Louisiana is in the middle of two consequential debates before the Louisiana Public Service Commission — one over how the state powers a historic wave of data center and industrial investment, the other over who gets to weigh in on that debate, and on what terms. Pelican Institute has been active in both.
Powering Louisiana’s Growth: Docket No. R-37905
In April 2026, Commissioner J.P. Coussan directed LPSC staff to open a rulemaking evaluating “private use electrical networks” (PUENs) — privately financed power generation and storage systems built to serve a large customer without running through the traditional monopoly utility rate base. The timing wasn’t accidental: Meta’s Hyperion campus in Richland Parish — originally announced at $27 billion, now expanded to more than $50 billion — and Amazon’s more than $12 billion commitment to two Caddo and Bossier Parish data centers have made Louisiana one of the country’s fastest-growing electricity markets, even as residential base rates have climbed more than 30 percent since 2019.
Pelican’s July 16 comment letter to the Commission argued that PUENs let Louisiana capture that investment “without exposing the public grid or captive ratepayers to new risk,” since the capital, execution, and price risk of a PUEN project sits with its private developer and customer rather than the general ratepayer base.
At the Commission’s August 28 technical conference on its proposed PUEN rule, Pelican thanked the PSC staff for producing a genuinely thoughtful first step while asking for a few specific refinements:
- broaden a proposed “contiguous property” restriction to accommodate varying property configurations and allow a PUEN developer and customer to finance a private transmission line across separated parcels of land without touching the public grid;
- revisit the proposed 30% cap on exporting surplus PUEN generation into the wholesale market, sincemore power on the market means lower prices for everyone; and
- preserve full Commission authority over the rates and terms of any backup or standby power a utility provides a PUEN so that ordinary ratepayers are never asked to subsidize those supplemental needs.
Pelican also urged the Commission to create an expedited, time-bound process for confirming PUEN status so Louisiana’s regulatory certainty matches the commercial pace that large-load developers require.
PSC staff’s final proposed rule is due by October 30, and the PSC is scheduled to take up the matter when it meets on November 18.
Protecting the Right to Weigh In: Docket No. R-36241
Running alongside that debate is a separate proceeding over who can participate in it. Since April, the Commission has been considering a rule requiring any group that intervenes in its proceedings — utilities, advocacy nonprofits, trade associations — to disclose its funding sources, including from out-of-state and foreign donors. Pelican’s July blog post on the proposal put the underlying tension plainly: “The more voices the Public Service Commission hears, the better its decisions tend to be,” but the original proposal, as drafted, would have swept in nonprofits, trade associations, and advocacy groups of every stripe, running headlong into decades of First Amendment donor-privacy precedent, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta and its unanimous 2025 decision in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport.
Pelican’s August 10 intervening and formal comment, along with a detailed redlined rule proposal, attempted to preserve a legitimate concern about foreign adversary influence while protecting constitutionally protected donor privacy. The Pelican redline actually strengthens the disclosure requirements aimed squarely at foreign adversaries and their agents — adding reporting on foreign-adversary board members, lobbying disclosures already filed with the Louisiana Board of Ethics, and specific contribution dates and amounts — while eliminating the original proposal’s broader requirement to report funding from other American states. As the filing put it, financial transactions between U.S. states are “common and generally unregulated,” unlike international transactions, and treating a Louisianan’s out-of-state relatives, alumni networks, or business partners the same as a foreign adversary would not significantly forward any sufficiently important governmental interest.
Following a flurry of mid-summer comments on this proposed rule before the PSC’s August 12 Business and Executive Session, Commissioners deferred action to allow more time for review. It remains under consideration.
The Common Thread
Both dockets reflect the same underlying conviction: that Louisiana’s energy future should be shaped by open, well-informed public debate, not walled off by either bureaucratic friction or a chilling effect on who’s willing to participate. Pelican has urged the Commission to move quickly, but thoughtfully, on PUEN authorization to meet the state’s surging demand, and to more narrowly focus its donor-disclosure rule so that Louisianans can continue weighing in on these most important issues that will largely determine our state’s economic future.
