Pushing Back Against Data Centers, One Small Town at a Time

(The Washington Post) -- The day in June that Wendy Reigel received a shipment of 200 “No data center” yard signs, she learned they were obsolete. The developer she had been fighting to keep out of Chesterton, Indiana, announced it was pulling out.

But the signs would find new life a few weeks later. Reigel packed them into cardboard boxes and shipped them to Peculiar, where a similar fight against a data center was underway. On Wednesday, locals there celebrated an announcement by the city that they said left the data center proposal as good as dead. “This is incredible for the people of Peculiar,” Reigel said on hearing the news.

The victories spring from a growing community-level resistance to the tech industry’s massive expansion of data centers. The nondescript warehouses packed with racks of servers that power the modern internet have proliferated in recent years as companies such as Meta and Google have expanded their influence, and the race to compete in artificial intelligence has driven a surge of new investment.

Many state and local officials welcome the tax dollars and infrastructure these projects can bring, and tech companies say they need the facilities to advance AI and keep the United States competitive with China. But over the past year, resistance to data centers has sprung up in places such as Fort Worth, Burns Harbor, Indiana, and Fayette County, Georgia.

Related:Why Communities Are Protesting Data Centers – And How the Industry Can Respond

The campaigns have similarities to local fights against wind turbines or any other developments, with complaints about spoiled views and construction noise. But opponents of data centers also cite the unique and massive power and water demands that they impose on local infrastructure.

Growing electricity demand from data centers has triggered concerns about grid capacity from utilities and local officials in places such as Northern Virginia, Atlanta, and most recently, South Carolina. Tech companies recently clashed with an Ohio utility over its plan to have them contribute more toward the expensive transmission upgrades required to meet their data centers’ projected needs.

Tech companies and data center developers often highlight how their projects draw new resources to areas hosting them. Diode Ventures, the developer that proposed the data center in Peculiar, said in publicity materials about its proposal there that it would provide new revenue to the city and school district. Despite the energy demands of data centers, building and operating the facilities “tends to lead to bolstering local grid resiliency and generation,” the materials said.

Related:New Data Center Developments: October 2024

But such promises have not satisfied citizens like Reigel who by sharing strategies, research and personal experiences via social media are honing a collective playbook for obstructing the data center gold rush.

On Tuesday, a post on the “Don’t Dump Data on Peculiar” Facebook page announced a prayer circle - the group’s second - at the proposed site of the data center, a field on the northern edge of city limits. The next morning, Peculiar residents’ phones lit up after city officials announced on Facebook that an ordinance to ban data centers would proceed to a public hearing later this month.

Over drinks at the Frog Pond that afternoon, lifetime Peculiar resident Bobby Riley said city leaders’ about face amounted to acknowledgment of their mistaken handling of the proposed development.

“They’re doing what they should have done from the beginning,” said Riley, a bearded, overall-clad biker who is outspoken online but was drawn into civic engagement for the first time by what he felt was the secretive nature of the city’s dealings with the project. “They’re shutting it down, and they’re doing it to save face.”

Diode and the city’s mayor, Doug Stark, did not respond to requests for comment. But in the parking lot of Peculiar City Hall, City Administrator Mickey Ary said he will follow the Peculiar alderman’s directive to craft an ordinance banning such projects for them to vote on. “My job is to bring economic development to the community,” he said.

Related:IBM Opens Europe’s First Quantum Data Center in Germany

Later that evening, Riley rode his Harley to the Peculiar Winery where opponents of the data center project celebrated over light beer and wine slushies.

Stefanie Grunwald raised her hand to express gratitude to the organizers of the local resistance. “When I first heard about the project, I was for it,” she said. She had hoped revenue from the project would provide funding for Peculiar’s police department, which is currently located in a former strip mall video store.

The Facebook group formed to resist the data center helped convince Grunwald of the potential harms of such facilities. Tech companies, she said, try to take advantage of places like Peculiar. “They think they can go into these small towns because they think they’re stupid, and they need money,” she said.

Opening Their Eyes

Reigel had just returned home to Chesterton after a month out of town for her father’s funeral when a neighbor dropped by and told her a company called Provident wanted to build a data center on the golf course bordering their cookie-cutter subdivision near Indiana’s Dunelands on Lake Michigan.

Reigel immediately set to searching online and soon learned of residents’ concerns about data center noise pollution in Loudoun and Prince Williams counties in Virginia, where some who’ve been pushing back on data center expansion for years complain of the constant “hum” of the systems that cool the computers inside.

“We don’t want to be the next Data Center Alley,” she said, using a nickname the region earned for its dense cluster of the facilities.

Reigel, with her mom and husband, Jon, wrote and distributed fliers sharing their concerns and research. Within two weeks, the former math teacher with no political experience was standing on a picnic table in a local park leading a meeting of more than a hundred people, including conservationists who later helped her organize a focus group and write petitions.

Reigel heard about Provident’s plans for Chesterton in time to convince the town council to push back at a crucial June 4 meeting. Later that month the developer announced it was withdrawing its application.

More often, opponents say, local officials keep proposals closely held or sign nondisclosure agreements that prohibit them from sharing details until land has already been sold, annexed or rezoned. “You find out days before the public hearing, and it’s just not enough time to fight it,” Reigel said.

After learning of Diode’s plans for Peculiar, Chad Buck, a real estate developer who lives nearby, traveled with some neighbors to see Google’s and Meta’s facilities in Sarpy County, Neb., for a glimpse of the town’s potential future. They found themselves, he said, in “a sea of power lines, infrastructure and substations” that looked “more like a maximum-security prison” than the renderings in the developer’s proposal.

Buck shared images and observations from that trip on the Don’t Dump Data on Peculiar Facebook page and also encouraged contributions from Reigel and others with experience fighting data centers whom he contacted. They included Gina Burgess, who in her quest to halt a Google data center in Indiana, had driven more than 160 miles to record videos of data centers in Ohio.

Video and photos showing how operating data centers could look and sound helped rally more Peculiar residents to the cause, said Kathy Haldiman, who lives in the town and was alarmed by how loud they were and the height of their power poles. “It opened their eyes,” she said, providing information “that the city wasn’t giving to us.”

People who have fought data center projects generally say they aren’t wholly against the facilities, without which their social media campaigns couldn’t exist. They just want them to be located far away from people, and for local officials to encourage public scrutiny and debate on the projects.

Buck says that in Peculiar officials did close to the opposite, changing zoning ordinances without providing enough notice to the community or probing the proposal’s details.

At a “Let’s Talk Peculiar” gathering hosted by City Administrator Ary on Aug. 15, he confirmed in response to a concerned resident’s question that he and the mayor had signed NDAs with Diode regarding its proposal.

Residents were not informed by Diode or the city which company the data center would ultimately serve. Ary told The Washington Post that he didn’t know. But the developer said on its website that it planned to use recent advancements in data center technology to limit noise and light pollution.

Buck, a wealthy builder of residential housing, said data center opposition is about more than everyday NIMBYism. But the potential risk to property values was a motivating factor to him and some less affluent neighbors.

The value of empty acreage is often increased when developers buy large tracts nearby to build data centers, but homes close to new industrial developments can become more difficult to sell.

Bailey Shelton worked two retail jobs to save up to buy a home near the proposed data center site with her husband five years ago. She said concerns about their financial future drove her to set aside her shy nature and pass out anti-data-center yard signs at the farmers market. “That’s our nest egg,” she said outside Peculiar Winery on Wednesday.

Not everyone in Peculiar opposed the project. Some appeared to be unaware of the controversy, while one local business owner said residents might want to consider the messy state of the town’s finances.

Those who joined the opposition often cited the water and electricity that data centers consume, although Diode said on a webpage about the proposal that it was working closely with water and power providers. Electrical infrastructure improvements needed specifically for the site would not affect residential bills, the webpage said, and past developments hadn’t led to water bill increases.

Riley, the biker, works on sewer lines in Peculiar and said water mains in the town are only six inches wide, which concerns family members who live near the site.

“They’re worried about it disrupting water,” he said. “They’re worried that it’s going to raise our electric bills - that there ain’t enough power to feed it.”

‘Resistance Will Spread’

Buck and Reigel said their wins have triggered inquiries from other towns looking for tips on slaying data centers.

Since the news broke in Peculiar this week, Buck said he’s heard from people opposing projects in Indiana and Idaho. Reigel said she’s in touch with organizers in Georgia and Fort Worth, where a new data center was approved last month over local protests.

City officials argue that Peculiar urgently needs the revenue new development would bring. In a letter posted to Facebook last month, Mayor Stark, who didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, said he was worried the “boisterous and ill-informed” opponents of the data center had damaged the city’s prospects.

“This project could have potentially meant hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to the city, the school district, the fire district and the county,” he wrote. “The city could have used these funds to build a police station, improve our roads and other infrastructure and improve parks.”

Many residents of Peculiar appreciate the country lifestyle, but the encroaching suburban sprawl of Kansas City and the chain restaurants and big box stores just up the road, threaten change. Off Peculiar Drive, construction workers are building a housing development called Tuscany, where modern homes will line roads with names like Sorano Drive and Lombardo Lane.

“We’re not against growth and economic development, we’re about doing it the right way,” said Buck to the crowd at the winery Wednesday evening. He believes data center developers use “predatory business tactics” that should be stopped.

Reigel said opposition incubated in individual communities is now spreading from state to state and taking on bigger targets than local projects, with people inviting her to join campaigns on statewide data center policies.

On Friday, developer Provident announced it was withdrawing its proposal to build a data center in Burns Harbor, Ind., where Reigel was campaigning after helping to drive the company out of her own town nearby.

Her husband, Jon, who helped organize the opposition in their area, said the fight will continue. “The data center industry is in growth mode,” he said. “And every place they try to put one, there’s probably going to be resistance. The more places they put them the more resistance will spread.”