What Cloverleaf and the EDC say.
Lowndes County Economic Development Board chair Thomas Ellis has cited assurances from Alabama Power and PowerSouth that “current rate-payers will have no impact from future data centers.”P1 Cloverleaf has echoed the framing: the data center is its own customer, on its own meter, and existing households will not subsidize it.
What that leaves out.
The promise is unbacked by a tariff filing. There is no rate schedule, no rate class, and no public utility commission ruling that binds Alabama Power to its own assurance. Independent reporting from PJM (the wholesale electricity market that includes Virginia, Ohio, and parts of the Southeast) tells a different story: as hyperscale data-center demand has surged, capacity-market clearing prices for the 2025–2026 delivery year jumped 833%. Those costs land on residential ratepayers' bills.P2
The “rate class” argument is the proof.
Across multiple states, regulators are now moving to create a separate rate class for hyperscale data centers — precisely because, under the existing tariffs, residential and small-business customers were absorbing the cost of new generation, transmission, and capacity. Virginia just did this. Ohio is doing this. Georgia passed legislation. The fact that the regulatory action was needed is the evidence that the original promise didn't hold.
Alabama has not yet acted. There is no Alabama Public Service Commission rate-class filing for hyperscale loads. There is no binding agreement that prevents Project Red Clay's eventual operator — whoever it turns out to be — from putting upward pressure on residential bills.
Alabama Power has already started building generation for unproven demand.
On December 3, 2025, the Alabama Public Service Commission approved Alabama Power's purchase of the Lindsay Hill natural gas generating station in Billingsley. The justification: a forecasted surge in electricity demand from data centers in Alabama over the next few years.P6
The Southern Environmental Law Center, citing a December 2025 Greenlink report, argues the load forecast supporting that purchase is approximately 0.2% likely to materialize as projected. In other words, Alabama Power has already committed capital — capital that will eventually flow to ratepayers through the rate base — for demand that has roughly a one-in-five-hundred chance of showing up.P7P8
This is exactly how the cost lands on residential customers, even when the developer "promises" it won't. The pattern is documented; the regulatory protections that have arrested it elsewhere have not yet been adopted in Alabama.
Ohio's regulatory protections caused data-center demand requests to crash.
After Ohio adopted ratemaking provisions similar to Virginia's new large-load rate class — provisions that require data-center customers to pay for what they actually demand, not pass it through to residential ratepayers — the volume of data-center demand requests in Ohio fell from roughly 30 gigawatts to 13 gigawatts.P9
That is the most concrete evidence available that ratepayer-protection regulation does not "kill" data-center investment — it filters out the speculative pipeline. The projects that survive are the ones a region actually needs and that pay their own way. Alabama can adopt the same protections at the Public Service Commission and produce the same effect.
The scale.
A single hyperscale data center can draw 100+ megawatts of electric power.P4 The site Cloverleaf has described to residents would consume three times the power of all of Lowndes County, combined.P5 Serving that load requires new generation, new transmission lines, and grid upgrades. Someone pays for those. The question on the table for the Commission is: who?
The question for the Commission.
- The peak megawatt demand of the proposed facility, in writing.
- The grid upgrades Alabama Power needs to make to serve it — in writing, with cost estimates.
- A binding tariff filing or rate-class structure that protects existing Alabama Power and PowerSouth customers from absorbing those costs. Not a verbal assurance. A filing.