Professor Lucy Qiu weighs in on statewide policy for data centers

In a recent story from Inside Climate News, Professor Lucy Qiu, Roy F. Weston Chair in Natural Economics at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, weighed in on the proposed statewide moratorium on data center projects.

Qiu is currently a co-PI on the UMD Grand Challenge Impact award entitled Sustainable and Ethical AI Infrastructure. The Grand Challenges initiative supports cross-disciplinary collaborations that address a grand challenge focus or theme. This initiative is integrating engineering analysis, economic modeling, geographic information system (GIS) and machine learning, and policy design to assess how data center infrastructure growth affects grid reliability and environmental costs, community and household energy security, equitable cost-allocation mechanisms, and other areas. The team will share its work with the public and will engage policy makers in the state and beyond to help ensure a more ethical and sustainable infrastructure for AI and quantum data centers.

She noted a pause in data center projects can prevent some costs if it comes before infrastructure investments are locked in and “can also give regulators time to improve their load forecasts and decide how new projects should be connected and charged.” But a moratorium does nothing about existing data centers or grid investments already under way, and stopping projects in Maryland wouldn’t fully insulate the state’s customers from data center growth elsewhere in the PJM region.

Qiu, too, cautioned against pinning Maryland’s rising residential electricity rates on data centers alone, citing distribution-rate increases, power plant retirements, reliability-must-run payments, transmission investment and weather-driven demand as contributing factors. “I think the fair conclusion is that data centers are an important driver of recent capacity and transmission costs, but they are not the only reason Maryland residents are paying more,” she said.

Instead of a blanket ban, Qiu said she’d favor a policy that makes large loads pay for the costs they create. Developers should be asked to disclose duplicate interconnection requests, she said. “Otherwise, the same company can explore several sites at once, utilities may treat all of them as likely projects, and the resulting load forecast can become greatly overstated.”

For the full story click here.

Published September 15, 2026