A resident calls the township office in the spring, 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. The person at the counter takes the call, and the honest answer 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. A developer proposed a 1.5 million square foot data center campus near the Limerick nuclear plant and asked township officials to sign a non-disclosure agreement before talking specifics. Limerick’s leaders declined to sign. Montgomery Township moved in March 2026 to close a gap in its own zoning after officials realized a large facility could land with fewer controls than they wanted. These are not far-off stories. They are happening inside MCATO’s own footprint, and they are landing 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, which is the market that pays power plants to be available when demand peaks. The results of that auction flow 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, close to a nine-fold increase, then to $329.17 for 2026/2027, and to the $333.44 price cap for 2027/2028. PJM’s own market monitor attributed roughly 40 percent of the cost in the December 2025 auction, about $6.5 billion of $16.4 billion, to data center demand. Across the PJM region, utility supply rates have risen between 5 and 44 percent since June 2025.
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 actually 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, which is exactly the gap Montgomery Township moved to close.
- 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 can run from $30,000 to $150,000 and take months to complete, so the reserve conversation and the solicitor 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, Limerick’s experience is worth keeping in mind. A township is not obligated to sign a developer’s non-disclosure agreement to have a conversation. Keeping the process public protects the board and the residents both.
Where to go next
Two resources are built for exactly this, and one of them is local.
Montgomery County and Chester County jointly developed a guide to drafting data center regulations, written for municipalities in our two counties and available to any township that wants a starting framework. Pennsylvania’s Department of Community and Economic Development also publishes a Data Center Planning Toolkit with model considerations for zoning and siting. Between the two, a township does not have to draft from a blank page.
For the statewide picture and the pending legislation, the PSATS data center resource center tracks the bills moving in Harrisburg, including the House-passed measures aimed at keeping data center costs off residential ratepayers. Those bills had passed the House but stalled in the Senate as of spring 2026, so nothing there changes a township’s job today. For how this connects to the state news MCATO has already covered, see the association’s recent PSATS updates. And 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.