builditrightamerica.org/receipts · Updated October 19, 2026
The receipts
Every factual claim we make, in our films, in the Cooper’s Mill series and in our posts, is graded and sourced on this page. That includes the claims against us that are true, and the ones our own side gets wrong.
The rule we work by: no number appears in anything we publish unless it survives this page. If you find one that doesn’t, write to hello@builditrightamerica.org. Corrections are posted here, dated, at the same prominence as the error. Don’t take our word for anything. Check.
What we’re asking for
The Standard: seven commitments, and where they already stand
We think America should build the data centers that power its future, and build them to a written standard. None of it is hypothetical: items one to six already exist in law, tariff or contract somewhere in the United States. Part of the seventh is now law in New Jersey, and all of it is the rule this page holds itself to.
01
The Front Door
No NDAs with local governments; the tenant is named before the vote. Microsoft has ended local-government NDAs (coverage); in Salix, Iowa, a proposed moratorium failed the week the tenant was finally named (Iowa Public Radio).
02
Your Bill Is Protected
A binding large-load tariff, filed publicly. Virginia's GS-5: 14-year terms, 85% minimum payment (Virginia SCC). Ohio: 85% minimum, 12-year terms (PUCO). 24 states have approved at least one large-load tariff (EEI tracker).
03
They Pay for Their Own Wires
100% contribution-in-aid for grid upgrades the project causes. One Ohio campus is funding $4.2B of its own transmission (EEI); FERC opened reform of large-load cost allocation in June 2026 (Utility Dive).
04
Numbers in the Permit
Enforceable nighttime noise limits with tonal criteria, closed-loop water commitments, metered construction water, well-monitoring escrow, and design standards — in the permit, third-party verified, remediation-bonded. The failures this fixes are documented: Chandler, AZ; Prince William, VA.
05
Benefits Signed Before the Vote
An enforceable community agreement negotiated before approval — local hiring with numbers and dates, funded first-responder training, an advisory board with authority, cash certainty up front. Practice guides: Brookings, Federation of American Scientists. Why process beats late money: Berkeley Lab's siting research.
06
They Carry the Risk
If the demand forecast fizzles, the company eats the cost — minimum take, exit fees, collateral, and utility backstops. Georgia Power financially backstops new generation through 2031, with the PSC holding remediation authority (Georgia PSC).
07
Receipts Public
Water use, energy use, tax benefits, and generator runtime published annually. This page is us holding ourselves to the same rule.
On the seventh: New Jersey’s P.L.2026, c.75, approved August 27, 2026, requires the owner or operator of a data center in the state to report its energy and water use to the Board of Public Utilities twice a year, and requires the Board to publish that information on its website within 30 days of receiving it. The first reports are due by November 27, 2026. The law covers energy, water and on-site power supplies. It does not cover tax benefits. It applies for three years from a data center’s first report, and then the Board decides whether to keep it. Checked October 1, 2026: New Jersey Legislature, S3379; the text as passed.
The part campaigns usually skip
The backlash is real, and parts of it are right
We’re a pro-build campaign, so read these numbers knowing they cut against us. We publish them anyway, because a case that needs to hide the polls isn’t a case.
71%of Americans oppose an AI data center in their area — Gallup, Mar 2026
True in the PJM grid region, where the market's own independent monitor attributes 38–46% of recent capacity-auction charges to data-center demand, and New Jersey residential rates jumped ~20% in June 2025. Also true: roughly half the capacity spike came from old plants retiring faster than replacements connected, capacity is one slice of a bill, and studies in the largest data-center states have found rates rising less than elsewhere. The honest fix is binding cost-allocation — see Standard items 2–3.
A typical 250,000 sq ft facility runs on about 50 permanent staff — that's real, and any developer promising hundreds without a signed agreement should be shown the door (one documented case drifted from 100 to 800 promised jobs across four years with nothing in writing). Also real: ~1,000–1,500 construction tradespeople per building for 12–18 months, operations wages around $76,000, and more tax base per acre than nearly any alternative land use.
The state blanket-exemption critique is fair: over $1M in incentives per permanent job in several analyses, and weak compliance auditing (only 6 of 20 Texas projects passed their five-year review). The local ledger is different: Ohio collected ~$5.2B in taxes against $2–3B in incentives; Loudoun County, VA cut its homeowner property-tax rate from $1.145 to $0.805 per $100 over a decade on data-center revenue. Fix the disclosure and clawbacks; keep the tax base.
Three separate looks — Virginia's legislative auditor, George Mason University, and an Indiana Zillow analysis — found no decline; two found slightly faster appreciation near facilities. Unproven isn't the same as disproven, and the real neighbor complaint underneath this claim is noise — which is why the Standard puts decibel numbers in the permit.
Under legacy regional cost allocation, Maryland households are on the hook for billions in transmission driven largely by out-of-state data-center load — that's a real defect, and FERC opened reform of it in June 2026. Also true: 41% of Maryland's projected new transmission costs are local utility projects no data center caused. We support cost-causation reform even where it raises industry costs.
EXAGGERATED — but the ratepayer risk is legitimate
Nobody knows whether AI revenue will justify the capital spending — not the companies, not us, not anyone selling certainty. What's checkable: national data-center vacancy is 1.4% and most capacity is leased before it's built, so "empty hulks" isn't the live risk. The live risk is a utility building power plants against a forecast that fizzles — which is exactly what minimum-take contracts, exit fees, collateral, and backstops exist to put on the company instead of your bill.
Chandler, AZ and Prince William, VA are the proof cases — chronic hum, sometimes legal because ordinances written decades ago (Prince William's exempted commercial HVAC since 1989) never imagined a tonal 24/7 source, and standard A-weighted limits under-measure exactly the low-frequency content people complain about. It's a design-and-permitting failure with known engineering fixes, which is why the Standard requires nighttime tonal limits, third-party verification, and remediation bonds.
Real local cases exist — notably construction-phase overuse (a Georgia contractor drew 29 million gallons through hookups the county didn't fully know about). Nationally, direct data-center water use is small next to agriculture or golf, and modern closed-loop designs cut a campus from millions of gallons a day to tens of thousands. The fix is scale-anchored honesty plus binding terms: cooling design in the permit, metered construction water, well monitoring funded before ground breaks.
The viral figure traces to a 2020-era model estimate covering 10–50 medium-length responses and including the power plant's water, not just the data center's. Google's measured 2025 median for a text prompt: 0.26 mL on-site. We'll also say what our side usually won't: the on-site number excludes water used generating the electricity, which is roughly an order of magnitude larger — quote the scope, not just the flattering number.
Concede the hard part: roughly 60% of PJM fossil-plant retirements slated for the near term slipped, some because of data-center demand. Also true: demand forecasts have missed badly in both directions; ~85 hours a year of contracted flexibility unlocks 76–126 GW of existing grid headroom, and Google has contracted a full gigawatt of data-center demand response. The ask isn't trust — it's curtailability and clean supply in the interconnection agreement.
TRUE as to one operator / FALSE as a generalization
What happened in Memphis and Southaven — hundreds of megawatts of gas turbines operated without air permits near homes — is documented, indefensible, and in federal litigation. We won't defend it. It is also not typical: measured PM2.5 changes near the Memphis site were not statistically significant, and standard facilities' backup generators run roughly 10–30 minutes a month, under 4% of regional NOx in the densest data-center market on Earth. The lesson is enforcement: no on-site generation before permits, period.
Projected national footprint by 2028 is on the order of 0.3% of prime farmland. But acreage was never the real complaint — adjacency is: a windowless wall at a property line, a campus beside a national battlefield. That's why the Standard backs brownfield-first siting, setbacks, buffers, and design standards rather than arguing acreage with someone who can see the building.
The industry's deepest self-inflicted wound: developers have asked elected officials to sign confidentiality agreements about projects in their own constituents' backyards. There is no counter-message for this — only changed behavior, which is Standard item 1, and it works: naming the tenant flipped the swing vote in Salix, Iowa.
No evidence that exposures at residential distances approach ICNIRP/IEEE limits, and the physics runs against it — fields fall off steeply with distance. We'll measure on request rather than argue.
Residents near several facilities report symptoms; no published study has characterized an operating data center's infrasound spectrum or examined health outcomes in host communities. Our position: fund the measurement, publish whatever it shows, pre-commit to mitigation — denial converts a measurable question into a trust question.
The buildings in The American Works are proposals, drawn with AI and labelled on every frame. The facts spoken or shown in the films are real. Here is each one with its source. All the films are in the screening room.
The American Works
Elemental, and the posts about it
The film says what a data center is made of: electricity, water and warmth. The posts about it point to one place where that warmth is already put to use.
“In Espoo, Finland, warmth from data centres has started flowing into the city’s district heating”
Fortum, May 2026: waste heat from Microsoft’s Kolabacken and Hepokorpi data centres is being brought into district heating, and is expected to cover about 40% of the area’s 2 TWh yearly heat demand for 250,000 heat users. Fortum
The film follows two things out of the building: warmth to the town, and answers to everyone. The five results shown on screen are real. Each was checked on September 30, 2026.
Cooper’s Mill is fiction: an invented town, performed by AI, and labelled that way on every episode. The numbers in it aren’t fiction. Here is every figure and factual pattern in the series, episode by episode, with its source. Details marked STORY DETAIL are in-world color (a fictional character’s line, a specimen document), not factual claims.
A note on two end cards. The series was made before this page was last checked, and its films are shown as they were made. The end cards of episodes nine and ten say every item on the list exists somewhere in America. Six do. Part of the seventh became law in New Jersey in August 2026: see the note on the seventh.
Episode 1 — "The Letter"0:56
Episode one makes no numeric claims — it dramatizes the documented pattern of projects arriving via opaque rezoning notices and unnamed tenants.
Job promises drifting 100 → 800 with nothing in writing
Documented Georgia case (100 → 200 → 800–1,000 across four years, no written commitment; realistic staffing for that size: 25–30): Governing. Milton's "28" is the fictionalized honest number.
Noise rules "written in 1989," hum legal under old ordinances
Prince William County's ordinance exempted commercial HVAC from 1989 until amended: Prince William Times
Every incumbent who approved, voted out
Festus, MO — all four incumbents on the ballot ousted the week after a $6B approval, turnout up 129%: St. Louis Public Radio
"Written in 1989, measured in averages" — the ordinance gap
Prince William's 1989 HVAC exemption (above); A-weighted limits under-measure tonal/low-frequency content — the technical critique documented in Virginia's JLARC review (facilities measured at 40–59 dBA: legal, constant, and complained of)
"45 decibels at night, tonal penalty, third-party mics, public data, a bond"
The acoustics-practice fix set; nighttime limits in the 40–50 dBA range exist in Northern Virginia zoning, and these five terms are the Standard's item 4 — what we're campaigning to make normal, stated as an ask, not an existing universal rule
Enforceable community agreements signed before the vote, with real terms
Practice and design guides: Brookings, FAS. Cash certainty up front works: Hobart, Indiana approved a ~$15B campus unanimously with $47M in upfront community payments (widely reported, Aug 2026).
Why process beats late money
Perceived fairness of process predicts acceptance across 30 years of siting research: Berkeley Lab
"Intends" as the soft spot; vague CBAs criticized
Executed CBAs have drawn criticism for vague jobs language: LancasterOnline
Loudoun County, VA: $1.14B in data-center taxes FY2026, homeowner rate cut from $1.145 to $0.805 per $100 over a decade (Loudoun County); New Albany, OH's minimum-revenue deal structure (City of New Albany)
Company-funded first-responder training
A recurring provision in real community agreements: FAS CBA guide
"Forty-one decibels last month, it's on the website"
STORY DETAIL as a number — but published continuous monitoring is Standard item 4/7, and the promised ceiling (45) is the episode's own permit term
"A machine is helping chase down cancer drugs"
Deliberately hedged in-show ("they tell me… I hope that's true"). Context: medical research is the one AI application Americans view net-positively (+41): Annenberg Public Policy Center
The roof, the plow trucks, the ladder truck
STORY DETAIL — fictional disbursements modeling the real fiscal pattern above
Our short explainer series takes one number per episode. Here is every figure each episode speaks or shows, with its source: the same rule as everything else on this page.
№1 — "1.4%" · the empty-buildings check0:43
1.4% of data centers sit empty, nationwide — record low
"Most of these buildings are leased before the roof goes on"
Majority of under-construction capacity preleased, per the same CBRE reporting
"Booms end. Nobody knows the future." — the caveat
Deliberate: hyperscaler capex is growing ~3× faster than operating cash flow, so we treat the boom's durability as unknowable — Epoch AI. The answer is contract structure: Standard item 6.
"The water behind the electricity — that part is bigger" — the caveat
Off-site (generation) water is roughly an order of magnitude larger than on-site use; scope detail in the water claims above. We say it because quoting only the flattering scope is the move we criticize.
A campaign is judged by its worst claim. These are common pro-industry talking points we’ve retired, and we grade our own material against this list the same way we grade the opposition’s.
Retired
The 4.5× national jobs multiplier. State-level analyses — including industry-friendly ones — come in far lower once imported equipment is netted out (Ohio Chamber Research Foundation). We use state-level figures only.
Retired
Job numbers spoken at town halls without a signed agreement. See the documented 100→800 drift (Governing). If it isn't signed, we don't say it.
Retired
"Data centers lower your bills" as a general claim. True in specific documented cases; false as a blanket statement in PJM, where the market monitor is on record. Case-by-case or not at all.
Retired
"$X billion investment" implying local spending. Construction is roughly 20% of a data center's capital cost; most of the rest is equipment bought elsewhere (JLARC).
Retired
"100% renewable" via annual certificate matching. Unbundled RECs don't displace much fossil generation; even Google calls annual matching imperfect (DCD).
Retired
Flagship efficiency quoted as fleet average. Industry-average PUE is ~1.4, not the 1.1 of showcase sites (LBNL).
Retired
Permit applications engineered to sit just under regulatory thresholds. Legally compliant, politically indefensible — and it earns the industry its backlash (the Memphis record).
Retired
Calling the opposition foreign-funded or astroturf. Measured to backfire with every audience, and wrong about the neighbors at the microphone. We don't use it.
Disclosure
Who we are, and how this is made
Build It Right is an independent initiative, organizing as a nonprofit. We make the case that America should build its data centers, and build them to a written, enforceable standard. We are pro-build and we say so; read everything here knowing our point of view.
Made with AI, and we say so. Our films, the Cooper’s Mill series and much of this page are produced with AI tools (writing, illustration, voice performance and video) under human direction and review. The people in Cooper’s Mill are fictional characters performed by AI; no synthetic person is ever presented as a real resident, expert or witness. Every building pictured on this site is a proposal, and carries the label “Imagined with AI”. We disclose the AI’s role on every piece because that is the same open-book standard we ask of every data center in America.
Who pays. Paid for so far by its founder, a private individual. No company, trade group or investor has given money. When that changes, this paragraph changes.
Policy: when a factual error is verified, it is corrected here and at the same prominence as the original claim, with the original wording kept and struck through.
No corrections to date. Page first published October 19, 2026.
Method. Grades reflect the best available evidence on both sides as of the date above; primary sources (regulatory filings, government audits, peer-reviewed work, on-record data) outrank advocacy material from any side, including ours. Where a source is industry-funded or advocacy-funded, we say so inline.