Half of the data center projects currently planned in the United States are being delayed or canceled outright, and it's rarely land or capital that kills them. It's power. The country's data centers run on roughly 51 gigawatts of capacity today, developers need about 44 gigawatts more by 2028, and the grid is on track to actually deliver only about 25 gigawatts of that in time, a 19 gigawatt gap between what's needed and what shows up. In markets like Northern Virginia, Phoe

West Texas Intermediate has spent September 2026 trading in the low $90s, its highest level in over a year and up more than 40% year over year, as the ongoing conflict in the Gulf and repeated disruptions near the Strait of Hormuz keep a risk premium baked into every barrel. On September 19, a U.S. commander noted that shipping through the Strait had actually hit a six-month high, a sign of partial stabilization even as prices stay elevated and traders keep watching whether B

On September 21, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to stop issuing permits sought by data center projects until the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) completes its audit of data centers in the interconnection process.

On September 30, 2026, PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving roughly 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C., opens a capacity auction it has never had to run before: a backstop auction with up to $20 billion to spend and a price cap of $555 per megawatt-day, nearly 70% higher than the cap on its regular annual auction. It exists because PJM's most recent base auction, for the 2028/2029 delivery year, came in 6.8 gigawatts short of the grid's 20% rese

After four posts on vocabulary, market forces, colocation strategy, and due diligence, this final post in the series answers the question every developer actually wants a straight answer to: which states currently have the most real, available grid capacity for a large data center, solar farm, wind project, or battery storage site. The ranking below is built directly from LandGate's own platform data, not survey responses or self-reported figures. The colocation ranking The t