Since August 18 there has been a web page in Pennsylvania where you can watch a data center try to get built.

On Tuesday, August 18, Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order that makes his state’s data-center standards legally binding. Most of the coverage went to the big provisions, and they are big: developers must sign enforceable agreements with the state before their permits are even evaluated, bring their own power instead of drawing down everyone else’s, pay for their own grid upgrades rather than folding those costs into every household’s bill, and get local approval before breaking ground. The governor called it the most stringent set of requirements in the country and told developers who will not follow them not to plan on doing business in Pennsylvania.

But the two provisions worth the most to an ordinary person cost almost nothing, and almost nobody led with them. The order bans the use of nondisclosure agreements on data-center projects. And it stands up a public tracker at the state environmental agency, a single page where anyone can see which data centers have been proposed, where each one stands, and what has been signed.

Here is why those two small things matter more than they look.

Think about how a person usually finds out a data center is coming to their county. A deal gets negotiated under confidentiality. Land gets assembled quietly, sometimes through a company name nobody recognizes. The utility and the developer work out who pays for what in filings written for lawyers. By the time an ordinary resident hears anything, the important decisions have already been made in rooms they were never told existed. That is not a conspiracy. It is just how large projects have learned to move, and confidentiality agreements are the tool that makes it possible. A community cannot weigh a project it is contractually prevented from hearing about.

The nondisclosure ban removes that tool. The tracker replaces it with its opposite: a page.

A page sounds like a small thing. But watch what a person can do with it. You can check what has been proposed near you before the rumor reaches you, instead of after. You can print the page and bring it to the county commission meeting, so the conversation starts from the same facts on every side of the room. You can compare what a developer promised in March to what it actually filed in August. You can watch the sequence: application, review, conditions, decision. None of that stops a project. What it does is convert “trust us” into “look it up,” and that conversion is the whole difference between a resident and a bystander.

Be honest about the limits. A tracker does not lower anyone’s electric bill. It does not block a single megawatt. And Pennsylvania’s order as a whole is probably headed for a courtroom. The governor wrote it with a clause designed to keep the rest standing if a judge strikes a piece, which is what you write when you expect the fight. Some of the order’s teeth may not survive. But a public page, once people have started using it, is very hard to take away, and information that has been published does not go back in the drawer.

Now the part that travels. Nothing about that page requires you to be for data centers or against them. A state that wants the projects can run a tracker. A state that is wary of them can run the same tracker. It is not a position. It is a record, and a record is the one thing every side of this argument claims to want.

Oklahoma is closer to this than most states realize. We already passed a law, unanimously, that says large new power users pay their own way, and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state agency that regulates utilities, already runs a public page explaining how that law is being put into practice. What we do not yet have is the project-level view: one page where a resident of Stillwater or Pryor or Muskogee County can see each large project proposed in this state, what it has signed, and where it stands. The pieces exist. The page does not. It should.

You should not need a subscription, a lawyer, or a leak to find out what is being built next to you. Pennsylvania just put that in writing. Any state can.

Sources: Pennsylvania Executive Order 2026-05 of August 18, 2026, published in full at pa.gov, with the governor’s signing remarks; reporting from the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, WHYY, and the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, August 18 to 19; Oklahoma’s HB 2992, the Data Center Customer Ratepayer Protection Act of 2026, 17 O.S. §§ 900 through 906, and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s implementation page.