New Orleans I get the fact that President Biden and the White House are doing everything they can in their last month in office to cement his legacy and prepare for Trump 2.0. A lot of it is good, solid stuff, but there’s one proposal starting to slip out that seems spectacularly bad. Some fools somewhere think it would be a good idea to build energy sucking data centers being promoted by techies and the artificial intelligence crowd on federal lands.
This is so ridiculous, that it’s almost unbelievable. These are the same federal lands that the administration has been protecting from oil and gas developments, highway construction, cheap grazing, mining rights from the 1800s, and massive logging. Did someone drink too much medicine at an agency or White House Christmas party and suggest this as a bad joke or what?
These data centers are energy gulping monsters, and tech companies, that are in the race to develop more artificial intelligence capacity, are going crazy trying to build them. Microsoft is supposedly in a deal to repurpose the mothballed Three Mile Island nuclear plant that was almost solely responsible for derailing nuclear power in the US years ago. Other companies are talking about refitting coal plants that are being retired. These are huge deals as Musk, OpenAI, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and the like all try to compete with each other and other countries to develop the best and fastest AI. Likely, all of these boys have been lobbying the White House on Biden’s way out to throw them a bone, but what the heck? They all have more money than Croesus. Surely, they can buy their own land, rather than stealing public lands on the cheap.
The problem is not just the land, but the energy. Each one of these data centers needs the equivalent electricity of a city of one-million people. It’s not just a big building with a seemingly infinite number of computers and processors. It means building or accessing a power plant that can juice these monstrosities. With that comes the pollution, traffic, and more that comes with big industrial-sized operations, and, remember where we started, they are talking about putting this mess on federal public property. The techies probably speculate that it would be easier to make some donations to some national politicians to grease these wheels, rather than having to deal with local communities, planning departments, water boards, and the like before they could build these things. Maybe they are right, but that doesn’t mean we should rollover and let them foul public lands for private gain.
Most of us can almost feel our utility bills rising as well. Reportedly,
The amount of power consumed by U.S. data centers has grown by 50 percent since last year, and it is expected to grow that much again by the end of 2025, according to figures shared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Data centers are expected to consume as much as 17 percent of all U.S. electricity by 2030 — more than quadruple what they consume now.
Anytime utility companies move to increase capacity, they try to push the costs over to consumers. It’s hard to believe this will be different.
The final irony of all of this is that with Biden, environmental concerns might deep six this crazy proposal, but even having it known that the White House was thinking about it almost legitimizes it for Musk and the other tech folks who have been buttering up Trump before he comes in to try harder to get their way. Even winning this battle, might foreshadow losing it over the next four years. What a tragedy in the making!