Maine Said No to New Data Centers. Other States Are Racing to Follow

ccdrnsf about 6 hours ago 15 commentsRead Article on motherjones.com

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xorvoid•about 5 hours ago

I live in a town in the Midwest that just voted down a data center project.

Personally I think it's mostly a proxy vote against bigtech/social-media. People are pretty fed up with their practices but don't have power to act at a national level. But, they DO have power at the local level to show up to town council and talk directly (in-person) to their representatives.

I think the other side of this is that there's this old idea (mostly correct) that municipalities partnering with businesses is good for the community because it brings positive side-effects: jobs, more cashflow in the local economy, etc. This is much less true for data centers. It's just a building that uses power and produces heat/by-products. Generally, employment gains are tiny compared with the old "automaker" labor model of the 1960s-1980s

People recognize this and they're not happy. They don't think it's a good deal for their communities.

Tanoc•about 4 hours ago

One argument I've heard that people try to use as proponents of these datacenters is that they bring in employment in construction and electrical engineering even if it's temporary. Their argument falls apart very quickly when it's pointed out that because of the specialization many owners of these locations hire specific firms and contractors willing to travel across the nation for the work instead of hiring a local construction company or an on-site engineer. Some locations are managed entirely remotely where one engineer handles multiple sites, and the only people actually there are security, maintenance, and cleaning staff who might also be traveling contractors that move between locations in a circuit. That's like six people for something with a footprint the size of fifty family homes.

tylerchilds•about 3 hours ago

This is a good take.

Put a different way, some companies have made a lot of money with business models that hinge on victims never being able to reach a human.

Those same companies want to set up phone centers in the neighborhoods of the people they’ve neglected that also will not take their calls.

Town hall it is.

ericd•about 4 hours ago

This is a major reason I think SpaceX’s space DCs aren’t insane, this is a pretty clear trend. These things don’t bring durable employment, they concentrate costs on infrastructure locally, and their benefits go to the world, so the only way I’ve seen the calculus work for a local community are if they levy property tax on the contents of the DC, use it to subsidize your local property taxes/infrastructure, and then foist the cost due to increased power demand on the wider region. My understanding is this is what Loudon County, VA does with its many DCs, taking the benefits and spreading the costs across the entire PJM region. You effectively have poor Baltimoreans subsidizing the highest median income county in the US via increases in their heating bills. Of course, the rest of the PJM region is annoyed about this and starting to try to obstruct that.

patrickhogan1•11 minutes ago

First data centers, next up: maineframes

bastawhiz•about 5 hours ago

I've been interested in understanding what would make people more amenable to data centers. We kind of need them, though arguably many of the ones being built now are motivated by foolish AI bubble incentives.

Quieter? Lower water use? Lower energy use? Mandatory accessory green spaces? Property taxes that reflect the value being derived relative to inconvenience/pain inflicted on the community? Jobs programs?

I think there's a lot of ideas to mitigate the downsides of data centers. Many of the people who don't want data centers have such proposals that are opposed by different people who don't want data centers.

ivraatiems•about 1 hour ago

There's no good reason to build datacenters in many of the places people are trying to build them. Look at all the ones they're trying to build in Phoenix or Tucson, Arizona, or in New Mexico. These are deserts! They're the exact opposite of a place where it makes sense to build a datacenter.

It's not enough to offer incentives. You have to explain why you even need to do it in the first place, and the answer better not be "we want money."

TimJRobinson•about 2 hours ago

They could give all nearby residents free/subsidized solar + battery for their homes.

This empowers people making them feel less beholden to rising energy prices, and gives the data center more energy for its needs as the grid is freed up.

gdulli•about 4 hours ago

> I've been interested in understanding what would make people more amenable to data centers.

We've been slowly boiling alive in the reality that the tech industry has long been evolving to hurt us more and help us less each year. We'd be neutral or welcoming to data centers if we didn't know that storing and processing all that data was going to be used against us.

DangitBobby•about 3 hours ago

It would help a ton if they'd pull some strings to get more power added to the grid than they consume so they don't cost residents and local businesses money. Or they could pay to subsidize residential usage and keep rates low.

thepryz•about 5 hours ago

To start, there is a lot of misinformation out there and the NDAs that surround data center construction and operation don't help. People will cite water consumption as a huge problem when modern hyperscalers use substantially less water because they're now using closed loop cooling instead of evaporative cooling. You'll see people cite noise because they saw a video online of a crypto mining grifter who bought a bunch of shipping containers and haphazardly threw together air cooled mining rigs with 80mm fans screaming away. I even saw one video of a woman who claimed data centers gave her diabetes despite the fact that she was obese.

Amazon and other companies already have job training programs because they cannot find enough skilled labor to build and operate their data centers. The number of jobs commonly cited are comically lower than what is common to operate a modern hyperscaler. In my experience, hyperscalers often have at least 100-200 people on site to operate the data center and I've seen more than 1000 people on a site when the data center is under construction.

The real issue, as always, are the local governments and utilities that sellout out the citizens and fail to create and enforce building codes. The governments should be using the demand for data centers to partner with the companies and have them pay to modernize and fix the power grid. They should be using them to help subsidize green energy initiatives among other things and fund other projects to benefit the community.

The inconvenient truth is that the problem with data centers lies with the people in the communities who continue to elect politicians who, time and time again, make decisions counter to the best interests of their community. Data centers just happen to be the latest scapegoat to distract people from corrupt politicians and an community that is not civically engaged enough to hold their politicians accountable.

vrganj•about 5 hours ago

Data centers are fundamentally a net negative to the region, value extraction towards the oligarchs.

Why would anyone want them?

The only thing that'd change my mind would be full communal ownership in addition to everything you've said.

Danox•about 4 hours ago

Mainframe centralized computing like the good old days in a way that will make OpenAI profitable is not coming back, IBM and Digital are gone.

CamperBob2•about 3 hours ago

I don't understand why these things need to be built in populated areas.

If it's true that they can be constructed in space and operated remotely, then they can also be placed on container ships, on isolated ocean platforms like oil rigs, or in unpopulated areas on land.

If it's not true that they can be constructed in space, then we'd probably better stop telling ourselves that it's possible.

ChrisArchitect•about 2 hours ago

Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708817