million Into Richland Parish's Schools and Roads. Entergy's Own CEO Just Revealed, by Accident, How Much Power the Data Center Behind It Actually Draws.

Lisa Hopkins bought her house in Richland Parish, Louisiana, two years ago. These days the sound she notices most isn't anything that was there when she moved in. It's dump trucks, idling in her driveway some mornings on their way to or from Meta's data center campus up the road, making it hard to even back out of her own driveway. "It's always noise, all the time," she told CBS News. That's the view from the ground on a project this blog covered on October 6th, when a sales-tax windfall from the same campus turned into five-figure bonus checks for parish teachers. The project has only gotten bigger since then, and this month it produced something nobody at Meta or Entergy had agreed to put on the public record: an actual number for how much power the thing needs.

Meta's Hyperion campus in Richland Parish is now a roughly $50 billion, 5-gigawatt build, and Entergy Louisiana is the utility trying to power it. On October 7th, the Louisiana Public Service Commission opened a three-day evidentiary hearing on Entergy's request in docket U-37882: seven new combined-cycle gas plants at roughly 754 megawatts each, battery storage, and more than 250 miles of new transmission, priced at $12.9 billion. The commission fast-tracked review of that request back in April on a 4-1 vote, with Commissioner Davante Lewis the lone dissent, and it's set to decide whether to approve the whole package on December 16th.

Alongside the hearing, Meta is putting real money into the parish beyond the tax revenue already covered here: $200 million earmarked for local infrastructure and school programs, and $1 million specifically to help low-income Entergy customers pay their power bills. Those are genuine, dollar-figure commitments, not a vague pledge to "support the community." They're also not the number that made news out of this hearing.

The number that came out by accident

The Louisiana Public Service Commission let Meta keep a range of operating details confidential back in August, over objections from consumer and environmental groups who argued they needed exactly that kind of figure to judge whether Entergy's request made sense. During the October hearing, Entergy Louisiana president and CEO Phillip May testified that the substation built for Meta's campus is sized for roughly 4,500 megawatts, and that May expects the company to draw close to that amount almost continuously, not just at a brief peak. For scale: New Orleans' own customers pulled about 1,100 megawatts on their system's peak day a few years back. One data center campus, on this account, needs about four times that, all the time. May's own account suggests the figure came out in testimony rather than through any planned disclosure.

Opponents organized as the Take the Power Back campaign reacted fast. Organizer Kendall Berry called the number "absurd" for a single facility, one that residents in the parish never got a vote on. The campaign's broader argument hasn't changed: a load this size strains the regional grid and water supply, and the seven gas plants built to cover it will pollute the air over a rural parish that didn't ask for any of this. What's new is that the argument now has a specific, utility-sourced number attached to it instead of an estimate pieced together from filings.

What Meta is actually paying for

Entergy's answer to all of this is the contract. Meta's deal with Entergy Louisiana runs 20 years and carries a minimum charge designed to cover the plants' annual capital cost, Entergy's return to its shareholders and debtholders, fixed operating and maintenance costs, taxes and insurance, whether or not Meta's actual draw ever reaches the level it has contracted for. Entergy's own figures put the net effect at roughly $2.65 billion in savings for its other 1.1 million Louisiana customers over the 20-year term, on the theory that Meta's payments are built to exceed what it actually costs to serve it. That's the same basic instinct this blog has covered favorably in Michigan, Wyoming and Wisconsin: make the company that needs the power pay more than its share, not less.

The gap is in what the minimum charge doesn't cover. Fuel costs are excluded and get spread across all 1.1 million customers, which matters a great deal for seven new gas plants running near-continuously. A Sierra Club-filed expert witness in the docket, along with Union of Concerned Scientists analyst Paul Arbaje, has argued the contract's termination provisions don't adequately protect existing customers from being stuck with stranded-asset costs if Meta exits early or doesn't renew after 20 years -- including a "retained generator" status that critics say could let Entergy shift leftover plant costs onto everyone else's bill. Commissioner Lewis dissented from an earlier round of gas plants for this same project in 2025, telling reporters at the time: "I cannot say with enough certainty that this deal and its power agreement serves the greater good." He cast the same lone dissenting vote again in April, fast-tracking review of the bigger seven-plant request currently in front of the commission.

Entergy already walked one of these back

There's a reason to take that skepticism seriously beyond one commissioner's vote. In early August, Entergy quietly shelved a separate plan to buy the Cottonwood gas plant in Texas for $1.8 billion, a purchase the company had said was needed for general system growth. A consultant's report prepared for the Louisiana Public Service Commission found otherwise: "the near-term capacity need [Entergy] relies upon to justify Cottonwood is not being driven by general system load growth. Rather, the need appears to be driven primarily by the timing and magnitude of the extraordinary Meta-Related Load Additions." The same report estimated the purchase would have added $8 to $13 a month to the average residential bill. Entergy spokesperson Brandon Scardigli told reporters the company would "identify ways to lessen the initial bill impacts" before trying again on a revised timeline.

That's a smaller deal than the one in front of the commission now, and a different structure -- buying an existing plant rather than building seven new ones Entergy itself will own and operate. But it's the same underlying dynamic a regulator caught once already this year: a utility citing general system need for a cost that, on closer inspection, traces back almost entirely to one customer's data center. The seven-plant request carries that same risk at roughly seven times the scale, with Entergy now holding the plants on its own books rather than buying one someone else already built, which changes who's exposed if Meta's actual draw ends up different from what May described in testimony.

This is the exact question GridPermit's own evidence-ladder diligence asks on any site: is a number something a company volunteered, or something regulators had to pull out of a witness mid-hearing. A 4,500-megawatt figure that only became public because a CEO said it in testimony is a lower rung on that ladder than a filed, audited load forecast would be, whatever else the contract gets right. The large-load tariff guide this blog keeps linking back to exists for the same reason: the minimum charge is the clause that decides who actually pays, and what it excludes matters as much as what it covers.

The $200 million for schools and roads is real, and so is the $1 million for bill assistance. What's still unresolved is the only question that decides whether either number means anything to someone like Lisa Hopkins: whether the fuel costs, the stranded-asset exposure, and whatever else sits behind Entergy's confidentiality designations add up to more than Meta's minimum charge actually covers. The commission finds out, on the record, on December 16th.