Data-center disinformation proliferates across Georgia
Georgia recently emerged as one of the country’s fastest growing data-center markets, and Atlanta in particular has the second biggest market. Only Northern Virginia surpasses it, but maybe not for long. Developers are slated to build several new, massive data centers in Georgia, and the outrage is as palpable as it is misinformed.
Data-center opponents raise numerous concerns – ranging from the projects allegedly using too much water, increasing residential electricity rates and not giving enough back to communities. Some complaints even border on the absurd, including claiming data centers cause diabetes. They don’t, by the way.
The rhetoric ratchets up as data centers scale up. As it stands, “Georgia has 227 tracked data center facilities and projects: 114 operational, 17 under construction, 88 planned, 1 paused, and 7 inactive or historical,” according to US Data Center Map.
Over the summer, OpenAI announced plans to build a $20-billion data center campus in Effingham County. On the same day, official paperwork disclosed plans for a $13 billion data center in Clayton County and a $1 billion data-center expansion in LaGrange. Not long after, Columbia County approved Google’s proposed $17 billion data-center investment.
Sure, this sounds like a lot. In some ways it is, but these increasingly seem more like life rafts than millstones. Thanks to the Effingham County agreement, “OpenAI is projected to become the county’s largest taxpayer,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
The Columbia County deal is poised to do even more. “Columbia County has approved a memorandum of understanding for the project, which officials say could eventually help eliminate [the county] portion of homeowners’ property tax bills,” reports WRDR News.
So data-center development has the potential to eliminate certain taxes, subsidize taxpayers and help fund essentials, like public schools. Data-center dissenters often downplay those tidbits, but raise other issues — like energy and water usage.
One of the top concerns is that residential electricity ratepayers will have to subsidize the buildout of new power plants to run data centers. They do, after all, consume a lot of electricity, and I presume few ratepayers would agree to underwrite data centers’ energy needs. The Legislature has debated measures to impose ratepayer protections, and the good news is that data centers increasingly want to build their own power plants, including one in Newton County.
Even without these private pop-up power plants, data centers are poised to bring electricity rates down. Georgia Power projected that the addition of large energy users like data centers will result in residential ratepayers seeing up to $180 in savings annually by 2029. This is consistent with national data too.
“Increasing electricity demand has gone hand in hand with lower electricity prices, and a doubling of data center capacity has been estimated to reduce residential electric rates by 4 percent,” my R Street colleague Josiah Neeley wrote. That’s because they spread out the price of stranded costs among more users.
Perhaps naysayers will concede this point, but they quickly pivot to data center water usage as if they are on the precipice of creating a post-apocalyptic waterless wasteland. Some data centers use quite a bit to cool their systems, but maybe not as much as you think.
“California’s almond farms consume 4.2 billion gallons of water per day […] Data centers consume just 46 million gallons per day. Those numbers will certainly rise over time, but compared to all the other things that use water — golf courses account for 1.4 billion gallons per day — it’s just a drop in the bucket,” Yahoo! News pointed out. Despite this, nobody is calling for a moratorium on almonds or golf courses, nor should they.
Data-center water usage might soon become a non-issue anyway. Other cooling systems exist, like closed-loop systems that reuse the same water and gel-cooled systems that need minimal water. Dozens of other data centers use reclaimed wastewater for coolant – leaving the clean water supply entirely intact. These could become the norm.
The data-center industry receives ample criticism, but the biggest problems surrounding it, other than the rampant disinformation, stems from misguided government regulation. This is not unique to the data-center industry, but is pretty consistent across all industries. Government loves to meddle in private enterprise and isn’t very good at it.
These are the things for policy nerds like me to mull, but data-centers are indispensable to virtually every single one of my readers. If you use a bank, social media, Google or Apple maps, email service providers like Yahoo! or Google, or any number of other pedestrian activities, then you rely on data centers, which some people demonize even as they use them.
Data centers are vital, and as the research suggests, they might also lower your property tax and utility rate exposure and don’t give you diabetes. That sounds like a pretty good deal.