Who Pays?

Words vs. Numbers

Entergy says Meta pays its fair share and that your electricity bill is protected. Here's what the numbers actually show.

Infrastructure investment has genuine value. Transmission modernization, grid reliability, and long-term capacity serve the entire Entergy service area, not just data centers. But the question of cost allocation matters: when infrastructure is built partly to serve data center demand, how should the costs be shared?

The costs break into two separate categories. Transmission infrastructure ($546M+): ratepayers pay 100% — spread across all Entergy customers as soon as construction is complete. Generation capital (the plants themselves): the Lightning Amendment requires data centers to cover at least 50% upfront — but plants depreciate over ~30 years, not 15. A data center covering 50% of costs for 50% of the plant's life covers just 25% of the total capital cost. Because the Lightning Amendment places no requirement on utility shareholders to cover the remainder, ratepayers can end up with up to 75% of total generation capital costs over the plant's full lifetime.

Source: Paul Arbaje, Union of Concerned Scientists / The Lens, Feb. 18, 2026; Earthjustice, Feb. 25, 2026

The Lightning Amendment: Speed Over Scrutiny

The Lightning Amendment sped things up. But it didn't add protections—it removed transparency. As electricity demand rises, your rates will rise with it. The question is: who benefits, and who pays?

In late 2025, the Louisiana Public Service Commission approved a new fast-track regulatory policy — dubbed the "Lightning Amendment" — to accelerate power plant approvals for large customers like data centers. It was introduced by Commissioner Coussan and passed with only Commissioner Lewis dissenting. It is not a formal written rule; it exists only in LPSC meeting transcripts with no permanent record in any official docket.

Source: Paul Arbaje, Union of Concerned Scientists / The Lens, Feb. 18, 2026; Louisiana Energy Users Group, LPSC Docket U-37425, Aug. 18, 2025

Entergy stands to make an estimated $178 million in new annual shareholder profits from the Meta deal alone — in part because the RFP waiver allowed it to build its own plants rather than procure cheaper alternatives. An additional $7 million per year in earnings margin flows through the Formula Rate Plan on top of that figure.

Source: Louisiana Energy Users Group, LPSC Docket U-37425, Aug. 18, 2025 (primary); The Lens, Feb. 18, 2026

The deal also raises an equity problem for other Louisiana businesses. The settlement allocates 1,500 MW of renewable generation capacity to Laidley — ahead of other industrial customers who have been waiting years in the interconnection queue. Companies seeking to reduce their own carbon footprint were effectively pushed aside so one tech company could cut the line.

Source: Louisiana Energy Users Group, LPSC Docket U-37425, Aug. 18, 2025

The Stranded Asset Problem: A Risk to Monitor

This is the most significant financial risk to Louisiana ratepayers. Understanding it is essential to assessing whether current protections are adequate.

Power plants built for data centers typically last 30 years. The formal contract with Laidley LLC (Meta's subsidiary) runs 15 years. That alone is a problem. But it gets worse: in late 2024, Meta sold 80% of the data center to Blue Owl Capital through a joint venture, creating a new holding company called Beignet. Meta holds only 20% of Beignet. Beignet borrowed $27 billion to fund the Richland Parish data center. That structure allows Meta to walk away after as few as four years — not fifteen.

The Wall Street Journal called this structure "Frankenstein financing" — a novel patchwork of private equity, project finance, and investment-grade bonds assembled to move risk off Meta's balance sheet. Here's what makes the PSC's role particularly troubling: the Commission's August 2025 approval of Entergy's plant application was premised on an existing parental guarantee from Meta — a commitment that Meta would stand behind the project and shield ratepayers from financial risk. On that same day, Meta restructured the deal through the Blue Owl/Beignet joint venture, reducing its own stake to 20% and effectively nullifying the guarantee the Commission had relied on. The PSC was never asked to revisit its approval. Earthjustice, the Alliance for Affordable Energy, and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed a motion asking the Commission to investigate. The Commission declined.

Source: Earthjustice, Feb. 25, 2026; Louisiana Illuminator, Aug. 20, 2025; Alliance for Affordable Energy

The LPSC's own outside consultant reached the same conclusion before the Commission voted. In its analysis, the consultant found that the ratepayer benefits of the settlement "all lie in the residual value of the Planned Generators, which is speculative." The Commission hired an expert who told them the benefits were speculative — and approved it anyway. And separately, LEUG's attorneys flagged before the vote that the parent guaranty's "ultimate collectability is unknowable at this time." Both warnings were in the record. Neither changed the outcome.

Source: Louisiana Energy Users Group, LPSC Docket U-37425, Aug. 18, 2025

The Co-Location Loophole

Co-located data centers — multiple companies sharing the same facility — can claim they're a single "customer" and avoid paying full transmission costs. In December 2025, FERC issued an order forcing PJM (the grid operator covering the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest) to fix this problem, ruling that co-located loads must pay their fair share of transmission costs "even if they rarely draw energy from the grid." The principle: costs must follow those who cause them.

Entergy Louisiana operates under MISO, not PJM. FERC's order does not apply here. The LPSC has not acted to impose equivalent protections. When a co-located data center avoids transmission costs in Louisiana, those costs don't disappear — they shift to every other ratepayer on the grid.

Source: FERC, Docket Nos. EL24-49-000 et al., Dec. 2025; Congressional Research Service, Report R48762: "Data Center Energy Infrastructure: Federal Permit Requirements", Dec. 2025

Protections Other States Have Adopted (That Louisiana Could Too)

Other states facing the same data center boom have implemented protections to limit ratepayer risk. Louisiana could adopt similar approaches.

What Louisiana has NOT done:

• No demand response requirements for data centers
• No emergency disconnect protocol (in emergencies, data centers should disconnect before homes lose power)
• No mandatory water usage reporting
• No public disclosure of infrastructure cost allocations

The stakes are significant. Virginia — home to the largest data center market in the country — forgoes over $1 billion per year in data center tax exemptions, and even it provides only limited outcome reporting on what those subsidies produce. Louisiana has enacted comparable incentive programs with no required public disclosure of who receives them or how much. Good Jobs First found in November 2025 that Louisiana is among 25 states out of 36 with data center incentive programs that do not disclose beneficiary names or amounts — leaving ratepayers and residents with no way to independently evaluate what the public is getting in return.

Source: Good Jobs First, "Cloudy Data, Costly Deals", November 2025

The Job-to-Cost Ratio: What You Get for Your Money

Louisiana is offering 20 years of tax rebates (Act 730) to data center developers. Here's what the law actually requires — and what the state says you're getting for it.

Act 730 itself requires no wage standards beyond the 50-job minimum, and no reporting beyond proof that minimums were met. Its clawback applies only if a company fails to meet those minimum thresholds. Once they are cleared, there is no mechanism under Act 730 to recover incentives if the company reduces headcount, outsources operations, or leaves Louisiana early.

Louisiana did separately enact the High Impact Jobs Program (HIP) in 2025 (Act 372), which offers additional grants to companies that voluntarily meet higher standards: wages must exceed the parish average (at least 125% of parish average wage, or 110% in state-designated distressed areas), jobs must include a basic health benefits plan within 90 days of hiring, and companies must submit CPA-verified expenditure reports. Data centers are an explicitly eligible sector. But HIP participation is entirely voluntary — a company can accept Act 730's 20-year tax rebate while declining to participate in HIP and the accountability standards that come with it.

Sources: Louisiana Act 730 (2024), §§ 47:6023–47:6025 (minimum thresholds; clawback provisions); Louisiana Act 372 (2025), R.S. 51:2771 (High Impact Jobs Program — wage standards, health benefits, CPA reporting); Louisiana Register, Vol. 51, No. 12, December 2025 (HIP implementing rules)

The Bottom Line

Data centers bring genuine infrastructure investment and some jobs to Louisiana. But the financial risks are real, the costs are shifted to residents, and the protections other states have adopted are entirely absent here.