OPINION: The Problem Isn't Data Centers, It's a Poor Understanding of Modern Life
Building data centers is not without issues and concerns. But step beyond the fearmongering pushed by some, and a more complex picture emerges.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Across the United States and Virginia, communities are pushing back against data center development. Motivations for resisting data centers vary, but they are united by two common threads: A poor understanding of what is driving the industry’s growth, and mono-dimensional arguments that are masking the complexities of the issues in ways that prove misleading.
Why the Growth?
The reason for the growth in data centers is simple and straightforward — the U.S. economy and its consumers demand it.
Over the past year, I have penned several columns that discuss the extent to which our everyday lives depend upon data infrastructure to carry out tasks that we take for granted.
Netflix, for example, streams entertainment through data centers. The sheer amount of streaming can be hard to get one’s head around. One study puts the amount at 203,840,000 hours daily. When one considers that an hour of online streaming requires as much energy as driving a gasoline-powered car 920 feet, that means a single day’s streaming burns enough energy to drive a single car 35,517,575 miles.
That’s just one service. Add in smart phones, and GPS navigation, and one begins to understand the extent to which data centers are central to our lives.
The Advance worked with the Fredericksburg Regional Alliance to build a tool that allows users to estimate how much square footage of a data center their own personal habits require 24/7, 365 days a year. I was surprised to learn that my use — which is not heavy relative to the average American — requires 45 square feet of data center space.
Other items and industries that rely on data centers include: electric cars, gas-powered cars with over-air upgrades, banks, air traffic control, and most every point-of-contact purchase machine we interact with.
Data centers are not a luxury — they’re core infrastructure.
The Challenge of Advocates and Mono-dimensional Thinking
When one grasps how integrated the data center backbone is to our lives, the concerns raised about their development should be around issues related to where they’re placed, the financial impacts they provide, and reasoned debates about the concentration of sites and the strain they create on resources.
Instead, opponents too often lean on fear and scare tactics to rally opposition. These tactics work because they show the problem mono-dimensionally, disguising the complexity of the challenge.
The impacts of these mono-dimensional arguments are real. At least 48 projects were blocked or stalled in 2025 according to research produced by the Data Center Watch initiative.
In North Carolina, Chatham County has recently imposed a data center moratorium over fears about “Environmental factors such as noise, air, and water pollution.…”
The state of Maine’s legislature also passed a moratorium on data centers. According to a piece in the Maine Morning Star, the moratorium was approved out of concerns there are “few to no safeguards to insulate people from shocks to electricity demand, impacts to local water supplies, and more.” (Gov. Janet Mills vetoed that moratorium — I will return to that momentarily, as well as the issue in Chatham County.)
These claims of broad environmental disaster and too much energy usage are not so cut-and-dried, however.
Let’s consider one example frequently cited by opposition groups — data centers are driving up people’s energy bills.
Without appropriate context, the argument is common sense. Data centers require huge amounts of energy to operate, companies are having to upgrade infrastructure to deliver it, and that cost is passed on to customers.
The story is far more complex.
A guest essay in the New York Times this week by Robinson Meyer detailed the energy challenge, and why data centers are the canary in the coal mine as opposed to the problem.
Meyer writes that data centers and AI are actually a “small part of a much bigger problem. Our grid is too old and our supply of electricity too small.”
Let’s start with the latter problem. Our electricity supply is too small. Technological advances are a big part of the reason.
Usually, when the economy grows, energy demands grow. But the first decade of the new millennium proved to be an anomalous exception to that rule. Meyer points to the shift from traditional to LED lighting, which significantly reduced the amount of energy Americans were consuming at home. Enough of a savings that while the economy was booming, energy use wasn’t growing.
That began to shift in the second decade of the new millennium as data centers came online, and consumer demand for electrification — EVs, air conditioning and heating, among others — soared. And it’s not slowing down. As Meyer wrote, everything depends on producing more energy: “growing the economy, reinvigorating the manufacturing sector, fighting climate change or just making life more affordable.”
Are data centers driving energy costs? Certainly. But they are far from the only factor. As Meyer wrote: “Data centers are a wake-up call.” And the surge in energy they demand can actually drive the improvements we require.
Which brings us to the former problem — an aging grid.
That decade of flat energy demand in the new millennium effectively put a mask on the problem we faced with an aging grid.
Data centers have removed that mask and energy companies are working furiously to upgrade that system.
The costs are enormous. But, again, data centers alone aren’t the problem. Meyer points to natural disasters — especially in California and the Southeast — which is forcing companies to rebuild vast swaths of the system.
Stopping data center development won’t change that. In fact, imposing moratoria or significantly slowing that growth could well make the situation markedly worse.
Again, Meyer:
Although it sounds counterintuitive, when a big new electricity customer shows up on the grid, it can sometimes help keep power costs down for everyone else, because it buys so much power that it can cover much more of the system’s costs, keeping a lid on rising power rates.
Advocacy groups like the Sierra Club and the Piedmont Environmental Council lean into the energy demand side of data centers to peg rising energy costs on data centers alone, but are relatively quiet about the upsides data center development brings to the larger challenge of the increasing electrified America.
It’s an example of taking a three-dimensional (or multi-dimensional) problem and showing it in just one or two dimensions.
The Challenge of Speaking for Everyone
Another challenge centers around a small group of people wanting to impose their will on everyone. We are seeing this at the national level, where Bernie Saunders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for a national moratoria.
As noted above, Maine recently passed the nation’s first state-wide moratorium. The governor, however, vetoed it. Her reasons are telling.
Here’s how WBUR described the decision:
“A moratorium is appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates,” she wrote in her veto letter. “But the final version of this bill fails to allow for a specific project in the Town of Jay that enjoys strong local support from its host community and region.”
Opponents criticized the decision claiming - you guessed it - environmental damage. We have already discussed the fault lines with that line of thinking.
The governor realized another fault line. Some may be troubled by the rate of growth in their backyard, but others want the economic benefits that data centers provide. Gov. Mills understood this. So do others who have long struggled to develop economically.
This is especially true in Virginia, where activist groups are challenging new projects along predictable lines — energy, water, pristine views — without due consideration to what communities want.
Virginia is currently locked in a battle over a tax break currently afforded data center developers designed to encourage growth. While Sen. Louise Lucas has led the charge to revoke it, others worry that it will cost their communities dearly.
Five people working in economic development in Southwest Virginia made that point in an op-ed for the Cardinal News.
After noting the net benefits in terms of employment and tax revenues that have flowed to Northern Virginia and are now beginning to benefit Central Virginia, the authors wrote that the move to kill the tax break would effectively end their chances of reaping the same benefits.
The writers continued:
This would be a deeply disappointing and unfair outcome for communities that want to recruit responsible data center investment and create good-paying jobs, just as their neighbors to the north have done. Many of these regions, including the ones we serve, have spent decades preparing for these opportunities with site, infrastructure and workforce investments. All of that would be for naught if Virginia removes itself from the competition for investment.
Data center developers, who typically invest millions as they prepare to launch new sites, are also beginning to challenge when communities reverse course.
The previously referenced moratorium that has stopped a project in Chatham County, North Carolina, will now be litigated in court, as the developer tries and recoup its loses.
Thinking Three-dimensionally
None of this is to suggest that communities simply roll over and let any and every data center development into their community — as with any industry, there are better and worse projects, better and worse agreements, better and worse deals.
It is to say that the meme-like arguments against data centers that anti-growth groups continually push demand close exploration, too.
Claims that data centers are driving up energy costs, wasting water, and polluting the environment are not as straight-forward as some would have people believe.
Before slowing down the infrastructure that is responsible for building the lives we expect, drives our economy now and into the foreseeable future, and brings unprecedented economic benefits that cannot be matched by any other industry, we need to pause our gut reactions.
Something to consider the next time anti-data-center activists make their cases with mobile phones in hands and reams of information available for download online.
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