Groundwork’s depth is capped by what each agency publishes, not by what it holds. Every agency below maintains a database that would answer the question directly; most publish only a rendered subset of it. These are the requests that would change the product most, in priority order.
Ask for a database extract in CSV or Excel, never PDFs. Agencies usually have one and will send it; asking for “the permits” gets you scanned documents.
Why: Texas is the largest gap. Its emissions inventory contains almost no data centers, ERCOT’s queue has no county detail, and the permit search is an application rather than a dataset. But TCEQ holds all of it in a database.
Who: TCEQ Public Information Request coordinator — [email protected].
Texas Public Information Act requires a response within 10 business days.
Before filing, it is worth emailing the Air Permits Division data steward
directly; agencies often send an extract without a formal request.
Ask for:
Under the Texas Public Information Act, I request an electronic copy, in CSV or Excel format, of records from the New Source Review air permitting database for facilities whose primary activity is data processing, hosting, or data center operation (NAICS 518210), or whose regulated entity or project name contains “data center”, for permits and registrations issued or amended from January 1, 2015 to the present.
For each record please include: regulated entity name and RN number; customer name and CN number; permit or registration number; permit type; project type and status; physical address, county, and latitude/longitude; date received and date issued; the permitted emission rates by contaminant in tons per year, in particular nitrogen oxides; and the number and rated capacity of stationary internal combustion engines authorised at the site.
I am requesting the underlying data extract rather than copies of the permit documents. If any portion is withheld, please identify the exemption claimed and release the remainder.
Why: Virginia already publishes the permit list, but as an HTML table with
no addresses; addresses and emissions are currently read out of permit PDFs,
which is where Groundwork’s probable tier and its worst error risk come from.
DEQ obviously maintains this as a spreadsheet.
Who: The contact named on the data center permit page, or DEQ’s FOIA officer. Virginia FOIA requires a response within five working days.
Ask for: the source spreadsheet behind the “Issued Air Permits for Data Centers” page, including any columns not shown publicly — facility street address, latitude/longitude, permitted NOx tons per year, and engine counts. Sixteen of the 201 permits are scanned images with no text layer; ask whether machine-readable copies exist for those.
Why: These are the next-densest markets after Virginia and Texas. Nobody has checked whether they publish like Virginia (a list) or like Texas (an app). A single phone call answers it, and if one of them publishes a list, that state becomes as deep as Virginia in a day.
Ask: “Do you publish a list of issued air permits for data centers, or can you provide an extract of permits by NAICS code 518210?”
Why: The ~1,800 projects paused in August 2026 sit in ERCOT’s large-load queue, which is published only as a statewide aggregate. County-level detail would let Groundwork answer “what is queued near me”, which nothing currently does.
Note: PUCT’s Interchange docket system is public, and the filings generated by the governor’s directive should appear there. That is worth exhausting before asking anyone for anything.
Public Evidence Project (publicevidence.org) — the closest precedent to this work, doing parcel-level permit crosswalks with confidence staging. Worth asking whether to share method and data rather than building the same thing twice.
Heatmap News — published the polling showing support for nearby data centers collapsing. They have the demand signal; Groundwork has the county-level record behind it. A reporter who can cite a permit is more useful than one who can cite a poll.