Mandate per-facility energy and water reporting with a penalty attached, and bar NDAs covering utility impacts

The proposal

Two instruments that only work together.

A public register. Every facility above a size threshold reports, annually or monthly, metered electricity consumption, water withdrawal and water consumption stated separately, the source of that water, generator runtime hours, and PUE and WUE calculated to a defined standard. Reporting is per facility, not per fleet, because the harm is basin-scale and utility-scale.

A penalty and an NDA bar. Non-reporting carries a financial consequence proportionate to the facility's size, and local authorities are prohibited from entering non-disclosure agreements that cover utility impacts, water source, load, or emissions.

Why it would work, and the evidence that half of it fails alone

The EU Energy Efficiency Directive database is the experiment that has already been run. Mandatory reporting, no enforcement: 36% participation in the first cycle, Ireland around 17%, Czechia zero, and "no known consequences for non-reporting" (Green Web Foundation). The lesson is not that disclosure fails; it is that a mandate without a penalty is a request.

What the 36% did produce is the strongest argument for the register. It contradicted two industry claims that had circulated unchallenged: the efficiency gap between the largest and smallest facilities was about 40%, far less than the "PUE well above 2 or 3" attributed to small operators, and larger facilities had worse water use effectiveness. It also showed reported renewable shares of 85–96% resting on roughly 70% unbundled annual Guarantees of Origin with under 0.5% on-site generation. None of that was visible from voluntary corporate reporting, and all of it changes how a permit should be assessed.

The NDA bar addresses sequencing rather than data. Roughly 80% of Virginia localities with data centre activity have NDAs in place (Public Citizen). Reporting after commissioning does not help a council voting on a rezoning.

Implementation path

State or national legislation, since local authorities are the party being asked to give up a negotiating tool. Bills were pending in California, Iowa, Michigan, Georgia and Virginia as of March 2026, with Georgia's SB 421 specifically barring local NDAs that restrict utility disclosure (MultiState).

Three drafting details decide whether it works:

1. Cover self-supply. Virginia's finalised waterworks rules, effective 1 January 2027, require utilities to report data centre sales but exclude self-supplied on-site withdrawals entirely, so a facility on its own wells reports nothing.
2. Define the metric. WUE and PUE need a specified boundary and averaging period, or the numbers are not comparable across sites.
3. Match the reporting burden to existing meter reads. Utilities objected that monthly data centre breakouts are "not readily available without extensive manual manipulation", with some reading meters on eight-week cycles.

Trade-offs and limitations

• Security objections are raised and are partly legitimate. Facility-level load and layout can be commercially and physically sensitive. Aggregating to monthly totals and omitting sub-facility detail addresses most of it; the objection is often broader than the sensitivity.
• Reporting is not a limit. Disclosure enables every other instrument in this catalogue but constrains nothing by itself.
• A penalty must be large enough to matter to a company spending billions on the facility, or it becomes a cost of doing business.
• Barring NDAs may shift deals to jurisdictions without the bar, which is an argument for state-level rather than municipal action.