Dive Brief:
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The Environmental Protection Agency last week launched a webpage 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 require, according to a press release.
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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 biggest environmental and social threats of our generation.”
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“We are seeing how difficult it is to move any policies forward at the federal level,” Jim Walsh, policy director for Food and Water Watch, told Smart Cities Dive. “In the near term, it’s more likely that states, counties or municipal governments would enact moratoriums until there are standards in place to actually address the litany of concerns about data centers.”
Dive Insight:
Tech companies are investing billions of dollars to build data centers to train and run AI platforms.
President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order forbidding state AI laws that conflict with his administration’s AI-forward policies and threatening to restrict federal funding if their laws are found to be burdensome. That order follows one Trump signed in January calling for a national AI action plan “to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance.”
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced in July that the EPA was “committed to increasing certainty in the permitting process that is crucial to securing power demand for data centers” and partnering with state, local, and tribal air-quality agencies to promote “ways for Americans to invest and develop AI domestically.”
EPA is updating Clean Air Act rules requiring companies to “maintain proper pollution control” that it says “have not been updated to reflect technological advancements of the 21st century,” according to last week’s press release.
“EPA is diligently working to eliminate burdensome regulations and ensure data centers and related facilities can be built in the U.S. as we Power the Great American Comeback,” Zeldin said in a statement announcing the new website. The website furthers two core pillars of that initiative: making the U.S. the AI capital of the world and “advancing cooperative federalism,” according to the press release.
In their letter to Congress, the environmental organizations stated that tripling the number of data centers in the next five years would require as much electricity as about 30 million households, as much water as about 18.5 million households and contribute to escalating electricity costs.
Bloomberg reported in September that wholesale power costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers.
U.S. Senators 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 tech companies are passing on the costs of building and operating their data centers to ordinary Americans as AI data centers’ energy usage has caused residential electricity bills to skyrocket in nearby communities.”
“City leaders are faced with significant challenges when data centers decide to locate in their communities, because the data centers themselves are so resource-intensive, both in terms of energy and water usage, it can be challenging for a municipality to actually evaluate and understand the full impacts of what permitting that data center in their community might be,” Walsh said.
Walsh said Trump’s executive order “doesn’t do anything to prevent local communities from exercising their existing powers” to enact moratoriums on building new data centers in their jurisdictions.
Local governments are beginning to push back.
In November, the Board of Supervisors in 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 computation have transformational potential, but communities need basic standards and transparency to ensure the infrastructure that supports them is developed in a way that benefits local residents,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said in a statement.
