XENIA — The White House and a bipartisan group of governors, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, are talking about data centers.
With the massive amount of electricity the facilities use, this group wants to make sure the costs are not passed onto consumers on our utility bills.
News Center 7’s I-Team lead investigative reporter, John Bedell, has been covering data centers for months. The facilities bring jobs and growth, but also come with controversy.
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Bedell spoke with Gov. DeWine at his home in Greene County on Monday and is one of 14 governors discussing what is essentially a supply and demand issue on News Center 7 at 5:30.
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One of the proposed data centers in Wilmington is about a 25-minute drive from Xenia. There are hundreds of data centers operating across Ohio, serving as the backbone of the Internet.
Every email we send, every movie or show we stream, lives on a server in some sort of data center. There are two coming to the Miami Valley.
“Data centers, we believe, are important to our future. We think they’re important to the economic development of the state of Ohio and job creation. But they need to pay their own way,” DeWine said.
PJM Interconnection is the Midwest’s electric grid operator, serving a region that includes Ohio.
DeWine said he backed efforts by the White House Domestic Energy Council and fellow governors to petition PJM to “Better address supply and demand issues caused by the expanding data center sector.”
Early on Friday, and before Gov. DeWine’s office sent a news release on the event at the White House just before 3:30 Friday afternoon, PJM put out the following statement regarding the event and the statement of principles from the White House Domestic Energy Council and 14 governors, including Gov. DeWine:
<i>PJM is reviewing the principles set forth by the White House and governors. The PJM Board’s decision, resulting from a multi-month stakeholder process on integrating large load additions, will be released later today. The Board has been deliberating on this issue since the end of that stakeholder process. We will work with our stakeholders to assess how the White House directive aligns with the Board’s decision.</i>
— PJM Interconnection
Then on Friday afternoon, PJM posted the PJM Board’s plan, accompanied by this news release.
Aside from the data center planned in Piqua, Amazon is building a data center in Sidney. According to datacentermap.com, Ohio is fifth in the country for the number of data centers.
“Data centers, we think it’s a positive, but we also know there are some cautions with them,” DeWine said.
He told the I-Team there are legitimate concerns about data centers.
“One of the things we’re looking at is transparency, particularly on the water. We need to make sure that we have the transparency there. We also need to make sure we have transparency completely with the electricity as well. So, those are the areas that we’re looking at right now,” DeWine said.
Dan Diorio is with the Industry Group that represents data centers. He said, “They are responsible and efficient water users.”
Diorio said proposed water numbers don’t tell the full story. He continued by saying much of the water is brought in each day and is returned to the water system.
For the data center project in Piqua, records the I-Team obtained show the company will put half of the two million gallons it could use every day back into the local water system.
In Sidney, it’s uncertain yet how much water Amazon expects to use.
Amazon told us in a statement, “Our data centers in Ohio exceed industry efficiency standards. Our Water Use Effectiveness score, which measures water used per unit of computing power, is three times better than the U.S. industry average.”
The I-Team asked Diorio, “Why not be more transparent?” He said, “Well, the data center industry, just like any other industry, has to consider confidentiality in terms of protecting proprietary and competitive information.”
Amazon previously told the I-Team, “We actively work to keep energy costs stable for communities. Rather than increasing costs for local communities, AWS actively works to keep energy rates stable and bring benefits to all energy users. We work with utilities on innovative agreements to keep rates comparably low and bring new carbon-free energy projects to the grid.”
Data centers provide local governments with details on their water needs. In some cases, that blacked out info so water authorities can plan and build more infrastructure.
“We are fully committed to paying our full cost of service, both for electricity and water,” Diorio said.
While data center operators pledge that costs will not be passed on to consumers, residents remain unconvinced that water bills won’t go up.
Alisha Lange, of Piqua, said, “Because statistically across the country where they’ve been popping up, they have increased utility rates.”
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