Louisiana PSC Votes 3-1 to Let Meta Hide Electricity Demand Data for $50B Hyperion Campus

The Louisiana Public Service Commission voted 3-1 on August 12, 2026 to overrule its own Administrative Law Judge’s subpoena order that would have required Meta to disclose electricity-demand and job-projection calculations for its Hyperion AI campus in Richland Parish. The Alliance for Affordable Energy, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Sierra Club had sought the data in a pending PSC trial over Entergy’s application to build $13 billion in new gas turbines to power the facility; Meta claimed trade-secret protection and the commission’s three Republican members sided with the company over the lone Democratic dissenter. Hyperion has grown to a reported $50 billion build-out with 7.5 gigawatts of projected demand — more than seven times the electricity consumption of all of New Orleans. If Entergy builds the gas plants on Meta’s undisclosed projections and Meta’s actual load comes in lower, the stranded infrastructure costs fall on existing ratepayers with no public record of the assumptions that justified the buildout.

This is the ratepayer-opacity variant of the datacenter-buildout capture pattern the timeline has tracked in Texas (2026-08-03–abbott-freezes-texas-data-center-grid-connections-ercot-audit), Wisconsin (2026-08-11–wisconsin-psc-forces-atc-restart-port-washington-datacenter-grid-app), and Pennsylvania (2026-03-13–ppl-electric-pa-puc-275m-rate-hike-large-load-data-center-tariff) — state utility regulators approving hyperscaler-driven infrastructure spending without full public disclosure of the demand data underlying it. Louisiana’s version goes further: the PSC didn’t just decline to act on ratepayer protection, it affirmatively voted to seal the evidence a party had already subpoenaed, before authorizing the power-plant investment those figures were meant to justify.