On May 14, Fayette County leaders and industry representatives gathered with community members to present their plan to incentivize the construction of data centers in the county.
Open house events like this are increasingly common amid an AI arms race and cryptocurrency craze. Since this technology requires so much computing power, there’s a push to build more sprawling data center campuses, which are stacked floor to ceiling with processing units and all the necessary equipment to keep them functioning.
At the town hall hosted by the Fayette County Chamber of Commerce and the FayPenn Economic Development Council, the introduction of data centers to the region was touted to introduce heaps of tax revenue and thousands of jobs to the region. This is up for debate itself, but with hyperscale data centers knocking on our doors in southwest PA, local communities ought to understand the grave concerns that coincide with flashy economic promises.
Data Centers Need Fossil Fuels
First and foremost, hyperscale data centers will increase fossil fuel extraction in the region. Processing and storing data itself pulls immense amounts of electricity.To keep these supercomputers running 30-45% of energy consumption at a data center is estimated to be spent on cooling systems. PJM, the regional market for electric utilities, conducts annual electric load forecast reports, and recently predicted its peak demands for both winter and summer to exceed 10,000 megawatts within the next five years.
To support this spike in demand, coal-fired power plants around the nation are being kept online well past their scheduled closures. Some decommissioned coal-fired power plants— such as Homer City Generating Station— are being converted to to use shale gas with the specific aim of hosting an on-site data center. Both coal and shale gas power plants release harmful pollutants into the air, accelerating climate change, damaging air quality, and risking public health.
On top of this, coal and shale gas extraction themselves have devastating consequences for local communities. Decades of coal mining in the Laurel Highlands have burdened the area with compromised groundwater and surface water, sinkholes and subsidence, and countless other impacts to daily life.
Shale gas extraction, often floated as a ‘cleaner’ alternative to coal, is linked to health impacts like poor birth outcomes and respiratory issues for residents local to well pads and compressor stations. Additionally, each well produces tens of millions of gallons of wastewater (also known as ‘produced water’ or ‘brine’), which is toxic and radioactive. All it takes is one spill into our roads or rivers from a brine truck or barge to expose thousands to toxic chemicals and radiation. More power demand means more mining and fracking when our region is already swamped with extractive industry.
More Electricity = More Transmission Lines
Increased demand on our electrical grid will also necessitate improvements to transmission infrastructure. PJM understands this, and has recently awarded NextEra Energy with a bid to improve a stretch of transmission lines with endpoints in southwest PA and northern VA, the current hub of data center development nationwide. The project, known as the MidAtlantic Resiliency Link (or MARL), is planned to follow existing transmission lines, but will require those rights of way to be widened by 200 feet to support higher voltages.
Several of the planned routes cut through wild areas, gamelands, parks and forests, meaning some of our region’s most pristine natural habitats will be sacrificed. These areas include PA’s Quebec Run Wild Area and Forbes State Forest, WV’s Coopers Rock State Park, MD’s Savage River State Forest, Dans Mountain Wildlife Management Area, and White Horse Mountain Wildlife Management Area.
Besides claims of improved resiliency, it is unclear how this project will benefit local communities. Short-term construction jobs may temporarily stimulate the rural economies along the route. But once the Link is built, community members will be faced with a visually scarred landscape, diminished wildlife habitat, and lower property values at the benefit of tech and energy companies.
Short-Term Jobs Don’t Stick Around
Finally, the economic benefits of data centers do not outweigh their costs. Short-term jobs during the construction of a data center campus may offer a boost to sales and hotel taxes from construction workers, but once a data center is built, there are few long-term, well-paying jobs to be had. Many data centers employ just between 5-30 people long-term. Even upstream jobs at a well pad or gas-fired power plant are relatively few. For example, just 24 workers are employed at Westmoreland County’s Tenaska power plant.
The tax breaks offered to tech companies on the hunt for places to host their data centers often effectively mean communities end up subsidizing the development of such campuses. 32 states have enacted tax breaks for data center developers, including cuts on property taxes and construction materials. After the landscape is scarred by sprawling data centers and their supporting infrastructure and property values have fallen, these areas become unfavorable to more dynamic industries like small businesses, overall creating a net negative for the community.
So what can you do?
One helpful strategy is to work with local leadership to adopt specific ordinances related to data center development. This can be done on a level as small as your municipality or township. Many localities have already implemented such ordinances, ranging from restrictions on zoning, to 1000-foot setbacks, to outright bans. While some states have passed legislation exempting data center development from such ordinances, in Pennsylvania no legislation exists at the moment.
Want to learn more? Read MWA’s comment to the PA Public Utility Commission regarding the interconnection of data centers to our power grid.