Louisiana Seals Meta's Books: $50 Billion Data Center Gets Ratepayer Subsidy Without Disclosure

Louisiana utility regulators voted 3-1 Wednesday to keep Meta's data center records sealed, reversing an administrative law judge's order that would have forced disclosure of the company's calculations behind its projected electricity demand and job creation at the Richland Parish site.^[1][2][3] The commission's decision, split along party lines, means the Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists cannot now access documents that would show how Meta arrived at the figures underpinning Entergy's multibillion-dollar grid buildout to serve the facility.^[1]

This is the signature scandal of the data-center tariff era: confidentiality plus socialized cost. Meta announced a 5 gigawatt computing campus with a projected $50 billion investment and over 1,000 permanent jobs; Entergy is seeking approval to build seven natural gas generators, three battery-storage projects, and hundreds of miles of transmission to serve it.^[1] The utility claims the deal will yield $2.65 billion in customer savings over 20 years.^[1] Yet the underlying projections that justify the capital, the actual electricity draw, the ramp curve, the permanence of the load, remain sealed. Ratepayers fund the infrastructure. Meta controls the forecast. And when load underperforms, or Meta pivots capacity elsewhere, the stranded-cost risk belongs to the utility's ratepayer base, not the company.

The judge's order was the correct move. Chief Administrative Law Judge Melanie Verzwyvelt had found that Meta's calculations were central to the public interest case for Entergy's buildout and should be produced.^[7] But the Louisiana Public Service Commission, with Republicans Jean-Paul Coussan, Mike Francis, and Eric Skrmetta voting to reverse, sided with Meta's confidentiality claim.^[9] Commissioner Davante Lewis, the sole dissenter, articulated the cost-allocation trap: "If we were to understand how they calculated their power and recognized that their calculations show they're gonna get more efficient...that means when it's time to vote, we would realize that a lot of the risk on the remaining years of this infrastructure would fall on you and I."^[5] That is the exact mechanics of the problem. The forecast justifies capex. Secrecy prevents ratepayers from interrogating it. And the utility, backed by state economic development pressure, builds the plant anyway.

The scale of the ask is enormous. Hyperion is one of the largest industrial projects in Louisiana history. Seventy-seven percent of state senators signed non-disclosure agreements about the deal at the request of the Louisiana Economic Development office.^[6] The secrecy is not incidental to a market negotiation; it is policy, top-down. Ratepayers have no mechanism to challenge the underlying demand forecast because they cannot see it. And Meta has every incentive to inflate projections during the approval phase, higher declared load justifies more dedicated capacity, and then optimize downward once the assets are locked in.

The protective mechanism exists in other states. Virginia's GS-5 large-load tariff, Ohio's data-center agreements, and Oregon's Schedule 96 all require long minimum-take commitments (85% of contracted transmission capacity, 60% of generation, typically over 10+ years) and substantial collateral, ensuring that if projected load does not materialize, the customer, not ratepayers, absorbs the stranded cost. Louisiana has adopted no such guardrails. Entergy's special contract with Meta appears not to be filed for public review with substantiating demand data. And now the company has successfully blocked even the subpoena for underlying calculations. The result is a blank check, backed by ratepayer collateral, signed in secret.

The window to undo this remains open. The Public Service Commission's next opportunity is at the conclusion of Entergy's pending generation case, when the utility seeks formal approval to build the infrastructure. At that docket, the commission can, and should, demand that Entergy file a large-load tariff with explicit minimum-take ratchets, collateral requirements, and cost isolation, making it clear that stranded capacity belongs to Meta, not the ratepayer base. The company has already announced Hyperion; it will not walk away from the deal over a protective tariff. But Louisiana's regulators can still require that the deal be structured so that confidentiality does not become a license to socialize risk.