One of Ohio's bigger utilities (AEP) recently just got a new tariff passed with the PUCO that required big electric users (i.e., datacentres) to actually commit with hard money when they said they expected some large increase in demand.

The amount of power datacentres said they were going to use dropped significantly - well over half. So now the utility has far less it has to worry about in big time transmissions build outs.

All from making the people claiming they needed it put a modest amount of money forward. They have to pay $100k (for a 100-MW project) to do a load study. Then they have to agree that they will pay for the electricity they claim they're going to use, even if they end up not using it (i.e., the data centre doesn't get built out and they end up using 0.)

If their credit rating is not strong enough, they have to pledge security or else put up the money.

A lot of data centre operators wouldn't cough up the $10k or $100k needed for the load study. Everything got a lot easier.