A Utility Promised To Stop Burning Coal. Then Google and Meta Came to Town.

OMAHA - Residents in the low-income, largely minority neighborhood of North Omaha celebrated when they learned a 1950s-era power plant nearby would finally stop burning coal. The community has some of the region’s worst air pollution and high rates of asthma.

But when the 2023 deadline to rid that plant of coal arrived, the power company that owns it balked. Eliminating toxic emissions conflicted with a competing priority: serving massive, power-hungry Meta and Google data centers the utility helped recruit to the region before it secured enough new energy to meet the extra demand.

The fast-growing data centers - which provide computing power for artificial intelligence - are driving explosive growth in the area’s energy use. Electricity demand in Omaha has increased so much overall, according to the Omaha Public Power District, that permanently switching off the two coal-burning generators at its North Omaha plant could buckle the area’s electricity system.

“A promise was made, and then they broke it,” said Cheryl Weston, who has lived for five decades in North Omaha. “The tech companies bear responsibility for this. The coal plant is still open because they need all this energy to grow.”

Coal is now planned to burn in North Omaha through 2026, according to the utility, although Weston and other critics are skeptical it will stop then.

The disputes in Omaha over data centers and power demand are playing out across the United States. Rapid data center growth has also been accompanied by utility plans to prolong the use of coal in Georgia, Utah and Wisconsin. The Nebraska story reveals in detail how the race by giant technology companies to gain the advantage in AI is conflicting with climate goals and potentially harming public health.

The Omaha Public Power District blames the missed closure date for its North Omaha coal-burning units on the slow arrival of clean energy supplies from wind and solar, which have met with heavy opposition in rural areas. It also cites regulatory delays that have slowed a plan to replace coal-burning units with natural gas, pointing to long waits to connect new projects to the regional electrical grid and mandates for minimum power supplies. But others in the energy industry say that’s not the full story.

The electricity that Google and Meta - the parent company of Facebook and Instagram - are devouring is a major factor in the extension of coal burning, they say. According to the utility’s own estimates, two-thirds of projected growth in demand in the Omaha area is attributable to the massive data centers rising largely on former farmland in the surrounding prairie.

“If not for the data centers and poor planning by the utility, they would not need to push to keep those coal units open,” said Devi Glick, a principal at the consulting firm Synapse Energy Economics. “It is disingenuous to say that is not what is driving this.”

The data centers’ need for electricity is enormous. Meta’s Nebraska data center alone used nearly as much energy as the North Omaha coal units produced in 2023, company and federal energy disclosures show. It is enough electricity to power more than half the homes in Omaha.

Google’s electricity use in the Omaha region eclipses that of Meta, according to tracking by the research firm DC Byte. The data shows Google uses more total electricity in Nebraska than anywhere in the United States.

The conflicts in Omaha are not unique. Companies are scouring the nation for alternative sites for data centers as they encounter land and energy shortages in tech hubs such as Northern Virginia and California’s Bay Area. Communities that recently landed on the radar of Silicon Valley are being visited by battalions of tech executives, energy developers and real estate brokers looking for power.

Omaha emerged as prime territory because of its bountiful, cheap electricity and seemingly endless opportunities to convert cornfields into vast solar and wind farms.

Despite the slow arrival of new solar and wind sources into the utility’s portfolio, tech companies insist their data center operations in Nebraska are green. By signing contracts with distant renewable power developers, they claim to have “net zero” impact on greenhouse gas emissions, even as the North Omaha coal plant continues to pollute locally.

Residents say those faraway clean power purchases offer little comfort. Asthma rates in North Omaha, where people of color make up 68 percent of the population, are among the highest in the country, according to a study released last year. Coal power plants have been linked to asthma and elevated mortality rates in neighboring communities nationwide.

Meta’s data center outside Omaha. Credit: Misty Prochaska for The Washington Post

The newest Omaha-area data centers are so massive, and so unexpected among the corn stalks and sorghum plants, that they seem like science fiction come to life. Meta’s sprawling facility is 4 million square feet spread over nine giant complexes. The largely windowless Google and Meta buildings are filled with the racks and servers that power the world’s cloud computing needs today and increasingly power the revolution in AI.

Data centers could consume as much as 17 percent of all U.S. electricity by 2030, according to new research from Bloomberg Intelligence, nearly quadruple what they consume today. In the Omaha region, utility officials have announced they will need to double the amount of electricity they generate by that time.Meta originally passed over Omaha. To woo the tech company, local utility executives created a special industrial electricity rate in 2017. The utility then aggressively marketed the rate to Google. Then-Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) said in 2020 that the Omaha Public Power District was the “linchpin” to getting Google to come to Nebraska.

“It took us 75 years to get where we are today,” Omaha Public Power District CEO Javier Fernandez said in a blog post. “By 2030, we are going to nearly double our generation portfolio. That’s incredible.” Utility officials say they will eventually bring online a huge amount of wind and solar energy - enough to meet as much as 60 percent of the new electricity demand. Much of the rest would come from gas.

Local activists are dismayed by what they say is a muted tech company response to the continued use in Omaha of fossil fuels, not just coal but also natural gas. They say these companies need to be clear that they will not continue to expand if the power company serving them is using dirty energy.

“They’re sitting on the sidelines and watching,” said Preston Love, a longtime North Omaha community organizer who is running for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat. “They’re not in the game. Shame on them. They need to be speaking up.”

The tech companies, which declined interview requests, said every watt of power they use for their data centers is matched with purchases of clean energy elsewhere on the regional power grid. But those contracts feed into a vast power grid, spanning 14 states from Louisiana to Montana. Many experts and activists say much of that clean power would probably get produced whether the tech companies were signing contracts or not.

“These tech companies are doing a lot of paper pushing in Nebraska, and there are not enough real projects being built that get new wind and solar on the grid now,” said Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Nebraska, which played a key role in killing the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project.

She said tech companies should help overcome rural opposition that has emerged to huge wind and solar arrays. “The Googles and Metas are basically saying ‘Yes, we’re net zero’ and then leaving all the responsibility of actually building clean energy to us, without supporting our efforts,” she said.

The Omaha Public Power District’s marquee solar project in development, a 2,800 acre industrial-scale project on York County farmland, 100 miles from Omaha, is getting a frosty reception from locals. At community meetings they have expressed alarm about the project size, its impact on agriculture, alleged chemicals in solar panels and worries the solar generation will be noisy. Some of the anxieties are spawned from what experts say is misinformation spreading online, but others are concerns of a rural community fearing its farming heritage is under threat.

Some of the tension is rooted in resentment that Omaha recruited the data centers and is getting the tax revenue and jobs they bring, but is now looking to far-flung, rural communities to host the industrial-scale energy installations needed to power them.

“I guarantee the people who say they are in favor of this project wouldn’t want to have them in their backyard,” local resident Jim Jackson said at a county meeting in June, according to the meeting minutes.

“Why pick on prime farm ground?” York County commissioner Stan Boehr said to Omaha utility officials at the gathering. “Why not go to places where you are not interfering with people’s lives?” County officials did not respond to requests for comment. York County’s draft ordinance would prohibit large solar projects from being installed within a half-mile of other properties.

Fernandez, the Omaha Public Power District CEO, called the York County measure “unreasonable and detrimental to crucial clean energy projects.”

Omaha Public Power itself sided against a battery project that clean energy advocates say is needed to support wind and solar farms in the state. (Batteries maintain a steady flow of electricity when solar and wind are not producing energy.)

The Omaha Public Power District ruled in April that the developer, Eolian, could not connect to the grid batteries it plans to install on an industrial lot near Omaha’s coal-fired plant. The power company said private companies are prohibited from hooking up such projects because Nebraska is a “public power” state where infrastructure must be community owned.

Eolian officials, after working on their plan for six years, say they were blindsided by the decision. They argue Nebraska law has specific exemptions allowing the purchase of clean energy from private firms.

“Given the large and growing data center footprint in Omaha, it is confounding that the local utility would intentionally impede the addition of multi-hour battery energy storage resources,” said Eolian CEO Aaron Zubaty. The utility said in a statement that the exceptions are limited and do not allow for “a privately owned, stand-alone battery storage facility.” Eolian and the utility will now make their case to the Nebraska Power Review Board, which has authority to approve the project.

As these controversies play out, North Omaha residents accuse the power company and tech firms of dealing with the challenges not by curbing energy use, but by turning North Omaha into a “sacrifice zone.”

Residents in the community say it has been neglected and underserved for decades. The average household income of $47,300 is far below that of the rest of the city. While tech companies and local politicians say the data centers have brought hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and thousands of jobs to the region, North Omaha residents say they are seeing little of it. But they are stuck with two more years of coal emissions.

“This would never be allowed to happen to an affluent White community,” said Anthony Rogers-Wright, a North Omaha activist. “People here are seen as expendable. … If the power company was not ready to provide clean energy, it should not have been recruiting these data centers to come to Omaha.”