This audio is automatically generated. Please let us know if you have any comments.
Dive brief:
- The Environmental Protection Agency last week launched a website to provide local communities and data center developers with “a central location for Clean Air Act (CAA)-related resources,” including regulatory information, guidance and technical tools designed to accelerate the ability to build data centers and the backup power generation they need, according to a news release.
- Also last week, a coalition of more than 230 national, state and local organizations sent a letter to Congress calling for a nationwide moratorium on the approval and construction of new data centers, saying their rapid expansion “presents one of the greatest environmental and social threats of our generation.”
- “We’re seeing how difficult it is to advance any policy at the federal level,” Jim Walsh, director of policy at Food and Water Watch, told Smart Cities Dive. “In the short term, states, counties or municipal governments are more likely to enact moratoriums until standards are in place to truly address the litany of data center concerns.”
Diving knowledge:
Tech companies are investing billions of dollars build data centers to train and run AI platforms.
President Donald Trump this Thursday signed an executive order banning state AI laws that conflict with his administration’s AI policies and threatening to restrict federal funding if his laws are deemed onerous. This order follows one signed by Trump in January a national AI action plan “to maintain and enhance America’s global AI dominance.”
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced in July that the EPA does “Committed to increasing certainty in the permitting process that is critical to securing energy demand for data centers” and collaborating with state, local and tribal air quality agencies to promote “ways for Americans to invest in and develop AI domestically.”
The EPA is updating Clean Air Act rules requiring companies to “maintain adequate pollution controls” that it says “have not been updated to reflect technological advances in the 21St century”, according to last week’s press release.
“The EPA is working diligently to eliminate burdensome regulations and ensure that data centers and related facilities can be built in the US as we drive the Great American Comeback.,” Zeldin said in a statement announcing the new website. The website promotes two core pillars of this initiative: making the US the AI capital of the world and “advancing in cooperative federalism”, according to the press release.
In their letter to Congress, the environmental organizations claimed that tripling the number of data centers in the next five years would require as much electricity as about 30 million homes, as much water as about 18.5 million homes and would contribute to higher electricity costs.
Bloomberg reported in September, wholesale energy costs up to 267% more than five years ago in areas near data centers.
U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., announced Thursday that they are opening an investigation into “alarming reports that technology companies are shifting the costs of building and operating their data centers to ordinary Americans as the energy use of AI data centers has caused residential electric bills to rise in nearby communities.”
“City leaders face significant challenges when data centers decide to locate in their communities, because data centers themselves consume so many resources, both in terms of energy and water use, it can be challenging for a municipality to assess and understand the full impacts of what that data center enables in their community,” Walsh said.
Walsh said Trump’s executive order “does nothing to prevent local communities from exercising their existing powers” to enact moratoriums on building new data centers in their jurisdictions.
Local governments are starting to push back.
In November, the Board of Supervisors of Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, unanimously rejected a land application that would have enabled a data center campus.
Phoenix and Portland, Oregon have signed a global initiative to address the environmental and community impact of data centers in their communities. “AI and advanced computing have transformative potential, but communities need basic standards and transparency to ensure that the infrastructure that supports them is developed in a way that benefits local residents,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said in a statement.
