08/22/2026
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – August 21, 2026
Contact: Tamela Trussell, Tamela Trussell, Founder of Move Past Plastic (MPP), 717-713-5890, [email protected]
GRID Executive Order is Bullet Points of Subterfuge and Obfuscation
Statement by the Move Past Plastic
Governor Shapiro’s Executive Order announcing the "strictest guardrails in the nation" is ripe with bullet points that look good on paper but don’t go far enough to protect the regions where he worked with Senator McCormick to embed some of the largest colocation and hyperscale data centers in the world – and laid the groundwork to promote the hundreds of others seeking to invade and pollute our communities.
The Special Counsel on Energy Affordability's engagement with the Pennsylvania Utility Commission is a positive aspect of his Executive Order. Unfortunately, Governor Shapiro’s claims that his executive order will prevent communities from being “bullied by developers and bulldozed by the lawyers working for these big tech companies” are not accurate. He’s already let “greedy developers run roughshod over our communities” when he announced plans for $15 billion dollars in the PAX1 1.8-gigawatt data center during the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit last July, with President Trump and Senator McCormick. He did not seek input from Middlesex Township residents.
Subterfuge and obfuscation will continue for the proposed 1.8 GW PAX1 Data Center and others in the pipeline, even with Governor Shapiro’s executive bullet points. For instance, the requirement for local legal approval would not have stopped PAX1 because the governor fully backed it and pressured county and municipal leaders, who were given empty tax promises for the Middlesex school district, township, and county. Our municipal leaders are not listening to the people. They listen to power and money. This was shown when a Middlesex Township Board Supervisor blurted out that he had to vote “Yes,” or the township would be sued. A measure that could help would be legal protections and state support for affected communities.
The prohibition on signing non-disclosure agreements is helpful, but it doesn’t ensure timely transparency. The current public-participation timelines under the Sunshine Act don't work for working residents, or stay-at-home parents to learn what will be discussed, educate themselves, clear their schedules, and find a way to get to the meeting to voice their concerns.
Another inhibitor to transparency and public engagement is that it can take four months or more to receive information from filing Right to Know requests. In the interim, the developer and municipality are casting important votes. The PAX1 developers have not been forthcoming with significant information. The Planning Commissioners and Board of Supervisors were often given documents days before a meeting and were pressured to vote on it. To this date, we don’t know where they will get enough energy, the number and type of backup generators, the type of cooling system, the amount of water and wastewater needed, what toxins will be in the blowdown and when it will be released, and so, so much more. Answers to these questions are not provided and/or are constantly changing. Requiring developers to present detailed plans to DEP could help prevent a lack of transparency, and a publicly accessible map with current permitting information and tracking for all proposed data center projects is a VERY positive element.
We look forward to DEP's new recommended regulations to better protect the environment from data center impacts and better consider the cumulative impact of backup generators. However, more protections should be implemented to monitor water usage and unregulated wastewater contamination after the pretreatment phase, before it enters the interconnected wastewater main. More should be done to address noise, light, and electromagnetic fields (EMF).
Some GRID requirements protect communities, but “Bring your own energy” is not one of them. Will communities be better off with “Clean Energy Sources”, like polluting turbines, hundreds of diesel generators, small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), or gas-fired power plants like the 4.5-gigawatt facility being built near? These are all polluting and/or dangerous to place near our farms, schools, homes, and creeks. How will developers be held accountable when the penalties have no real teeth? In addition, PUC Chairman DeFrank cited natural gas as a factor in data center development. Pennsylvania is experiencing drought and floods due to increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Middlesex Township and surrounding municipalities have come dangerously close to running out of water because of turbidity and low creek levels.
Developers will not be the only ones paying for all the costs associated with the enormous amount of electricity data centers consume, as the governor stated. Homeowners in the Conodoguinet Creek watershed will pay for these monstrosities for decades, if not centuries, through myriad environmental and health impacts. Reduced drinking water quantity and quality (perhaps affecting homeowners’ private wells), worse air quality, 24/7 noise, light pollution, EMF radiation, and heat island effects will limit residents’ recreation, impact their physical and mental health, and translate into a lower quality of life, poor health, increased medical expenses, declining property values, as well as harm to the surrounding wildlife. The creek itself will experience stream erosion, pollution, and harm to wetlands, plants, aquatic life, and several rare species, and a 15-year-old bald eagle nesting pair. This seems to violate the Pennsylvania Environmental Rights Amendment, Article 1, Section 27, which Governor Shapiro said he would uphold and which states that the people have a right to clean air and water and that these should be conserved for the benefit of all people.
Dawone Robinson, Managing Director, Climate & Energy, Natural Resources Defense Council, stated that “One of the most significant ways to lower energy bills today is to require data centers to bring more of their own clean energy to power their facilities and to do it faster, and this EO puts us down this path to help with climate change.” Bring your own power means more land loss and pollutants in a community and less regulatory oversight, as shown by the Abilene, TX Stargate data center, which is considered to be one of the largest data centers in the world. It will be smaller than PAX1 once both are built out at their current proposed size. Stargate has brought its own energy in the form of polluting turbines and generators. PAX1 has yet to reveal how it will meet all its power needs, but it has told the community it would use over 200 backup generators and has since increased that number to over 500. They and other developers will cut corners, exploit regulatory loopholes, or outright violate minimal regulations because it is quicker and cheaper to pay the fines and because the Department of Environmental Protection essentially acts as an agency issuing permits to pollute rather than protect due to being underfunded, understaffed, and succumbing to political and economic pressures from developers and people in power.
It will be great to ensure that any further infrastructure costs caused by data centers are paid by the AI data centers. However, this doesn’t address the 30.95% increase, alongside a 4.9% rise in total residential bills driven by a newly approved distribution rate hike since 2024 to present. As Special Counsel for Energy Affordability Mark Szybist stated, “In 2025 nearly 290,000 Pennsylvanians had their electric utilities shut off for nonpayment, because they could not afford to pay their bill.” These increased rates are making other purchases more expensive. We agree that data centers should be required to contribute to the universal service programs that keep low-income families connected to utility services.
The final bullet point to address is maintaining the Computer Data Center Sales and Use Tax Exemption Program created in 2021, which provides 100% abatement of sales and use taxes on equipment and electricity for up to 15 years. Regular consumers don’t get a tax break to buy a new computer or other technology that could help level the playing field for students compared with their more affluent peers. Why should the richest companies receive a tax break? They need to pay taxes to help mitigate the harms they will cause to communities. This tax break also incentivizes larger, more impactful projects, including buying more servers and chips every two to three years, which are covered in PFAS, use vast amounts of energy and resources, and cause massive environmental destruction and labor injustice. Tax breaks don’t slow the careless creation, purchase, and disposal of unnecessary technology.
We ask for a 3-year moratorium to address the lack of environmental regulations that will help protect our community’s air, water, soil, wildlife, and creeks that provide recreation and drinking water for hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania citizens. This would also allow time to determine how many data centers are really needed and how much water and energy infrastructure is needed.
Dawone Robinson, Managing Director, Climate & Energy, Natural Resources Defense Council, made a couple of accurate statements. One statement was “Some projects are moving forward where it makes sense.” The PAX1 data center does not belong in Middlesex Township, where it is surrounded by farmland and residential homes, where there are wetlands, rare species, a 15-year-old bald eagle nesting pair, and where their toxic wastewater effluent will enter the Conodoguinet Creek where families boat, fish, and swim. He is correct about the statement reflecting on the GRID principals, “In many ways we do not know the full environmental toll that data centers have on communities. Although we do have research on many of the harms caused by some of the toxics that will enter the air and water, noise, light, and EMF pollutants, we have not studied the combined impacts on humans and wildlife within the watershed. Downstream impacts on drinking water and aquatic life remain unknown. Many toxins from these mammoth data centers are unregulated, and their harms are not fully understood.”
Move Past Plastic (MPP) will continue to work with other organizations and individuals to support communities and their governing leaders through education about the real harms data centers will bring to their communities.
Tamela Trussell, Founder of Move Past Plastic (MPP)
Municipal moratorium can serve as a guide, Reasons for Municipal and State Data Center Moratorium Infographic & Petition for Moratorium on Data Centers 2/2026 http://www.bit.ly/DCMoratorium Form
You are agreeing to sign this petition to show support for a statewide and municipal moratorium on data centers. Local Moratorium for Municipalities to implement. DC MORATORIUM Pennsylvania joined eight other states with proposed moratorium legislation for data centers. On February 12, 2026, 06:07 P...
