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The Worst News of the Day
(Or How Bad Is It?)
Who is taking land, who is paying for the power and what switches on next. Free, and you can leave whenever you like.
The Worst News of the Day
(Or How Bad Is It?)
Who is taking land, who is paying for the power and what switches on next. Free, and you can leave whenever you like.
The regulations, dockets, power fights and pipeline decisions shaping America's AI buildout — as they happen.
PHMSA is proposing to raise the dollar amount that determines when certain pipeline construction and maintenance projects must be reported in advance. If approved, smaller projects would no longer trigger the notification requirement, and the threshold would increase each year with inflation.
The document: “Pipeline Safety: Adjustment to OPID Notifications for Construction”
Before a federal agency makes a rule final, it has to consider the comments people submitted during the public comment period. Once that deadline closes, the agency moves forward using the information already in the official record. If you did not submit your concern before the window closed, it may not be part of what the agency considers when finalizing the rule.
FERC has begun its environmental review of ETC Tiger's proposed Franklin Farms pipeline, opening the first window for the public to raise concerns about the project.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) posted this document to the federal docket system on 2026-08-28.
It is not open for comment — it moves on the record as filed.
The parties it binds are named in the document itself — docket — on the record.
No comment window is posted on this document.
The Big Drop’s map tracks 1,360 data centers, 732 power plants and 15 gas trading hubs across the United States.
The money is moving first. In June, builders were putting up data centers at a pace of $68.3 billion a year — a preliminary figure, and the fastest on record.
The electricity shows up next. On Aug. 29, the stretch of grid covering most of Virginia and part of North Carolina — the section that feeds the Ashburn data-center cluster — used 422 gigawatt-hours in a single day. That is about what 14 million American homes use in a day. All of it moved through one utility’s territory (the Dominion zone of the PJM Interconnection grid).
That day was not a fluke. Over the 30 days ending Aug. 29, the zone averaged 446 gigawatt-hours a day — 16.7% more than the same 30 days a year earlier, matched day-of-week to day-of-week so weekends don’t skew the comparison. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration hourly grid data.
Zone data: EIA hourly grid monitor (PJM Dominion zone) · footprint 2023 County Business Patterns · from The Big Drop’s daily trackers
How the grid number is made: the reading is EIA-930 hourly demand for the PJM Dominion zone (API facet subba=DOM, produced by daily_draw.py), summed for Aug. 29 — 422 GWh, an average draw of 17.6 GW. The raw single-day change against Aug. 30, 2025 (the same weekday a year earlier) was +26.4%, but one-day comparisons swing with weather, so the page reports the 30-day weekday-matched average instead: 446 GWh a day, +16.7% year over year (7-day: 424 GWh, +17.9%). The homes equivalence uses EIA’s average residential consumption, 10,791 kWh a year (2023). The zone covers most of Virginia and part of North Carolina; the Ashburn data-center cluster sits inside it. Data: the EIA API dataset · EIA Hourly Electric Grid Monitor, PJM.
Source: Regulations.gov, the federal docket system. The lead, Just Dropped, and Deadline Radar headlines are The Big Drop’s plain-English renderings of each document’s official title and government-published abstract; the official title appears beside them; every list headline is the document’s own title, and every link lands on the government record. The heat index is The Big Drop’s own tempo gauge computed from the counts on this page. Humans and machines can both make mistakes — verify before acting.
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