Citizen Jessica Kivell filed a routine FOIA request with the Arkansas Public Service Commission (APSC — the state body that regulates utilities). The APSC returned documents, some marked confidential, apparently by mistake. Kivell passed them to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter Sydney Sasser. Sasser published. Entergy Arkansas called it an accidental release — though how documents were obtained matters far less than whether they were obtained lawfully, and these were.
What those documents showed:
- Google’s upfront payment: ~$526 million — roughly one-third of the Cypress Solar project’s $1.6 billion price tag
- Remaining two-thirds: covered by Arkansas ratepayers via a proposed ~$6/month utility rate increase
- The West Memphis data center is expected to eventually consume all power produced by the new solar array
- Google executive Ruth Porat said at the 2025 groundbreaking that Google would “cover the full cost of powering the facility” — a claim the documents complicated considerably
“Both the newspaper and its source obtained the documents legally, and they have no obligation to refrain from sharing important information about a matter of significant public interest.” — Arkansas Pro Chapter, Society of Professional Journalists
The Court Wasn’t Impressed
A nearly four-hour emergency hearing exposed both the legal weakness of Entergy’s position and the very human cost of dragging a citizen into federal trade-secret litigation.
Entergy’s response was to sue everybody: the Democrat-Gazette, the Arkansas Times, reporter Sasser, managing editor Byron Tate, and Kivell herself. At the emergency hearing before U.S. District Judge Lee P. Rudofsky, one detail stood out — Kivell sat in that federal courtroom without legal representation, visibly distressed, having committed the radical act of filing a public records request. Entergy’s attorneys argued trade secrets and “irreparable harm.” Rudofsky told them the First Amendment “gives me significant pause.” That’s judicial understatement for: this isn’t going well for you.
Rudofsky denied the temporary restraining order (TRO) the next day. His written opinion called Entergy’s request “actually or the equivalent of a prior restraint” — the legal category courts have treated as nearly radioactive since the Pentagon Papers. Worth noting: Entergy also asked the court to force both papers to delete already-published stories. That’s not protecting a trade secret. That’s asking a judge to rewrite history.
Judge Rudofsky held that the First Amendment barred the order even assuming trade-secret claims had some technical merit, according to legal analysis published by Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy.
Your Bill, Their Math
The dispute over who actually pays for Google’s power reveals a gap between corporate messaging and the financial details buried in regulatory filings.
Google and Entergy both insist that 20 years of payments will fully cover Google’s “operational footprint.” Entergy claims the Democrat-Gazette made a “careless mathematical error” — counting only 12 months of Google’s minimum payments rather than the full 20-year term, with total payments allegedly exceeding $2 billion. Those are corporate claims, not independently verified figures, and ratepayers should weigh them accordingly. The fact that it took an accidental FOIA release — and a federal court fight — to surface that math lesson says something about how carefully both companies guarded the arithmetic from public view. Europe has similarly scrutinized big tech’s role in sensitive sectors, with regulators now restricting handling government health, financial, and legal data.
