TriStar Technology Council · Civic Education · Tennessee
The United States is adding data centers and power generation at a pace with no modern precedent. That is not automatically good news or bad news for the people who live nearby — the outcome depends almost entirely on how each deal is structured: who funds the new power, who absorbs the risk, what gets abated, and what a community asked for before saying yes. This project maps those deals — starting with Tennessee and the TVA corridor.
File 0 — The thesis
A data center can stabilize a region's grid and quietly subsidize every household's electricity — or it can push new generation costs onto residential bills, drain a watershed, and lock a county into a 30-year tax abatement nobody read. Both have happened. The difference is rarely the technology. It is the deal structure: behind-the-meter or grid-connected, who sits where in the interconnection queue, what the PILOT actually says, and whether the community showed up at the two or three meetings where the terms were still negotiable.
We sit deliberately between resistance and boosterism. This is not an anti-data-center page and it is not a development ad. It exists so that residents, operators, and policymakers can all see the same board — and so the decisions get made with the people who live with them.
File 1 — How to read this site
Nothing here asks for your trust without showing its work. Every factual claim on this site carries one of four confidence tiers. A page that admits what it doesn't know is the page worth reading.
Documented in filings, dockets, official announcements, or direct data.
Follows directly from confirmed facts, but not yet official.
No announcement — but the same actors run this pattern elsewhere. Possible and patterned, not predicted.
A line you could draw. We label it, and mostly we decline to assert it.
File 2 — The frames
These are the recurring structures under every data-center and generation deal in the country. Each becomes a full explainer with live examples as the project grows.
New generation gets funded somehow — by the hyperscaler that needs it, or socialized across every household's bill through rate cases. The single most consequential line in any deal.
Some data centers bring their own generation and barely touch the shared grid. Others draw from the same pool you do. The same building can be a grid asset or a grid burden.
The years-long line to plug new generation and new load into the grid. Unglamorous, mostly unwatched — and it is where the next decade is actually being decided.
Payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreements and county abatements are where the local terms get struck — often in sparsely attended meetings, years before the first shovel.
Cooling at scale is a water question, and in the Southeast it is a sleeper issue: rarely in the headlines, central to whether a site makes sense where it's proposed.
Failed and withdrawn proposals — where communities said no, and why — are the most valuable, least reported data in this space. They are the civic playbook, documented.
File 3 — The instrument
The centerpiece of this project: an interactive map of the US grid and data-center landscape — every existing facility, every proposal, every failed proposal, every speculative site — cross-referenced with where each sits in its county and state approval process, with particular attention to nuclear and solar capacity and the Oak Ridge / TVA corridor. It is in development; we'd rather ship it right than ship it first.
IN DEVELOPMENT · BUILT ON PUBLIC DATA (EIA · FERC · TVA · STATE DOCKETS)
Each point will carry its regulatory stage, its deal structure, and a confidence tier. The map engine is shared with the East Bank case study below — one instrument, two scales.
File 4 — The worked example
Abstract forces are easiest to understand on a real piece of ground. Nashville's East Bank — 550 acres, the largest public stadium subsidy in US history, an Oracle campus, and a Super Bowl clock — is the national playbook running in one place, fully documented.
The story, map, money, power brokers, and timeline of Nashville's 550-acre remake — from the 1780 river landing to Super Bowl LXIV, with every claim graded.
File 5 — Who this serves