Others received it too: some the full letter by mail, some the shorter Op-Ed, some a message through an official contact form, and some a link to this page. They are listed at the bottom of this page.

AN OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR JOSH SHAPIRO, THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF PENNSYLVANIA, AND THE WORKING PEOPLE OF THE COMMONWEALTH

Subject: Who will own the robots? Pennsylvania must set the terms for AI data centers now, and pay every Pennsylvanian a permanent dividend for the privilege.

To:

The Honorable Josh Shapiro, Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
The General Assembly of Pennsylvania, Main Capitol Building, Harrisburg
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission
The Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate

Five plain truths

1. The leverage is running out. Big Tech is betting trillions that AI will replace most human work. Today working people still have leverage. We can strike, vote, and walk away. A workforce that has been replaced can do none of that. The one thing these companies still need from us that they cannot make for themselves is physical: our land, our water, our substations. That need is our leverage. It lasts only as long as they are still building.
2. You are already paying their electric bill. PJM's own market monitor found that data center demand added $29.4 billion to capacity costs across the last four auctions, and that those auctions were not competitive, mainly because of data center forecasts. That cost lands on every residential bill in Pennsylvania.
3. Let them go. The lobbyists will say they will build in Texas or Virginia instead. Some will. A data center that will not pay for its own power is a cost to this state, not a prize. Governor, on August 18 you said that developers who cannot agree to your GRID requirements should stop considering Pennsylvania. This letter asks you to mean it.
4. This is not an ordinary rate case. Every state is about to decide who owns the machines that replace human labor. The first state to set real terms sets them for the country. Pennsylvania has gone first before. It should go first again.
5. The demand. Three things, written into law: a per-megawatt-hour fee at the meter on every facility over 25 megawatts; a requirement that each such facility build 125 percent of its own demand in new, clean, always-on generation inside Pennsylvania; and a Keystone Dividend Fund, protected by constitutional amendment, that pays every Pennsylvanian equally for life.

I. The leverage, and when it ends

Governor Shapiro, Executive Order 2026-05 and the Public Utility Commission's new large-load tariff are real steps. They are also defensive. They decide who pays for a substation. They do not decide who owns the economy the substation powers.

The American system rests on one fact: capital needs labor. When a company squeezes its workers, the workers can organize, withhold their work, and demand a share. That has been the working person's leverage for 150 years. AI companies are spending trillions to end that fact.

If their bet pays off:

• The tax base goes. Wage taxes fund our schools, police and roads. Payroll that no longer exists pays no wage tax. Hardware write-offs and offshore licensing erase the corporate profit that was supposed to replace it.
• Strikes stop working. A workforce that has been replaced cannot walk out. You cannot picket a server farm into a raise.
• Bills stay high for good. Once hyperscalers hold Pennsylvania's firm power, the residential customer is the one who gets cut first and pays most.

Some of this leverage is already gone. What is left is physical. A data center cannot be downloaded. It needs a site, a water permit, a substation, and a transmission line, and this Commonwealth controls every one of them. That is the last card.

This is bigger than a rate case. If working people in this country cannot secure a cost of living they can actually live on, this country will not stay calm, and it will not take long. The state that sets fair terms first gives the rest of the country something to copy. Pennsylvania can be that state. No one else is going to go first.

II. Let them go

Every time a state asks for accountability, the lobbyists say the same thing: tax us and we go to Texas or Virginia.

Some will go. Gigawatt-scale campuses are going up right now in Texas, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania should not pretend otherwise. It also should not care, for three reasons.

• A data center that will not pay for its own power costs this state money. It raises every household's bill through the PJM capacity market, draws millions of gallons of water a day, and employs a few dozen people once it is built. Losing that is not a loss.
• The ones that stay are the ones worth having. They need what Pennsylvania has and most states do not: fresh water, a nuclear and gas fleet, fiber to New York, Washington and Chicago, and land. Those operators can afford fair terms.
• Walking away is expensive for them. Large transformers and switchgear carry a multi-year backlog nationwide. A developer who leaves an active Pennsylvania interconnection queue goes to the back of another state's line.

Governor, on August 18 you said that developers who cannot agree to the GRID requirements should stop considering Pennsylvania. This letter asks you to hold that line, and to extend it.

III. The three demands

These are not a menu. Without all three, none of them works.

1. A Large Load Energy Fee, charged at the meter

Hyperscalers pay little corporate income tax. Hardware write-offs and offshore licensing see to that. So do not tax their income. Charge for the one thing they cannot hide: the electricity they draw.

• Applies to every facility over 25 megawatts, the same threshold the Governor's own Executive Order 2026-05 uses.
• Charged per megawatt-hour, read at the utility meter. The meter has no accounting department.
• Drafted as a fee tied to the cost these loads put on the grid, so it holds up under the Uniformity Clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution (Article VIII, Section 1). The General Assembly's lawyers know how to write this.
• Every dollar goes to the Keystone Dividend Fund (Demand 3). None goes to the General Fund.

2. Build 125 percent, and build it clean and firm

AI companies say their machines will solve humanity's hardest problems. Make them prove it on our grid first.

• No facility over 25 megawatts may draw existing baseload power away from Pennsylvania homes and businesses.
• Each must finance, build and connect new clean, firm generation inside Pennsylvania equal to at least 125 percent of its own demand. "Firm" means power that is there when the sun is down and the wind is still. Solar and wind count when they are paired with enough storage to carry through the night. So do new nuclear and geothermal. The rule is not about which technology they pick. It is that the power has to be there every hour, so Pennsylvania homes never cover a data center's gap.
• The extra 25 percent belongs to Pennsylvania ratepayers. Wholesale electricity prices are set under federal law, not state law, so the statute should deliver that value on the retail side: as a credit on residential bills, or as revenue into the Dividend Fund.

If this means no new hyperscale data center opens in Pennsylvania until its power plant does, that is the intent. The grid gets stronger before it gets heavier.

3. The Keystone Dividend Fund

This is not a one-time sale. They will draw on our land, our water and our grid every hour of every year they operate. A transaction that runs forever has to be paid for forever. That is what a dividend is.

Fee revenue must not vanish into the state budget. It must go to the people, permanently, in a form no future legislature can raid.

• Created by constitutional amendment, the way Alaska created its Permanent Fund in 1976. That fund is now about $80 billion and has paid every Alaskan a dividend every year since 1982.
• Every Pennsylvanian, from birth, receives an equal annual payment from the fund's earnings.
• The payment cannot be sold, assigned, pledged as collateral, or taken by creditors.
• It starts small and it grows. At 5 gigawatts of data center load and a fee of $10 per megawatt-hour, the fund takes in about $440 million a year. That is not a living. It is a floor that rises every year the machines run, and it is owned by the people whose land, water and grid made the machines possible. The fee rate is the General Assembly's to set. The principle is not negotiable.

IV. The receipts

• PJM Independent Market Monitor, 2026 first-half State of the Market report (August 2026). The monitor found the capacity auctions for the 2025/26, 2026/27 and 2027/28 delivery years were not competitive, mainly because of forecast data center demand. It recommended removing that forecast from the auctions and requiring data centers to build their own new generation (MyChesCo, Aug. 24, 2026). Data center load added $29.4 billion to capacity costs across the last four auctions and made up 9 percent of the wholesale price of power through July 2026 (Utility Dive, Aug. 27, 2026).
• PJM 2025/2026 Base Residual Auction (results July 2024). The capacity clearing price rose from $28.92 to $269.92 per megawatt-day, more than nine times the prior year.
• FERC, Docket ER24-2172, November 1, 2024. By a 2-1 vote, FERC rejected the amended interconnection agreement that would have raised the Amazon data center's draw from the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Luzerne County from 300 to 480 megawatts, finding PJM had not justified the special terms (World Nuclear News; Talen statement, SEC filing). The utilities that protested, and the concurring commissioner, warned the deal would shift costs onto other customers.
• Executive Order 2026-05, signed August 18, 2026. Requires data center developers to pay the full cost of the generation, transmission and distribution their projects need; removes all data centers from the Permit Fast Track Program; conditions the data center sales tax exemption on GRID compliance; bars nondisclosure agreements with state agencies (Governor's press release). The Governor's words that day: developers who cannot agree to the requirements "should stop considering Pennsylvania" (KDKA, Aug. 18, 2026).
• PA Public Utility Commission, Docket M-2025-3054271, Final Order (May 2026). A model tariff for large load customers of 50 megawatts or more (100 megawatts in aggregate): the customer that causes an upgrade pays for it, posts collateral, and signs a minimum contract term. Each utility now files its own version (PUC press release, May 13, 2026).
• Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code, 53 P.S. § 10101 et seq. Municipalities may zone, condition and limit hyperscale development.
• Hughes v. Talen Energy Marketing, 578 U.S. 150 (2016). The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Maryland program because it set wholesale electricity prices, which only federal regulators may do. Demand 2 is written to respect this.
• Alaska Constitution, Article IX, Section 15 (1976). The Permanent Fund. The model for Demand 3.
• Duquesne Light Company, PUC Docket M-2025-3058814, May 18, 2026. The utility that serves the author of this letter told the Commission it has no mechanism to pass costs through to large-load or data-center customers, and estimated 12 to 24 months to build one (filing). Three data centers totaling 1,145 megawatts are already in its study queue (Duquesne Light presentation to PJM, Sept. 29, 2026).
• House Bill 1834 (Rep. Matzie) and House Bill 2650 (Rep. Webster). HB 1834 sets clean-firm energy requirements for data centers and creates energy-assistance accounts they pay into; it passed the House 104-95 on March 24, 2026 and has sat in the Senate Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure Committee since March 31 (LegiScan). HB 2650 writes the Governor's GRID standards into law; it passed the House on June 24, 2026 (Governor's press release).

Conclusion: who will own the robots?

Governor Shapiro, the question of this decade is simple. Who will own the robots, and who will own the minds that run them?

If a handful of boardrooms own both the machines and the intelligence that directs them, the working citizen is left with nothing. No job. No wage. No strike. No tax base that can pay for a school. That citizen will live on whatever those boardrooms decide to give, for as long as they decide to give it.

These machines were built on public ground. They were trained on the collected work of every person who ever wrote anything down. They will run on Pennsylvania's rivers, Pennsylvania's substations, and Pennsylvania's power plants. The wealth they make cannot belong to five companies. Part of it must belong, forever, to the people whose land made it possible.

Pennsylvania earned the name Keystone State by holding the first thirteen states together. It can earn it again by holding this country's working people up while the ground moves under them. Pennsylvania's coal miners forced the first federal arbitration of a strike in 1902. Pennsylvania wrote an Environmental Rights Amendment into its Constitution in 1971, ahead of nearly every other state. Going first is what this state does.

Set the terms now. Two bills that move in this direction already passed the House this year: House Bill 1834 in March and House Bill 2650 in June. Both are waiting in the Senate. This session ends November 30. Pass them. They are the floor, not the ceiling. In January, introduce the three demands above. Charge the fee. Require the power. Write the dividend into the Constitution.

Our leverage is intact today. Tomorrow it will be gone.

Respectfully submitted,

Matt Cleere
Verona, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
mattcleere@gmail.com