The Direct Message
Tension: Clackamas County wants to keep the door open to tech investment while its ratepayers absorb the cost of infrastructure built for hyperscale users whose loads dwarf ordinary demand.
Noise: The easy frames — anti-tech NIMBYism versus pro-growth boosterism — miss that Oregon has already made its first structural move with the POWER Act and a 29.7% large-load rate increase.
Direct Message: A moratorium would pause new applications while the county updates its code; it does not undo the PUC rate order, but it is part of the same shift toward making data centers pay more of their own way.
Every DMNews article follows The Direct Message methodology.
Clackamas County is weighing a temporary moratorium on new data center development, joining a growing list of local governments in Oregon and beyond that have decided the pace of the industry has outrun the tools available to assess it. The county has not yet passed a moratorium. Commissioners have signaled they want time to study the infrastructure, energy, and land-use pressures that come with hyperscale facilities before more projects arrive.
The context is a state that already moved. The Oregon Public Utility Commission approved a substantial rate increase for Portland General Electric’s largest industrial customers — including data centers, cryptocurrency operations, and heavy industry — while cutting residential rates. Those new rates affect roughly 963,000 customers and are already in force.
That order was the first use of Oregon’s POWER Act, which was passed to address the rapid growth of large-load customers. Clackamas County commissioners are considering their moratorium in that legal environment — not in a vacuum.
What the county is actually considering
A moratorium is not a ban. It is a pause on accepting or approving applications while a jurisdiction updates its code. The Clackamas discussion tracks a national pattern: local governments that welcomed data center investment a decade ago are now looking at the electricity bill, the water draw, the noise buffer, and the tax structure, and asking whether the deal still pencils out for residents.
The scale of what is being paused matters. Gartner projects worldwide data center power demand will rise 26% in 2026, reaching 133 gigawatts, with the U.S. accounting for a significant portion of the global total. AI-optimized servers alone are projected to see substantial consumption increases.
Non-AI workloads are essentially flat by comparison. The pressure on grids and permitting offices is coming almost entirely from one segment.
Why the timing is not accidental
A recent report from the International Data Center Authority found that data centers now consume about 6% of U.S. electricity. The report noted that significant community and political pushback tends to begin once national data center consumption crosses the 5% threshold. The U.S. is past it, and the backlash is arriving on cue.
Florida is the cleanest example. State lawmakers there have directed the Public Service Commission to keep new data center costs off residential bills, and multiple Florida counties and cities have enacted temporary moratoriums as residents pushed back against projects that promised jobs but delivered rate pressure. Clackamas is looking at a well-worn playbook, not an experimental one.
What Oregon’s POWER Act already changed
The PGE rate order is the piece Clackamas residents will notice first, because it is already on bills. Large industrial customers — the category that now includes hyperscale data centers — saw rates rise 29.7%. Residential customers got a 1.3% cut. In practical terms, that is roughly a dollar or two off a typical household bill each month, and hundreds of thousands of dollars added annually to the power cost of a single large facility. The point of the order was not to reward homeowners. It was to stop them from subsidizing infrastructure being built for industrial users whose demand is rising faster than the grid can accommodate.
The POWER Act allows the PUC to assign new large loads a separate cost-of-service category. That means a data center over a certain threshold is now, in Oregon, a different kind of customer with a different rate structure — a legal distinction that did not exist two years ago.
A county moratorium sits on top of that. State rate law addresses who pays for the power. Local land-use law addresses whether the facility gets sited at all, and under what conditions — cooling, noise buffers, water use, transmission tie-ins, and traffic during construction.
The infrastructure question underneath
Water is the quieter half of the story. A single large facility can draw water at levels that rival small countries when aggregated across the industry. Evaporative cooling towers, still the dominant approach, can consume millions of gallons daily at hyperscale sites. Closed-loop liquid cooling is more efficient but represents a small share of the installed base.
Oregon has been here before with cryptocurrency mines and earlier server farms drawn to cheap hydro power. What is different now is density. AI training clusters concentrate load in a way that legacy planning assumptions did not anticipate.
The White House has also acknowledged the ratepayer pressure. A recent expansion of a federal pledge sought to address the way AI data center growth is showing up on household electricity bills, though the mechanisms remain a matter of state-level implementation.
What a moratorium can and cannot do
A moratorium buys time. It does not, on its own, resolve the underlying question of whether Clackamas County wants to be a data center hub, and under what terms. Some jurisdictions have ended data center tax breaks or rejected proposed projects after community input.
Some jurisdictions decide to negotiate harder: energy consumption taxes, water-use disclosure requirements, or setback rules requiring substantial buffers from residential areas, schools, or places of worship.
Others decide to walk away. Some local governments have enacted permanent bans.
Clackamas has not decided which direction it is going. What a moratorium would do is stop the clock while the county figures out which of those tools it wants to use, and which of them are even available under Oregon law now that the POWER Act has changed the landscape at the state level.
What ratepayers should watch
Three things. First, whether the moratorium is actually introduced and adopted, and what its duration is. Second, what the county produces during the pause: updated zoning code, buffer requirements, disclosure rules, or a tax structure. Third, whether any project already in the pipeline is grandfathered in.
The large-load rate increase is a separate track, and it is already law. It will not be reversed by a county moratorium. But the moratorium and the rate order are pointing in the same direction, and that direction is the real story here: after a decade of chasing data center investment with tax breaks and cheap power, local and state governments are quietly concluding they signed a bad deal. Clackamas is not an outlier. It is the next jurisdiction saying out loud what Florida, Texas, and Oregon’s own PUC have already decided — that the fastest-growing customer class in the country should pay its own way, and that the people who live next door get a vote on whether it shows up at all.
