EDITORIAL: Real gigawatts and artificial intelligence

The biggest data center complex in the United States, which could become the biggest in the world, will have a big appetite.

It will be hungry for human resources, not for operation, but just to be built. Dana Adams, president of Vantage Data Centers North America, told Ozaukee Press last week it will require a construction crew of 3,000 workers—equal to one-fourth of the entire population of the City of Port Washington.

It will be thirsty for water. Vantage asked and received a guarantee from the city that it would provide up to 1.2 million gallons of water a day (though the average daily usage will likely be considerably less). 

And it will be ravenous for electricity. To open for business, it will need 1.3 gigawatts of it—enough to power a city of one million people. When the data center campus is completed, the draw on electricity is estimated to be 3.5 gigawatts, the mind-boggling number that inspires predictions it will be the world’s largest.

Electrical power in prodigious quantities is the lifeblood of data centers and the source of most of the issues that whirl around them as they feed the artificial intelligence boom, including their impact on people living near them, the environment, the cost of electricity and even the future of data centers themselves.

On Tuesday, Aug. 19, the same day scores of citizens descended on City Hall in a doomed last-ditch attempt to persuade the Common Council to reject an agreement that gives the data center development a green light, a crowd gathered at the Holiday Inn hotel (conveniently located at the edge of the data-center site) to learn about and object to plans for high-voltage transmission lines on towers that will march across Ozaukee County from distant electricity sources to feed the data centers.

Power will have to be imported through those lines because We Energies grids can’t provide enough juice to run the Port Washington data center. The current will flow through cables strung from a towers that will be installed on or near the land of 2,300 property owners. A number of them voiced their worries and disgust over that prospect at last week’s meeting.

Homeowners who spoke said the high-voltage power lines will be unsightly intrusions into their living areas, will lower the values of their properties and could pose a threat to the health of people living near them.

Beyond the route of the transmission lines, there are valid concerns about the source of the electricity they will deliver. A portion of it will be generated by old fossil-fuel technology. Natural gas, sometimes called a clean source of power, is clean only in comparison to coal. The methane emitted by gas-fired power plants is a significant contributor to the heat trapped in the atmosphere that is driving climate change.

To meet data-center demand, We Energies is spending $2 billion to build new gas plants in addition to investing in solar and battery power sources.

The Port Washington data center will require millions of dollars worth of electrical infrastructure, including large substations on the site. Standard operating procedure is to prorate the expense among all ratepayers regardless of who benefits. Both We Energies and the Vantage CEO say that won’t happen in the case of the Port data centers.

“We are ensuring no cost is passed on to other utility customers,” Dana Adams said in her interview with the Press. 

That may be comforting, but ratepayers will have to hope the regulators at the Wisconsin Public Service Commission will be vigilant.

In any case, everyone’s electricity bills are going to be affected by data centers. Like any product, electricity pricing is a supply and demand exercise. And thanks to data centers, the demand that raises prices is soaring.

By 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, data centers will consume more energy than the entire country of Japan does now.

The biggest data center in the world will have a starring role in that scenario.