THE LOADSTAR NUMBER · FREE TO CITE
How much of the power supply pipeline behind the AI-era buildout shows a signed agreement — measured live across official U.S. ISO generation queues.
Citation copied — paste it anywhere.
the series · live
reading the generation queues live from official ISO data…
PJM · ERCOT · CAISO · MISO · SPP · ISO-NE · NYISO — every figure links to its filing and is recomputable.
How to read this figure — the full picture ▾
Four questions, four straight answers
Is the AI buildout real?
Most of it is unproven — which is not the same as phantom.
Only a floor of the U.S. interconnection queue can be machine-verified as signed. The live share, and what it does and doesn’t mean:
THE NUMBER →
Does anyone publish declared AI load?
One U.S. grid operator names it, request by request.
A dedicated “AI Datacenter” class in a public file — the record, and the four things it cannot tell you:
DECLARED AI LOAD →
Can I check your numbers myself?
Yes — every figure recomputes from official filings.
Step-by-step derivation, hash-sealed ledger, and the rules that govern how any of it can change:
VERIFY IT →
Will you admit it when you’re wrong?
The verdicts publish themselves — hits and misses.
Sealed predictions mature on pre-announced dates; the ledger is append-only, so misses can’t be hidden:
TRACK RECORD →
What brings you here?
Same instrument, four doors. Go straight to the read your seat needs.
Regulator / policy staff
What each grid operator actually publishes on large-load requests — read operator by operator, with the date each document was read.
Open the disclosure survey →Journalist on deadline
A citable number with its primary source and a one-click citation string. Written answers within 24 hours.
Get the number + receipt →Investor / analyst
Formation scores region by region, each linking to a recomputable receipt — announced demand vs. what public signals corroborate.
See the live index →Utility / grid planner
Energy first: where low-carbon supply is forming in the interconnection queues, and how much of the queue is machine-verifiable as signed.
Open the energy map →⚡ The energy map
Where AI power is forming — by region.
AI's #1 bottleneck is power. The Energy Map ranks U.S. regions by how much low-carbon generation is forming in each region's interconnection queue — the power supply chasing the AI buildout, straight from the grid operators' own data.
Descriptive of today — the queue forming now, not a forecast.
Who pays
The AI data-center boom is already on your power bill.
Utilities and capacity markets price forecast data-center demand into bills now, on the largest U.S. grid alone, that pricing added billions in a single year. That is the real, rising cost of the AI boom — and the part no one can yet check is how much of the demand behind it is committed, and how much is speculative.
PJM · 13 states + DC
$9.3 billion in one year
the data-center-attributable share of the rise in PJM consumers' capacity cost for one delivery year (63% of the total increase), per PJM's own market monitor.
Source: Monitoring Analytics ↗Virginia
+$11.24 a month
the 2026 residential increase Virginia's regulator approved in Dominion's rate review — and state analysts project a further $14–$37 a month by 2040 driven by data-center growth. From 2027, a new data-center rate class makes large loads cover most of their own costs.
Source: SCC · JLARC ↗The blind spot
no public field says which is real
Generation queues generally publish agreement status — in our reading, only some of the seven publish a machine-readable field — while large-load requests disclose nothing, so from the public record alone, no single field separates a real data center from a speculative one.
The dollar figures are on the public record, reported by regulators and grid monitors, not measured by us. What we add is the missing read: how much of the demand driving those bills is corroborated today, region by region, with the receipt attached.
See where the buildout is actually real →On the record
9 predictions, sealed and dated —
public since June 18.
We don't just publish a number. Every regional call is timestamped and hash-sealed the moment we make it, chained so it can't be edited after the fact, and resolved in public — hitsand misses. The commitment is already on the record; the verdicts landDec 15, 2026.
Sealed calls · sample
hash-sealed · June 18, 2026
- Central Indiana932026-06-1893b5c57f…
- Silicon Valley762026-06-1874090dab…
- Phoenix Metro452026-06-183347998d…
Score 0–100: real ·unsure ·phantom. We seal the low ones too.
Why we exist
AI is being built faster than the power to run it.
Every week brings another gigawatt-scale data-center announcement. But a press release isn't a power plant, and the grid can't tell the difference. Utilities commit billions in upgrades, regulators approve rate hikes, and the public foots the bill — all against a queue of power requests nobody verifies.
We built LOADSTAR to measure that gap: how much of the AI power pipeline is real, region by region, straight from official filings. Every number is sealed and dated, so it can't move after the fact. We take no side and sell no project. We publish what's forming, and what's phantom.
Others sell the answer privately to one developer. We publish the number for everyone: free to cite, sourced, and neutral.
How we stay neutral →A living index
The index, building itself. Live.
LOADSTAR is a living index. The number reads live from its source, the machine runs in public around the clock, and corrections are published in the open, dated, in a ledger anyone can recompute. The numbers here are live and verifiable. Nothing is a mockup.
How we get to a number
Collection
Tens of thousands of documents a day, from public sources: SAM.gov, SEC EDGAR, regional grid operator interconnection queues, USPTO, GDELT.
Filter
Deterministic rules (not AI) cut the volume down to a handful of genuinely relevant documents, before any analysis.
Correlation
We cross-reference independent signals: environmental permit, energy contract, hiring, federal registration. The more signals converge, the higher the score.
Proof
Every result is dated and sealed in an immutable ledger. The history is public — including when we're wrong.
We don't ask you to trust us.
We ask you to check.
We don't say whether it's real — we say how much we were able to corroborate. Every headline number links to its source. Every score is sealed by hash, dated, recomputable by anyone.
Absence of signal isn't proof of phantom. It's a coverage gap — and we say which one.
The Reality Report
A dated reality check on the AI buildout — every week.
Region-by-region scores, the honest read behind the numbers, and the receipts. Free, and cross-posted in full on Substack.
Start with the sample report
No commitment. A real report, on a real project, with the methodology open end to end.