Duke's Data-Center Cost Projections Blacked Out of the Consumer Brief Challenging Them, Under Duke's Pending Confidentiality Requests

Correction (2026-10-15). This entry first said the Commission required the redaction. The brief itself shows otherwise. The cover letter says the confidential material “has already been subject to a request for confidential classification by Duke Energy Florida, LLC,” and that Duke filed a statement under Rule 25-22.006(8)(c) that day. Footnote 1 says Florida Rising “did not object” to those requests, argues that aggregated 20-year costs should not qualify as confidential under s. 366.093, and says it redacted the characterizations of the cost gap “out of abundance of caution.” No Commission order requiring the redaction was found. The “PSC required” framing came from Food & Water Watch. The entry date (Sept 16) is the press-report date; the brief was filed Sept 15.

On September 15, 2026, Florida Rising (represented by Earthjustice) filed its post-hearing brief in Docket 20260064-EI, Duke Energy Florida’s petition for a large-load tariff, with Duke’s own internal projections of data-center generation costs blacked out. The blackout followed Duke’s pending requests to classify those figures as confidential business information: under s. 366.093 and Rule 25-22.006, material under a pending request is exempt from public-records disclosure until the Commission rules. The brief argues that Duke’s proposal “will irrefutably strand the general body of customers with [redacted] billions of dollars of extra costs that will be incurred for the sole purpose of serving new data center customers.” The amount itself is blacked out, so the public can read the claim but cannot check it. (Earlier versions of this entry quoted a paraphrase; this wording is from the filed brief, Doc. 06674-2026.) Food & Water Watch reported on Sept 16 that a final decision is expected in November 2026. That is a press-reported expectation, not a docketed agenda date.

This is the concealment step in a proceeding canon already recorded at the hearing step. Three weeks earlier a commissioner told Duke its filing was on “real shaky ground” under SB 484, the statute requiring each large-load customer to bear its own full cost of service, and the state’s consumer advocate testified that the proposal “doesn’t attempt to comply with the most basic provisions” of the law and failed to disclose projected data-center costs (2026-08-25–florida-psc-duke-sb484-large-load-tariff-hearing-shaky-ground). The mechanism is the utility’s confidentiality claim, which the classification rules honor by default until the Commission rules. No regulator order was needed: the default kept the numbers out of the public record. Any person may petition to inspect the material under Rule 25-22.006(7)(a).

The confidentiality determination decides the substantive question procedurally. SB 484 turns on cost causation — whether the incremental cost of serving a data center lands on that customer or on the general body of ratepayers. Answering it requires the cost projections. If those projections are confidential as to the public, then the only parties who can evaluate the statute’s central test are the commission and the utility, and the public record of the first proceeding under the new law contains everything except the number the law was written to govern. Duke’s residential bills rose 45% between January 2021 and January 2026, more than twice inflation over the same span, which is the baseline the withheld projections would be added to.

The pattern is regional, not Florida-specific. Louisiana’s PSC let Meta withhold Hyperion’s demand data (2026-08-12–louisiana-psc-meta-hyperion-hides-electricity-demand-data); Wisconsin’s cost-shift fight reached litigation (2026-06-19–oracle-sues-wisconsin-psc-data-center-ratepayer-cost-shift); Pennsylvania’s large-load tariff arrived attached to a $275 million rate increase (2026-03-13–ppl-electric-pa-puc-275m-rate-hike-large-load-data-center-tariff). In each, the load’s cost data is classified as competitively sensitive commercial information, and that classification is what keeps the cost-shift question unresolvable on the public record.

Sourcing note. The capture described the PSC as excluding cost figures “from public hearing materials,” and the first version of this entry said the commission required the redaction. Both are superseded by the brief’s own cover letter and footnote 1 (see the correction above). The 45% bill increase and the November decision timeline are from Food & Water Watch. Duke Energy Florida serves multiple central and north Florida counties; this is a statewide proceeding and no single county FIPS applies.

Open: the Commission’s rulings on Duke’s classification requests (five were pending as of the Aug. 11 prehearing order) — Florida’s public-records law provides a route to challenge or at least to document the basis for the designation, and the unredacted projections are the single document that would settle whether SB 484 is being satisfied. Which specific data-center projects drive Duke’s proposed framework is also unnamed in public materials and may appear in hearing exhibits or testimony.