Datacenters will soon use about 13% of all US electricity production.
Perhaps this is the real reason for the abrupt, about face on EVs – there won’t be enough electricity to power all the data centers, charge EVs and replace all natural gas stoves and water heaters with electric ones.
I sort of live in the middle of nowhere – but within 25 miles, Apple and Facebook have huge data centers, plus there are third-party data centers operated on behalf of others. The Facebook data center cost $2 billion. Up the highway, along the Columbia River, Google operates another huge data center.
Oregon subsidizes these data centers with our tax money – giving them property tax breaks up to 15 years, provides an Enterprise Zone subsidy program that was intended for small businesses but is now mostly used for data centers, plus cities and counties provide even more subsidies. For businesses that employ, sometimes, only dozens of workers. The subsidies may run as much as 1/2 million dollars per job created – and in many cases, the jobs are “remote” jobs not even located in the county or even Oregon.
In Morrow County, Oregon, local officials are accused of personally profiting from approving an Amazon data center by using inside information to buy a local fiber optic communications business: State attorney general alleges Morrow County officials enriched themselves in broadband deal – OPB and Morrow County officials accused of exploiting nonprofit to cash in on Amazon’s Oregon data centers, reap millions for themselves – oregonlive.com
In addition to driving up electricity costs, raising taxes on everyone else to give big tech huge tax breaks, data centers often consume huge amounts of water to run their cooling systems.
