As more communities consider data center development, state and local leaders need to bring residents into the process earlier and give them better information about projects’ energy, land-use, environmental, and economic impacts, panelists said during a recent Brookings Institution discussion.
The Sept. 15 panel at the think tank in Washington, D.C., brought together community, energy, and environmental advocates to examine how localities can navigate growing demand for data centers while giving residents a meaningful role in decisions that may reshape their communities.
Community engagement should begin before deals are largely settled, rather than after developers and government officials have already made key decisions, the experts agreed.
“Trust really has to be earned in the community, and you also have to make the conversation inclusive,” said Marie Sylla-Dixon, founder and principal of Tuckahoe Creek Strategies, a government affairs firm focused on regulated industries.
“You have to talk to people and really talk about it in a human way, so that they understand the benefits and what that means for their everyday lives and how that impacts them,” Sylla-Dixon said.
She pointed to lessons from the telecommunications sector, where providers engaged communities before projects were on the table, including through consumer advisory boards and conversations with civil rights and other community groups.
That kind of early engagement has often been missing in the data center debate, panelists said.
Ronald Newman, senior vice president of distributed power solutions at Groundswell, a nonprofit organization working on energy issues in local communities, described one small Louisiana town where a developer proposed changes to local land-use and zoning rules and asked the locality to approve them under a nondisclosure agreement.
“There should be an opportunity for the communities to hear, learn, ask questions, and when you’re walking down a path that doesn’t include that checkpoint, you’re probably on the wrong path,” he said.
He contrasted that approach with communities where local officials regularly hold open town halls and bring data center companies in to answer residents’ questions.
“They actually may not oppose if you don’t ignore them,” Newman said.
Rural communities weigh benefits and costs
Rural communities with available land and economic development needs may initially see data centers as an opportunity after years of disinvestment, but local officials need to evaluate a broader set of impacts before moving ahead, Newman said.
“Those decisions are deeply complicated,” he said. “And one of the things that we’ve tried to do is work with some of these local communities to make sure that they are considering the full spectrum of considerations, and we at least approach solutions and outcomes that are closer to a win-win over the long term.”
Communities once routinely offered tax abatements to attract data center development, but today, more emphasis is on community benefit agreements that produce tangible benefits for residents, Newman said.
In Covington, Ga., for example, Groundswell is working on energy-efficiency retrofits for hundreds of homes using funding provided by a data center company as part of a broader local arrangement, Newman said.
“You’ve seen a massive amount of change in just the last 18 months,” he said.
Power demand raises ratepayer concerns
Communities are grappling with rising electricity needs and questions about who should pay for infrastructure needed to serve new data centers.
Consumers are feeling the effects of higher electricity supply costs, and utilities are working to modernize aging grid infrastructure and build new transmission capacity to support growing demand. In many parts of the country, utilities are trying to address those needs while generation costs are rising sharply, Sylla-Dixon said.
“It just becomes important for utility providers to have the tools that they need to modernize the grid, to also have customer assistance programs in place, and really … protecting the ratepayer from these costs that are going up,” she said.
Communities should have a voice in determining how new energy demand is met, Newman said. He pointed to communities where officials are considering natural gas and others where solar generation is part of the equation.
“That’s a choice point that people should have the opportunity to weigh in on because that choice has implications for how those folks live in that community,” he said.
Abre’ Conner, director of the NAACP’s Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, called for full transparency about the infrastructure supporting data centers, including backup energy sources.
“There are a lot of buildouts that are promising clean energy, but then they’re still using diesel backup,” Conner said. “A lot of times, the way that that information is presented, it’s not clear that there’s still going to be fossil fuels that are used.”
Community input shapes data center decisions
Conner said policymakers can build community participation into the decision-making process.
She pointed to the NAACP’s Frontline Framework Community Data Center Guiding Principles, which were developed with more than 100 organizations, activists, and coalitions working on data center issues around the country.
Its principles stipulate that health and the environment are sacred, affected communities should lead, infrastructure should be community-led, accountability should be enforceable, and jobs cannot justify harm.
“That’s really a good starting point as well for legislators when they’re thinking about how they want to build out legislation that actually feels community-centered,” Conner said.
Elena Schlossberg, founder of the nonprofit Coalition to Protect Prince William County, noted that local decisions can have effects well beyond the jurisdiction approving a project. For example, Northern Virginia’s data center demand is driving transmission and generation needs across state lines, leaving other communities to absorb some of the land-use and environmental impacts, she observed.
“The ripple effect is wide,” Schlossberg said.
Schlossberg has been involved in Virginia data center fights since a proposed transmission line affecting her property led her to organize other residents.
“My role has been to help the community understand the resource demand is simply too much, too much water, too much power, too much land, too much fossil fuel,” she said.
Early engagement builds public trust
Residents need more information and more opportunities to shape decisions, the experts agreed.
“I don’t think there is actually a one-size-fits-all approach here,” Newman said. “But I think it’s unquestionably true that the more community engagement you can get into the mix, the better.”
Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation, said the broader lesson extends beyond today’s data center debate to future technologies that may create similar infrastructure demands.
“At the end of the day, this is a conversation about sharing power,” Turner Lee said.
