On November 3, Louisiana voters will elect two of the five members of the Louisiana Public Service Commission, the body that sets Entergy Louisiana’s rates and decides which power plants get built. The timing is the story. The commission is scheduled to vote on December 16 on Entergy’s application to build seven more combined-cycle gas plants for Meta’s Hyperion data center campus in Richland Parish — and the two commissioners elected on November 3 will not take office until January 1, 2027. The largest generation decision in Louisiana history, or close to it, will be made by the outgoing commission and enforced by the commission voters choose tomorrow.
That sequencing is a direct result of the fast-track framework the commission adopted for large loads: applications are to be considered and voted on within eight months of filing. Entergy filed the seven-plant application in March 2026, the commission set an expedited schedule in April, and the December vote lands squarely inside that window — before the new members are seated. The election is not about whether Hyperion gets built. It is about who holds the enforcement pen for the next six years.
Two open seats, after a generation of incumbency
Both seats are open because both incumbents are term-limited. Eric Skrmetta has held District 1, which covers much of metro New Orleans, Jefferson Parish, and the Northshore, since 2009. Foster Campbell has held District 5, the largely rural north Louisiana district that includes the Hyperion site itself, for 18 years. The winners will serve six-year terms and could remain in office for as long as 18 years — long enough to oversee Entergy’s next integrated resource plan, scheduled for a decision in 2028, and every large-load application that follows the Meta precedent.
In District 1, the field is Republican state Representative Stephanie Hilferty, in the Louisiana House since 2016, who won the June runoff over former Jefferson Parish Councilman John Young with 62.5 percent of the vote; Democrat Connie Norris, a retired educator campaigning on lower utility bills; and Chris Justin, a no-party chemical engineer and former commission consultant. In District 5, Republican John Atkins, a Caddo Parish commissioner who won his primary with 88 percent of the vote, faces Democrat James E. Green, a Shreveport city councilman and pastor, who captured 76 percent of his party’s primary vote.
The partisan arithmetic matters because the commission currently holds a Republican majority of three seats to two; if Democrats won both open seats, they would flip the majority. But the more interesting feature of this campaign is how much agreement there is on the surface: reporting on the races has found that all five candidates, in one formulation or another, say data centers should pay their own way on electricity costs. Hilferty has put it plainly: if the data center needs the additional power, the data center pays for that power. Justin has gone further, calling for data centers to be ordered to cover their infrastructure and power costs and for an end to utility campaign contributions; Green has campaigned on directing data centers to foot their grid costs, and Atkins on transparency and lower rates.
That consensus is real, and it is also thin. “Pay their own way” is a slogan, not a tariff. The disagreements that matter are about percentages, contract lengths, overrun risk, and what happens when a customer leaves early. Louisiana’s fast-track framework answers them with a floor rather than a negotiation: the large-load customer must agree to pay at least half of the costs of the new capacity. Half is the rule. Everything above half, and everything about what happens after the contract ends, is where the next commission’s work lives.
What December decides
The December 16 vote concerns Entergy Louisiana’s second power buildout for Hyperion, docketed as U-37882 and filed on March 25, 2026: seven 754-megawatt combined-cycle gas units totaling 5,278 megawatts, three battery storage projects, a 150-mile 500-kilovolt transmission line from Richland Parish to St. Landry Parish with additional 500-kilovolt and 230-kilovolt lines, and an output increase at the Waterford 3 nuclear plant. Combined with the three plants already approved, the ten gas plants would total roughly 7,400 megawatts tied to a single customer — more than half of what Entergy Louisiana currently produces statewide, by one local account.
The commission voted 4-1 on April 15, 2026, to place the application on the fast-track schedule, with Commissioner Davante Lewis the lone dissenter, as he had been on the original three-plant approval. The commission also agreed to forgo a formal recommendation from the administrative law judge overseeing the case — a standard step in contested proceedings, though not a binding one. A hearing was held on October 7. Consumer and environmental intervenors, including the Alliance for Affordable Energy, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Sierra Club, are contesting the application; Sierra Club testimony has urged rejection.
Entergy’s case rests on two claims. The first is that Meta is paying: the company says Meta is funding the seven gas plants, the transmission lines, and the storage and nuclear upgrades, and it has argued the expanded agreement will deliver approximately $2.65 billion in total customer benefits over two decades. The second is speed. Commissioner Mike Francis, voting for the expedited schedule, dismissed the idea that eight months is rushed — “only in government is eight months rushed,” he said at the time.
The December vote is therefore not a referendum on Hyperion. The campus is under construction, the first three plants are approved, and Meta has expanded the project from its original December 2024 announcement — a $10 billion, 4-million-square-foot facility — to a campus now described at more than $50 billion with a planned 5 gigawatts of IT capacity, reaching about 2 gigawatts by 2030 and the full 5 gigawatts around 2032. What December decides is the size of the regulated buildout, the transmission network that comes with it, and the cost-allocation terms attached to it.
How the fast track works
The framework governing that vote was adopted on December 17, 2025, in a directive put forward by Commissioner Jean-Paul Coussan in support of Governor Jeff Landry’s “Louisiana Lighting Speed” executive order of September 16, 2025. Its core mechanism is an exemption from the commission’s Market-Based Mechanism requirement — the rule that utilities source the most affordable electricity through a competitive request-for-proposals process. Under the directive, a utility seeking generation for a large load can skip that competitive test if the customer meets certain criteria: a signed electric service agreement of at least 15 years, a load scheduled to come online within five years, a demonstrated need for additional electricity, an agreement by the customer to pay at least half of the costs of the new capacity, and a letter of support from Louisiana Economic Development. Applications under the framework are to be considered and voted on within eight months.
That is a coherent industrial policy, and it is also a conspicuously thin procedural record. Critics, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, have noted that the directive was adopted as a commission directive rather than a written order, so that aside from meeting transcripts and minutes, the policy does not appear in permanent, codified form in any docket. A competing directive offered the same day by Commissioner Lewis — which would have ordered commission staff to assess data-center impacts comprehensively and guarantee stronger protections for existing customers — was not adopted.
The comparison that matters is to the specific mechanism, not to other states’ data-center fights in general. In Michigan, the fight over DTE’s Google contracts played out as a contested case, with an attorney general’s rehearing petition attacking a 20-year aggregation standard and an 80 percent take-or-pay floor on the record. Louisiana’s fight is different in kind: the question is not whether a contract’s annual accounting is adequate, but whether a directive that waives competitive procurement, sets a 50 percent cost floor, and compresses review into eight months produces a defensible result at all. Michigan argues about the terms of the deal. Louisiana is arguing about whether there was a real proceeding.
The arithmetic critics keep returning to
The 50 percent figure deserves the closest reading in this story, because it is simultaneously the framework’s main ratepayer protection and its main vulnerability. The requirement is that the large-load customer pay at least half of the costs of the new capacity. The service agreements at issue run about 15 years; the gas plants they justify have roughly 30-year operating lives. Critics’ arithmetic follows directly: half the costs, for half the depreciable life, leaves the other half of the life — and the associated capital costs — to somebody else if the customer does not renew. The Union of Concerned Scientists has argued that ratepayers could be left with up to 75 percent of total capital costs over the plants’ full lives in that scenario, and that the framework places no requirement on utility shareholders to absorb any share.
Entergy’s answer is that Meta’s commitment is stronger than the floor: reporting on the first three plants described Meta as paying the full annual revenue requirement for the plants for 15 years, and the company’s $2.65 billion customer-benefit estimate for the expanded buildout is the figure it asks the commission to weigh against the residual risk. That estimate, like every benefit projection in a large-load case, is a model of the next twenty years, not a payment already made. The question December’s vote cannot answer — and the one the incoming commissioners will own — is what happens in year 16, when the plants still have roughly half their lives left and the customer that justified them is free to renegotiate, scale back, or leave.
What the first three plants already settled
It is worth remembering what the December vote does not reopen. On August 20, 2025, the commission voted 4-1 to approve Entergy’s settlement to build the first three combined-cycle plants for Hyperion — two in Richland Parish expected online in late 2028, one at the Waterford site in St. Charles Parish expected by the end of 2029 — with a combined capacity of about 2.26 gigawatts, plus new transmission and authorization to acquire up to 1,500 megawatts of solar through an expedited certification process. Lewis dissented, saying there were things about the deal’s costs and benefits he could not verify. That approval is final, and the plants are proceeding regardless of who wins on November 3.
What the new commission actually inherits
The winners will take office on January 1, 2027, after the December vote, and their first consequential decisions will be about enforcement rather than approval. If the seven plants are approved, the new commission will oversee their construction cost recovery, their treatment in Entergy’s rate cases, and what replacement or renewal terms apply as the 15-year agreements approach their ends. If the vote produces conditions — a higher cost share, stronger exit protections, shareholder participation in overruns — the new commission will be the body that tests whether those conditions hold. And if the vote is delayed or denied, the new commission will inherit a live, contested application and a developer with a construction schedule.
That is not a reason to treat the election as symbolic. Six-year terms are long, and the commission seated in 2027 will decide whether the costs of the data-center buildout stay with the customers who caused them or drift, year by year, onto households and small businesses across Entergy Louisiana’s territory. The candidates’ shared slogan — data centers pay their own way — will be tested not in campaign statements but in the first cost-recovery filing that arrives after a plant comes in over budget, or in the first negotiation over what happens when a 15-year agreement meets a 30-year asset. The December vote sets the terms. The January commission decides what they mean.
What to watch
The first thing to watch is the December 16 vote itself: whether the commission approves all seven units as filed, approves with conditions that raise the customer cost share or add exit and overrun protections, or defers or denies any part of the application. The conditions, if any, are the story — an unconditional approval ratifies the fast-track template at triple the scale.
The second is the election result in District 5, the district that contains Hyperion. A Green victory would put a critic of the current cost-allocation approach on the commission that polices the deal; an Atkins victory would keep the seat in the camp that has generally supported the fast-track approach. Either way, the winner takes office after the vote, so the immediate effect is on enforcement posture, not on the December outcome.
The third is what happens to the fast-track framework in 2027: whether the new commission codifies it, reforms it, or simply continues to use it. That decision will determine whether the Meta precedent becomes Louisiana’s permanent large-load policy or a one-off accommodation to a single project.
Louisiana’s siting debate, as this desk has argued before, is ultimately about consent: whether communities and ratepayers accept the facilities built in their name. The siting explainer’s lesson was that developers earn consent by protecting ratepayers in writing, before opposition organizes. Louisiana inverted that sequence. The plants were approved first, the fast track was adopted by directive, and the election that might have tested the whole arrangement arrives after the decisive vote. Tomorrow’s voters are not being asked to approve Hyperion. They are being asked to choose the people who will make sure Louisiana does not pay for it twice.