The Watch · Corrections

What we got wrong.

A watch that never admits error is just another press release. When this site publishes something wrong, the correction runs here and at the top of the page that carried it — not quietly, and not at the bottom.

This log covers corrections to what the site published. Research notes revised before publication are not corrections, and listing them would bury the ones that matter. If you find an error — in a number, a name, a date, or a characterization — write to the reporting line and it will be checked against the source.

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OCT 3, 2026

We said Blue Owl had no financing tied to Jupiter. A Blue Owl filing shows otherwise.

What the site said: Blue Owl had announced no Jupiter-specific financing.
What is correct: A Blue Owl REIT lists the Red Chiles companies — the Series 2025B companies and their bond purchasers — among its subsidiaries in its FY2025 annual report.
How it was caught: Found reading the trust's SEC filing.

SEP 28, 2026

We undercounted BorderPlex's political contributions.

What the site said: BorderPlex Digital Assets gave $98,325 in 2025–26.
What is correct: $138,325 net: 24 contributions totalling $148,325, less $10,000 returned. Recipients spelled the name several ways, and the name search missed some.
How it was caught: Re-read from the state's bulk contribution files.

SEP 28, 2026

We said the hearing officer held final decision authority. That was wrong.

What the site said: The timeline and the hearing officer's page said final decision authority on the air permit was delegated to the hearing officer.
What is correct: The July 2 notice delegates all final and dispositive decisions to Deputy Cabinet Secretary John Rhoderick. The hearing officer runs the hearing.
How it was caught: Found reading the notice itself.

SEP 28, 2026

We named the wrong commission chair for the Sept 19, 2025 vote.

What the site said: The timeline said Manuel Sanchez chaired the commission at the $165 billion vote.
What is correct: Christopher Schaljo-Hernandez chaired that vote. Sanchez became chair on January 13, 2026.
How it was caught: Found checking the record against the complaint that describes the meeting.

SEP 28, 2026

We gave the second Open Meetings Act suit the wrong case number and plaintiff.

What the site said: The timeline said NMELC filed the February 6, 2026 suit for the Empowerment Congress, under case D-307-CV-2025-02766.
What is correct: NMELC filed it in its own name, as case D-307-CV-2026-00398. D-307-CV-2025-02766 is the first suit.
How it was caught: Found reading the complaint's caption.

SEP 28, 2026

Four pages still carried errors we had already corrected.

What the site said: FERC's page said it denied the pipeline; Hennessey's said the well application was never acted on; Trump's said EO 14110 was revoked the same day Stargate was announced; the DOJ data-security page dated the end of its enforcement pause to 2026.
What is correct: FERC's staff filed a protest, not a denial. Hennessey signed the October 23, 2025 emergency authorization. EO 14110 was revoked January 20, 2025, the day before Stargate. The pause ended July 8, 2025.
How it was caught: Found in a check of every dossier against the record's own sources.

SEP 28, 2026

We said a lobbyist was not registered for the air-permit applicant. She is.

What the site said: Checking the lobbyists named in an email to legislators against the Secretary of State’s registry, this record reported that Jennifer Bradfute was not registered to lobby for Yucca Growth Infrastructure, the air-permit applicant, and that Bloom Energy’s filing listed only one lobbyist. It put that on the timeline, on her page and in the entry on the lobbying roster, and presented it as a place where the email and the state’s records disagreed.
What is correct: They agree. Yucca Growth Infrastructure’s roster lists five lobbyists: Vanessa Alarid and Roberto A. Ramirez, marked Authorized: Yes, and Jennifer Bradfute, David Kirmse and Jose Ibarra, marked Authorized: No. Bloom Energy’s lists Brent Moore and Scott Forrester. The registry’s page does not say what “Authorized: No” means, and this record does not read anything into it. The pages now say what the rosters say.
How it was caught: The registry has two ways to ask a company who lobbies for it. The one this record used returns only the registrations marked Authorized: Yes; the one the registry’s own public page uses returns them all. A second pass through the same records, run to check the first, found the difference and compared it against the rendered page. The error was live for less than a day. It is logged because it said something untrue about a named person — and because it contradicted a newspaper that had it right.

SEP 12, 2026

We put the cooling system's initial fill at 960,000 gallons. It is about ten million.

What the site said: This record carried Oracle's water figures with the 960,000-gallon one-time fill attached to the data centers' closed-loop COOLING system. That attribution sat in the graph for months and travelled into the way this site described the campus's water.
What is correct: The 960,000 gallons is the BLOOM FUEL CELL system's initial fill. The cooling fill is approximately 2.5 million gallons for each of the four data center buildings — about 10 million gallons, drawn down over two to three years. Oracle's own material said so plainly in June 2026 and again in August, in a table. We misread it. The error understated the campus's single largest one-time water draw by roughly a factor of ten, and it understated it in the company's favour.
How it was caught: The Attorney General's September filings sent us back through every water document we hold, and the misattribution turned up in a figure we had never re-read after first recording it. It was not found by a reader, a source, or a correction request. It was found because a different question made us open the file again — which is the argument for opening files again.

AUG 24, 2026

We said the emergency well was “not an approval.” There was an authorization.

What the site said: Reading the October 2025 emergency filing, this record found the State Engineer's action box on the application blank — not approved, not denied — and concluded that § 72-12-22 was the mechanism at work, not an approval. The Timeline and Water & Power both said so in those words.
What is correct: The blank action box on that application form is still what the document shows. But an authorization dated October 23, 2025 existed two days after the filing, in a document this record had not seen. We now hold it. It is the Emergency Authorization on File LRG-03150-E, Permit LRG-03150-POD 50, tag 40C14, signed for the State Engineer's District IV office by Deputy District Manager JR Hennessey, and it carries its own narrow terms: the same underground source, the same amount of water, the same place and purpose of use as the right it replaces, with the new well within a hundred feet of the old one. The caution was right that drilling proceeds during review; the inference that no approval had issued was wrong, and both pages now say what the document says.
How it was caught: The correction arrived in two steps, and the second one matters more. The Supreme Court's August 23 order named a document we did not have. Four days later the Center for Biological Diversity's petition arrived carrying that document as Attachment 3, and this entry stopped citing a court's description of the order and started citing the order. Reading about a record is not the same as reading it, and the gap between the two is where this site's errors live.

AUG 12, 2026

A correction we published was itself wrong — the retraction

What the site said: The entry directly below this one said the two most-circulated emissions figures — ten million tons of greenhouse gas a year and 124.01 tons of VOC — described the WITHDRAWN East and West applications and should not be attached to the current permit. The Air page carried the same caveat prominently.
What is correct: Both figures are in the current application's own summary tables. The 648-page NMED Universal Air Quality Application for the YGI Microgrid states, in Table 2-P, 10,144,115 tons of CO2-equivalent a year — and 124.01 tons per year of VOC, a figure that exceeds the 100-ton threshold at which a source inside a nonattainment area would be major for VOC. The opponents who cited these numbers were quoting the live document accurately, and this site's provenance caveat wronged their accuracy. Both figures are now carried at primary-source tier, and the Air page has been rebuilt from the application itself.
How it was caught: The full application was obtained and read — all 648 pages — rather than relying on secondhand descriptions of it. A correction of a correction runs under the same rule as everything else here: at the top, in full, with the superseded entry left intact below so the record of the error survives its repair.

AUG 12, 2026

SUPERSEDED by the entry above · Two big emissions numbers describe a permit that no longer exists

What the site said: The figures circulating widely in this record and elsewhere — ten million tons of greenhouse gas a year, and 124.01 tons of volatile organic compounds — were carried as though they described the permit now before the state.
What is correct: They describe the WITHDRAWN East and West applications, from an opponent's April 2026 letter about those filings. They should not be attached to the current application and no longer are. What is actually known about the current permit's greenhouse gases is a range: press accounts near 10.1 million tons, an independent scaling of the manufacturer's published rates at roughly 7.3 to 9.0 million, and no figure yet quoted from the application itself. The Air page states the range and says why.
How it was caught: A provenance check on the two most-repeated numbers in the air story. They had a real source — just not the document everyone was attaching them to.

AUG 12, 2026

Two lawsuits, told as one — and a stay that was denied

What the site said: The record described a single Open Meetings Act suit, dated February 6, 2026, seeking to void the two ordinances.
What is correct: There are two distinct suits over the same September 19 meeting. The first — the one seeking to void the ordinances — was filed October 17, 2025. The second, a different legal theory, was filed February 6, 2026. And on March 20, 2026 the judge both denied the county's motion to dismiss and denied the plaintiffs' motion to stay the ordinances. Both halves matter: the challenge to the approval's validity is alive, and construction has proceeded unstayed since March.
How it was caught: A docket check while integrating new research. The denial of the stay is the half we had never recorded, and it cuts against the project's opponents — which is exactly why it belongs here.

AUG 12, 2026

The Supreme Court decree — verified, and narrowed

What the site said: The timeline carried an entry, badged unverified, saying the Court required New Mexico to “retire 18,200 acre-feet per year of groundwater pumping” “between Caballo Reservoir and the Texas state line.”
What is correct: The decree is real and the figure is right: the Court entered it on May 26, 2026, and New Mexico must achieve 18,200 acre-feet a year of depletion reduction within ten years. Three things were imprecise. It is a negotiated consent decree the Court entered, not a ruling imposed on the parties. The obligation is a reduction in depletions, achieved mainly by buying and permanently retiring rights from willing sellers — not a ban on pumping. And “Caballo Reservoir to the state line” is a journalist's description; the operative documents say the Lower Rio Grande, below Elephant Butte, measured against the Effective El Paso Index.
How it was caught: The entry was published carrying a to-verify badge precisely so it could be checked, and then it was — against the Court's own order list and the State Engineer's program documents. The corrected version is narrower and, because the decree turns out to say nothing at all about new industrial users, sharper.

AUG 12, 2026

A senator's page carried an unverifiable figure — and material that didn't belong

What the site said: The dossier for a state senator said he received "$30k+" from the developer's lobbyists, without itemization — and included decades-old workplace allegations with no connection to this project.
What is correct: The allegations have been removed entirely: their disposition is unknown, they concern a 2006 role unrelated to energy policy, and placing them beside a documented legislative record invites the whole record to be dismissed as a smear. The contribution figure is now itemized on the page — $32,400 across seven CFIS-recorded contributions on a single day — with the sequence stated plainly: the money came nine months AFTER the amendment became law. The page also now records the exculpatory finding: no direct contributions from the project's companies appear in his filings.
How it was caught: An independent researcher tried to verify the bare figure, could not, and downgraded it to an allegation. That is a right-of-response event that happened without anyone filing a response — and it was treated exactly as seriously.

AUG 12, 2026

A timestamp we could not find again — retracted

What the site said: Research notes behind the HB 93 record dated the floor amendment March 19, 2025, and attached a "10:43 p.m." timestamp to a committee substitute.
What is correct: The amendment document is headed March 20, 2025. No document bearing the 10:43 p.m. timestamp could be located on a second, independent pass; it has been retracted. The verified chain is the Fiscal Impact Report's own designation, and the substitute is dated February 10, 2025.
How it was caught: A second research pass went looking for the document behind the timestamp and could not find it. A detail that cannot be re-found does not stay in the record — however small, and however well it fit.

AUG 12, 2026

The million-gallon figure — where it actually comes from

What the site said: Pages compared the ~1,000,000-gallon-per-day estimate against the county's 20,000-gallon cap as though they measured the same thing, and treated the estimate as a settled state figure.
What is correct: The cap governs potable water only — the word "potable" was added to the agreement after the commission vote — while the estimate spans all uses, so the two numbers are not directly comparable. And the estimate's provenance is now stated: it originated with the State Engineer's office from what its spokeswoman described as an informal conversation with a Project Jupiter attorney. It remains the state agency's working number; it is not a metered measurement. The claim's verification tier was lowered accordingly.
How it was caught: Both refinements came out of a primary-source research pass — including against this site's own claims. The comparison would have been corrected in public by the applicant sooner or later; better that the record corrected itself first.

AUG 12, 2026

The hearing date was stale for two weeks

What the site said: The countdown and every page naming a date said the air-permit hearing would be held October 19, with filing deadlines running from September 28 through October 12.
What is correct: NMED moved the hearing to September 14 in an amended scheduling order filed July 29, pulling every deadline forward — technical testimony and prehearing motions to August 24, rebuttal to September 3. The decision deadline is unchanged at November 23.
How it was caught: Caught by a reader, thirteen days after the order was filed. For those thirteen days this site told people a filing deadline was six weeks later than it actually was. The clock is now built to roll through the whole schedule, and the Take Action page says plainly that the schedule is being fought over.

JUL 8, 2026

A connection we could not verify

What the site said: An entry connected an attorney, as a lobbying client of a registered lobbyist for the developer, to the 2026 governor's race.
What is correct: The connection has been removed entirely, along with the person's dossier. It rested on a single self-reported client roster that the Watch could never independently read, and the named party disputed it.
How it was caught: The person wrote to the reporting line and asked to be removed. One unverifiable source against a direct denial does not meet this record's standard. The correction on the affected entries does not name her — naming her would defeat the removal she asked for.

APR 2026

“Blocked” overstated what happened to the pipeline

What the site said: Earlier language described the Green Chile pipeline as blocked or denied by federal regulators.
What is correct: FERC did not deny the pipeline. Its staff filed a protest over a missing state historic-preservation sign-off, and the certificate remained pending; the denial that did happen came from the State Land Office, on the state-trust-land crossings. BLM later granted the federal right-of-way.
How it was caught: Caught in a source review against the FERC docket and the Land Office letters. The distinction matters: one agency said no to a segment, another said yes, and the federal review stayed open.

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