Talen's CEO tops US power pay at $409 million. His host township signed the NDAs.

A township under nondisclosure

In August 2025, every Lower Mount Bethel supervisor then in office, plus the township manager, signed nondisclosure agreements with Talen Energy, records released under Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law↗ show ¹. Eight months passed before Talen and its partners unveiled a data center campus beside the Martins Creek power plant ¹³.

"You're not giving us any straight answers at all," resident Arlene Tishuk told the board in July ¹. More than 250 people packed the township's 17 August hearing on its data center ordinance↗ ³, and residents kept coming, vowing to "fight until the end" ².

The sector's biggest package

A Reuters tally of stock-based pay at the 16 largest US power companies↗ ranks Talen chief executive Mark McFarland first, at $409,333,588 ⁴. That is 2.6 times runner-up James Burke of Vistra ⁴. Nearly 900,000 of McFarland's restricted shares have already vested, worth roughly $300 million at the analysis price ⁴.

No rate case stands between

The regulated camp has a ready defense. "The vast majority of our CEO's pay is not recovered from customers," an Exelon spokesperson said ⁴. Talen cannot say that: an independent producer selling into wholesale markets ⁵, it earns market prices, not a regulator-approved return ⁴. A utility earns on what it builds; Talen earns whatever scarcity pays. In May it told investors that more frequent PJM scarcity events "will further benefit the economics of gas-fired generation" ⁴.

Ratepayers sit on the other side of that trade. Monthly electricity rates are up 10% on average across the US this year ⁴, and PJM, the grid Talen feeds, serves 67 million customers in 13 states ⁴. US utilities recorded 13.4 million service disconnections in 2024 ⁴.

The tape and the table disagree

The quarter underneath the pay story missed badly: $747 million of revenue against an $832.8 million estimate, and a $2.00 per-share loss against a $3.21 expected profit ⁵. The swing is the business model, not an accident. Revenue ran $1.13 billion in the first quarter and $747 million in the second, and net income flipped from a $63 million profit to a $92 million loss ⁷.

Talen still raised 2026 guidance to $2.025–2.225 billion of adjusted EBITDA↗, cleared more than 10 gigawatts at the $325-per-megawatt-day cap in PJM's 2028/2029 auction, and holds an Amazon Web Services contract ramping toward 1,920 megawatts of nuclear through 2042 ⁶.

That is the bull case, and the tape is not paying for it. On Monday the shares closed at $303.50, below their $322.41 50-day average, against a $460.08 consensus target ⁵.

The local arithmetic runs the other way

The money on offer keeps shrinking. The developers' estimate of annual township revenue has fallen from $3 million to about $500,000 ¹. Neighboring Upper Mount Bethel was offered more: a $50 million pledge from Slate Belt Holdings↗, the Talen partnership, if its campus reaches two gigawatts ⁸.

More than 300 people turned out, and most speakers opposed the memorandum ⁸. A motion to reject it failed on a 2-3 vote; the vote on a revised version was tabled 3-2 ⁸. The venture presses a validity challenge arguing the township's zoning is exclusionary ⁸.

The answer on file

Talen says the agreement was "contemplated" for an informational session, "never fully executed," and that township officials were never under disclosure restrictions; it has told the township it will not enforce the terms ¹. What stands is the paper: signatures dated 21 August 2025 from every supervisor then in office ¹.

The next readings

Lower Mount Bethel has passed its own data center ordinance, and Upper Mount Bethel's board has sent planners its own draft, shelving the developer's version ⁹. Watch the zoning board's ruling on the validity challenge and the pending vote on the $50 million memorandum ⁸. McFarland's grant vests on schedule. The signatures kept the campus quiet for eight months ¹; the hearings since have been spent asking the questions that quiet put off.