'The Most Bipartisan Issue Since Beer': Opposition to Data Centers
www.nytimes.com

... Americans have soured on data centers, polls show, and the sentiment is profoundly bipartisan. How will that change our politics?

The monthly meeting in Lyon Township, a small town in southeast Michigan, was packed on a recent Monday, even though the main item on the agenda was an easement for a drain.

Residents, holding notes and water bottles, lined up at the mic to talk about the actual issue on everybody's minds: the proposed large-scale data center.

They had come prepared.

"Just a reminder," said a man in a black puffer vest, who identified himself as Larry. "An N.F.L. football field is 57,600 square feet. A 1.8-million-square-foot hyperscale data center is about 32 football fields."

A motorcyclist asked about the potential effects on traffic. Someone asked if the proper procedure had been followed to preserve a habitat of endangered bats. A woman in a pink shirt played a recording of noise from a data center in another Michigan town.

When a town board member gently interrupted a speaker to say her time was up, she exclaimed, "I haven't even gotten off my first page!"

Lyon Township voted for Donald J. Trump in 2024, but party loyalties hardly seemed to matter. In an era when Americans are divided on everything -- even the cars they drive and the TV shows they watch -- data centers seem to have bridged the partisan divide.

Early evidence suggests that Americans -- once agnostic -- are now souring on them. Last month, Maine became the first state to pass a moratorium on data centers -- only to have the governor, a Democrat, veto it -- and similar measures have been introduced in at least 13 other states and dozens of municipalities. ...

Abundance clashes with affordability in California's data center debate (June 2025)
www.politico.com

... For a state that considers itself a leader in both tech and climate, California is falling behind in both building data centers and putting guardrails around their environmental impacts.

Democrats in Sacramento are taking cues from lawmakers in Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia as they explore special electricity rates for data centers aimed at controlling costs for other customers. They're also weighing new energy reporting standards to better understand the supercomputers' impacts on California's electric grid.

Those proposals come as electric utilities are embracing data centers as a potential business savior that promises to increase electrical demand several fold after an era of energy efficiency.

"This trend is absolutely real for us," Pacific Gas and Electric CEO Patti Poppe said during the utility's most recent quarterly earnings call in April. "This will be so beneficial for our customers."

The handful of bills this year are a reaction to PG&E's November 2024 application to energy regulators for a special tariff for all the new data centers it anticipates connecting to its grid in Northern California " enough to require the power of roughly 6.5 million new homes in the next 10 years and four times the output of its Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. Tentatively planned projects would add an additional 1.5 million homes' worth of power.

"It's a big change, and not expected," said Hunter Stern, assistant business manager with IBEW 1245, which represents PG&E electrical workers. "For years, California's goal was to reduce emissions through efficiency and load growth was an indication that emissions would be going up, and we've changed that."

But for ratepayer and environmental advocates, it could go either way: Data centers could, if managed properly, bring down the per-customer grid costs that have been dominating the political conversation for months -- or they could leave ratepayers with costly stranded assets and even outpace the growth of renewable energy on the grid. ...