A resident calls the township office, and the question is not about a pothole or a permit. It is about the electric bill, which jumped again, and whether the data center everyone is talking about is the reason. Whoever picks up the phone is left with an honest answer that sits in an uncomfortable spot: some of it is connected, and almost none of it is something the township can fix.
Montgomery County is in the middle of this. In Limerick Township, a developer known as MDC 7, LLC has proposed “Project Laurel,” a data center campus of roughly 190 acres with eight buildings up to 85 feet tall and close to 3 million square feet of space, sitting less than a mile from the Limerick Generating Station. The site has reportedly lined up 750 megawatts of power from PECO and would draw around 750,000 gallons of water a day. When residents asked who the end user was, the answer was a non-disclosure agreement, which is how a project this size turns into a debate about secret deals. These are not far-off stories. They are landing inside MCATO’s own footprint, on boards that were not built to referee a project this size.
So the useful thing a township can do first is get clear on the line. Where does township authority actually reach, and where does it stop? Answer that, and both the resident call and the board meeting get easier.
Why the bill is going up
Start with the part the township does not control, because it is the part residents feel.
Most of the price pressure traces back to PJM, the regional grid operator that runs the wholesale electricity market across Pennsylvania and twelve other states. Once a year PJM holds a capacity auction, the market that pays power plants to be available when demand peaks. The result of that auction flows into the supply portion of a residential bill.
Those auction prices have climbed hard. Capacity cleared at about $28.92 per megawatt-day for the 2024/2025 delivery year. It jumped to $269.92 for 2025/2026, then to $329.17 for 2026/2027, and hit the $333.44 price cap for 2027/2028. The newest auction, held in July 2026 for the 2028/2029 delivery year, cleared at the cap again, $325 per megawatt-day, the third straight year at the ceiling. PJM’s own market monitor tied about 40 percent of the cost in the latest auction, roughly $6.3 billion of $16.4 billion, to data center demand, and a large share of that came from data centers not yet built. The Natural Resources Defense Council projects the average PJM household could pay about $70 more per month by 2028 compared with pre-surge levels.
The plain version for the counter call: large new electricity users, data centers chief among them, are bidding for the same limited supply everyone else draws from, and the auction price that results is baked into the supply charge. A township does not set that price, cannot appeal it, and has no seat at the PJM table.
What a township controls, and what it does not
Here is the line, stated plainly.
A township does not control wholesale energy prices, the PJM auction, grid capacity, or whether a utility connects a large customer. Those sit with PJM, the utilities, the Public Utility Commission, and the state. A board can pass a resolution about electric bills, and it will change nothing about the bill.
A township does control land use. Zoning, siting, and the conditions attached to a large facility are municipal authority, and that authority is real. A township decides where a data center may locate, whether it needs conditional use approval, and what it must meet on noise, setbacks, building size, water draw, screening, and decommissioning. That is the lever that works, and it is the one a board should spend its energy on.
The two get confused because they share a headline. The electricity worry is a state and regional problem. The facility in your township is a local land use decision. Treating the second as if it were the first wastes the authority a township does have.
What a township can actually do this year
The work is zoning, and the timing is the whole game. Pennsylvania land use law rewards whoever files an application first under the rules in effect that day. A zoning amendment still in draft does not bind a proposal already on file. So the moves that matter happen before an application lands, not after.
A practical order for a part-time office:
- Audit current zoning. Find every district where a large data center could locate by right or by conditional use today. Many townships discover a facility could go somewhere no one intended.
- Decide the conditions that matter locally. Noise limits at the property line, setbacks, maximum building footprint, water usage disclosure, backup-generator rules, and a decommissioning requirement so an abandoned shell does not become the township’s problem.
- Move an ordinance through before a proposal arrives. Budget for it honestly. A data center zoning amendment carries real solicitor and engineering costs and takes months to complete, so the reserve conversation should start now, not after a developer knocks.
- Use a pending-ordinance posture knowingly, with your solicitor. Once an amendment is properly advertised and pending, it can apply to applications filed after that point. That protection is only as strong as the timing, so the calendar matters more than the language.
On transparency, the Limerick experience is worth keeping in mind. A township is not obligated to accept a developer’s non-disclosure terms to have a conversation, and keeping the process public protects the board and the residents both.
Where to go next
Two lanes of resources help here, and one is close to home.
For zoning language, the Montgomery County Planning Commission and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development both publish data center and siting guidance a township can build from rather than drafting from a blank page. For the statewide picture and the pending legislation, the PSATS data center resource center tracks the bills moving in Harrisburg.
That legislation is worth watching but does not change a township’s job today. In May 2026 the state House passed a bill, sponsored by Rep. Robert Matzie, that would require data centers to pay for their own grid connections and shield other ratepayers from those costs, on a 104-95 vote. It now sits in the Senate. The only data center measure that became law in the 2026 state budget was a narrower one: facilities using more than 10 megawatts must disclose their energy and water use. For how this connects to the state news MCATO has already covered, see the association’s recent PSATS updates. Your township solicitor remains the person who turns all of it into an ordinance that holds up.
The bottom line
A township cannot lower the electric bill, and it should stop residents from expecting that at the counter. What a township can do is decide, on its own timeline and its own terms, whether and where a data center gets built and what it has to meet to get there. The boards that write those rules before an application arrives keep control of the outcome. The ones that wait take whatever shows up under the old rules.