Florida PSC Requires Duke's Data-Center Cost Projections Redacted From the Consumer Brief Challenging Them

On September 16, 2026 the Florida Public Service Commission required the consumer intervenors opposing Duke Energy Florida’s large-load framework to redact Duke’s own internal projections of data-center transmission and generation costs from their post-hearing brief, treating the utility’s figures as confidential. The brief, from attorney Jordan Luebkemann, argues that Duke’s proposal as filed “will irrefutably strand the general body of customers with an undisclosed billions of dollars of extra costs that will be incurred to serve data centers specifically” — a claim the public can now read but cannot check, because the numbers supporting it are blacked out. A final PSC decision is expected in November 2026.

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 non-disclosure identified as a defect in August became, in September, a commission-enforced condition of the record. The regulator did not merely accept the gap; it required the party trying to close it to reproduce it.

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 correction against the ledger capture. The capture described the PSC as excluding cost figures “from public hearing materials.” The more precise and better-sourced mechanism, confirmed on 2026-09-20, is that the commission required redaction of Duke’s projections from the intervenors’ brief on confidentiality grounds. 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 Florida PSC docket number and the confidentiality ruling itself — 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.