Summary
Governor Josh Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05 on August 18, 2026, and it takes effect immediately. The central mechanism is a sequencing rule: for any data center with peak demand above 25 megawatts, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) will not issue a permit until the applicant documents that the project has received all required local approvals and is consistent with the local comprehensive plan. The order also removes every data center from the Permit Fast Track program, bars nondisclosure agreements at agencies under the Governor, conditions the sales and use tax exemption on compliance with the GRID Requirements, and directs DEP to study whether its rules adequately address the cumulative emissions of backup generators.
Alongside the order, the administration published a Data Center Permit Tracker covering every proposed project known to DEP. The 900 Conshohocken Road project does not appear on it, neither does the Upper Merion proposal, and Montgomery County has no entries at all among the 57 projects listed. That absence carries weight, because the order reaches applications submitted after August 18, and a project with nothing on file has nothing grandfathered.
None of this decides anything in Plymouth Township, since the order binds executive agencies and leaves the Zoning Hearing Board, the courts, and the Delaware River Basin Commission exactly where they were. What it changes is the consequence of the local record, because the state gate now sits behind the local one.
The order puts the local approval first and the state permit second
Executive Order 2026-05 creates two paths, both applying only to applications submitted after the effective date. A developer who executes a project specific Consent Order and Agreement binding it to the GRID Requirements, with penalties for failing to follow through, gets rolling permit review, though DEP still withholds issuance until local approvals are documented. A developer who declines that agreement gets the slower path, under which DEP will not begin review at all until local approvals and any required water withdrawal or wastewater discharge authorizations are documented, and will not issue anything until every application needed for construction has been received and reviewed.
The recitals matter as much as the directives. The order describes the problem class as proposals that are, in its words, “speculative in nature, with no identified end user,” which is a description that fits the posture the applicant has maintained in Plymouth Township since the first planning agency hearing. The order also records that across PJM’s last four base residual capacity auctions, data centers accounted for $29.4 billion in capacity charges to ratepayers, or 46 percent of total auction costs, according to PJM’s Independent Market Monitor. That figure is now a finding in a signed state document, which gives the systemic ratepayer argument a citation it did not have last week.
Two other pieces speak directly to the questions we have been asking. Operators will have to report annually their monthly water consumption by source and by whether the water went to cooling, their monthly natural gas consumption, their peak hourly energy usage, and their on site generation. Separately, DEP is directed to examine whether its regulations adequately consider the cumulative impact of multiple backup generators operating at a facility or at proximate facilities. The applicant’s own preliminary noise assessment disclosed six generators on the Tract 2 parcel across the street, and the state has now identified that exact configuration as a regulatory gap it intends to study.
What the order does not do is decide anything in Plymouth Township
Some coverage has described the order as handing communities a veto, and that overstates what the text says. The operative test is documentation of approvals “under the applicable subdivision and zoning ordinance.” A Zoning Hearing Board grant of special exception would satisfy that test even over unanimous neighborhood objection, and so would site specific relief obtained through the substantive validity challenge the applicant filed under Section 916.1 of the Municipalities Planning Code. The order raises the stakes of the local proceeding without resolving it.
Three further limits belong in any honest reading. The order reaches only agencies under the Governor’s jurisdiction, leaving the Zoning Hearing Board, the county court, and the Delaware River Basin Commission outside it. It applies to applications submitted after August 18, so anything already filed proceeds under prior practice. And it states on its face that it operates only to the extent applicable law permits and creates no right enforceable at law or in equity by any party, which forecloses a resident suing to enforce it. DEP says as much on the tracker itself, noting that the department has no role in local zoning decisions.
There is also a live legal question underneath the whole structure. The order leans on Section 619.2 of the Municipalities Planning Code, which says state agencies “shall consider and may rely upon comprehensive plans and zoning ordinances” when reviewing permit applications. Reading a discretionary authorization to consider local zoning as a mandatory precondition to permit issuance is a substantial step, and it is the kind of step a well funded applicant tests in court. Anyone telling you the order is bulletproof has skipped that paragraph.
The map the state published does not list 900 Conshohocken Road
The Data Center Permit Tracker is a genuine transparency improvement, and it is also incomplete in a way that residents here should understand before they rely on it.
We pulled the underlying data files that feed the map on the evening of August 18, and they contain 57 projects with 108 associated permit authorizations. Twenty projects carry at least one DEP application, sixteen of those remain under review, and four are marked as having completed DEP review. The distribution is heavily northeastern, with 38 of the 57 in DEP’s Northeast region and exactly two in the Southeast, those being the Amazon project in Falls Township and Project Forge in East Whiteland Township. Montgomery County appears nowhere. We re-pulled both files on August 19 and confirmed they had not changed.
What that absence means is narrow and worth stating precisely. It means DEP has not recorded a data center permit application, or a pre-application engagement it chose to publish, for 900 Conshohocken Road. It does not prove that no filing exists, since DEP describes the map as covering projects known to the agency, and it does not prove anything about the applicant’s intentions. What it does establish is that as of the day the order took effect, the applicant had not begun the state permitting process, which places every future DEP authorization on the far side of the local approval gate.
The state’s own numbers do not agree with each other
Three official counts were published on the same afternoon, and they do not reconcile. The Governor’s press release reports 58 projects engaged with DEP, 15 with at least one permit application, and 5 holding every permit required for a first phase. The executive order’s recitals report permit applications related to 20 proposed facilities, along with 14 locations holding an active tax exemption from the Department of Revenue. The map’s own data file lists 57 projects, 20 carrying applications, and 4 marked as review complete. The 20 figure matches the order, the 57 comes within one of the press release’s 58, and the completed count differs by one with no explanation offered.
Three maintenance problems are worth flagging alongside that. The data file still marks nine projects as Fast Track participants, hours after the order removed every data center from the program. The 37 projects with no applications on file sit on a layer titled “Unconfirmed PA Data Centers” that is switched off by default, so a resident opening the map cold sees 20 projects out of 57, and nineteen of those carry approximate coordinates only. The Governor’s press release also links the tracker’s test environment while DEP’s own homepage links the production version, which is worth knowing before you share a link.
None of that makes the tracker useless, though it does make it a starting point that has to be checked against township filings, DEP’s eFACTS database, and the Pennsylvania Bulletin, which is how we have been building our own statewide tracker all along.
The air permitting pattern sitting in the state’s data
Of the 108 authorizations in the file, only 13 are air quality permits, and 12 of those are minor facility plan approvals. Exactly one project statewide, Starpointe in Washington County, is going through a major facility plan approval under nonattainment new source review. The standard practice across Pennsylvania’s buildout is to permit as a minor source, which keeps a project below the thresholds that would trigger the most demanding analysis.
That pattern is the backdrop for the questions we raised in our earlier reporting on the 25 ton threshold. Correspondence obtained through Right to Know has described on site generation far above the 25 megawatt line the executive order now draws, and the applicant has yet to put a projected emissions figure on the record. The order leaves that question open while adding a state directive to study cumulative generator impacts, which makes the silence more consequential than it was.
What continued vigilance looks like from here
The practical work in front of us has not changed shape, though several new watch items have been added.
The tracker itself becomes a monitoring tool, because if 900 Conshohocken Road appears on it, that is the first public signal a DEP filing has been made, and the entry will show which authorizations were sought and when. The Consent Order and Agreement question comes next, since executing one is the only route to rolling review, and the template commits a developer to community engagement, community benefit agreements, and local hiring, which are the same categories of commitment the applicant declined when he rejected all 43 safeguards the township council proposed earlier this summer. Either answer produces a clean question for the record.
Beyond that, DEP has been directed to recommend new backup generator regulations, the Department of Community and Economic Development has been directed to publish model zoning and community benefit agreement practices, and the Governor’s Special Counsel for Energy Affordability has been directed to press the Public Utility Commission on curtailment protocols and on assigning PJM reliability backstop costs to data centers. Each of those will generate documents bearing on the arguments in this proceeding. The nondisclosure prohibition also opens a fresh Right to Know question about whether any such agreement was ever executed touching this project, which sits directly on top of what the records already showed about the administration’s earlier work on the developer’s behalf.
Most importantly, the zoning record is now the gate for everything downstream, which raises the value of every question asked at the hearing table and every gap left unfilled by the applicant’s testimony.
What to expect from the applicant
Nobody should expect this to slow MLP Ventures down, and the reasonable expectations run in a few directions.
The validity challenge becomes more attractive, because site specific relief granted through that route would produce a local approval satisfying the executive order without the Zoning Hearing Board ever granting a special exception, so expect that challenge to be pressed hard. Expect argument that the order cannot bind the Zoning Hearing Board, which is correct as far as it goes and says nothing about DEP, and expect a jurisdictional argument built on Section 619.2 whenever a permit is delayed. Given the Upper Merion Board of Supervisors' unanimous denial on August 13 and the litigation that preceded it, expect the same counsel posture here.
One more possibility is worth preparing for. The applicant may embrace the GRID Requirements publicly, sign a Consent Order and Agreement, and present compliance as proof of good faith, which would put the burden back on the community to explain why a compliant project still fails the township ordinance. The answer there is the same one that has carried this proceeding from the start, since the applicant bears the burden of proof on the special exception, and a state agreement about energy and water leaves untouched the questions this ordinance asks about noise, air, traffic, and the health, safety, and welfare of people living roughly 200 feet away.
Sources
- Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Executive Order 2026-05, “Protecting Pennsylvania Consumers from Data Center Impacts,” August 18, 2026, http://www.pa.gov/content/dam/copapwp-pagov/en/governor/documents/eo2026_05_protecting%20pennsylvania%20consumers%20from%20data%20center%20impacts_final_executed.pdf
- Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, “Governor Shapiro Signs Executive Order Demanding Data Center Developers Comply with Strict Requirements and Blocking Speculative, Irresponsible Data Center Projects,” August 18, 2026, https://www.pa.gov/governor/newsroom/2026-press-releases/governor-shapiro-signs-executive-order-on-data-center-developmen
- Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, “Gov. Shapiro’s Remarks at Signing Ceremony for an Exec. Order on Data Centers,” August 18, 2026, https://www.pa.gov/governor/newsroom/2026-press-releases/gov--shapiro-s-remarks-at-signing-ceremony-for-an-exec--order-on
- Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, GRID Template Consent Order and Agreement, August 18, 2026, http://www.pa.gov/content/dam/copapwp-pagov/en/governor/documents/grid%20template%20coa%2008-18-2026.pdf
- Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, Data Center Permit Tracker, data files retrieved August 18, 2026 and re-confirmed August 19, 2026, https://gis.dep.pa.gov/DataCenterPermitTracker/
- Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, Pennsylvania Data Center Planning Toolkit, https://dced.pa.gov/business-assistance/data-center-resources/planning-toolkit/
- Spotlight PA, “Shapiro puts conditions on fast-track perks for data centers,” August 18, 2026, https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2026/08/shapiro-data-center-fast-track-permits-executive-order-environment/
- Patch, “Gov. Shapiro Signs Executive Order On Data Centers,” August 18, 2026, https://patch.com/pennsylvania/across-pa/gov-shapiro-signs-executive-order-data-centers
- The Philadelphia Inquirer, “King of Prussia data center complex is rejected by Upper Merion Township officials,” August 13, 2026, https://www.inquirer.com/real-estate/commercial/kop-data-center-developer-lawsuit-brian-oneill-upper-merion-20260813.html
- DeSmog, “How Pennsylvania Governor’s Office Helped Push for Huge Data Centers in the Philadelphia Suburbs,” August 7, 2026, https://www.desmog.com/2026/08/07/how-pennsylvania-governors-office-helped-push-for-huge-data-centers-in-the-philadelphia-suburbs/
- No Conshy Data Centers, “He Asked Washington for Flexibility on the 25-Ton Air Pollution Threshold,” https://noconshydatacenters.com/posts/flexibility-on-the-threshold.html
- No Conshy Data Centers, “The noise study arrived after the meeting ended. It added six generators across the street.”, https://noconshydatacenters.com/posts/aug6-noise-study.html
- No Conshy Data Centers, “He rejected all 43 safeguards. Now he’s trying to remove residents from the decision entirely.”, https://noconshydatacenters.com/posts/oneill-rejected-the-safeguards.html
- No Conshy Data Centers, “Hell No, Eventually,” https://noconshydatacenters.com/posts/hell-no-eventually.html
- No Conshy Data Centers, Pennsylvania Data Center Map, https://noconshydatacenters.com/pa-data-center-map.html