Utilities across the country are saying they need more natural gas plants to meet the needs of projected energy growth, led by data centers. (Getty Images)
In early December, news broke that lawmakers were asked to come to the Capitol for a special session to pass a bill. That legislation, which was never officially sponsored or released, would have built upon a 2022 law that allowed private companies to skirt around our Public Service Commission and our coal-entrenched electricity market and either build their own renewable energy sources or choose to get power from one.
The special session was never called, likely because of poor understanding of our state code and its requirement that newly elected lawmakers be sworn in. Since then, people involved have said that the goal of the bill was to attract an unnamed, multinational company to build a data center and renewable energy supply in Logan County.
I wrote before how the 2022 law that opened up the opportunity for Berkshire Hathaway to come to West Virginia and build an industrial park and renewable energy microgrid was a form of corporate favoritism. The Legislature changed the rules for large companies like Berkshire Hathaway who want lower-cost, renewable energy. Yet, it’s still difficult for average West Virginians to get solar energy unless they can put panels on their roofs.
Courting a mega data center to come to the coalfields and changing laws to allow it to do so is favoritism on steroids, at the expense of West Virginians. Data centers are energy, resource, and land-intensive. The proliferation of artificial intelligence and the powerful data centers needed for them has broken the gains the United States made in reducing energy demand.
Now, utilities across the country are saying they need more natural gas plants to meet the needs of projected energy growth, led by data centers. That fossil-fuel generation will lead to more carbon emissions, and ultimately hurt our chances at reducing global warming. Just last week, scientists said 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded. So was 2023 before that.
Neighboring Virginia has been grappling with data centers for years, and lawmakers there have started to push back and demand more transparency and accountability. A recent study from the legislative auditors at the Virginia Assembly estimated that the infrastructure needed for data centers could cost Virginians up to an additional $37 per month on their power bills by 2040 under certain conditions.
While the data center in Logan County would supposedly run on renewable energy, it still has the potential for other concerns, particularly water usage and fairness. Data centers are water hogs, using up to 5 million gallons per day according to some estimates. It feels unconscionable to bend the rules to allow a company to build a facility that would require so much water in a place whose residents have so little access to clean water.
I don’t just mean Logan County. Much of the coalfield counties have lacking water and sewage infrastructure. On top of the long-standing water issues in West Virginia, the recent news that the state’s Water Development Authority awarded a $5 million grant to a private, religious college in Ohio to expand into West Virginia indicates to me that the state doesn’t have much interest in addressing the area’s water woes.
Gov. Patrick Morrisey has expressed interest in making West Virginia a state open to data center business. In his adopted West Virginia area of Jefferson County — and my home county — the fight over data centers in Virginia and the power lines needed for them has gained traction. People there are upset that West Virginia land is being used for transmission lines for data centers in Virginia. I suspect that people in the southern part of the state wouldn’t like the transmission lines even if the data centers were in West Virginia.
Data centers aren’t going away, quite the opposite it seems. While they can provide substantial tax revenue if done correctly, I worry that our officials are not prepared to grapple with the environmental issues they’ll bring. I also fear that in the race to the bottom against other states that want large companies to move in, West Virginia will cut tax breaks that companies like Amazon don’t really need.
In Virginia, lawmakers are considering a package of transparency bills, specifically concerning that data centers publicize water usage and that counties conduct an environmental study before approving a data center. I hope ours will consider the same and not let another industry run rampant in our state.
And when the centers do ultimately come, I support them using renewable energy. But yet again here we were looking at an example in which the rules were going to be walked around for a deal, behind closed doors, just like the Berkshire Hathaway deal three years ago. Meanwhile most West Virginians are still getting their energy from expensive coal while other states have moved toward pro-renewable energy policies and generation that will bring costs and pollution down. If we expand access to renewable energy for corporations, we should do it for every day West Virginians too.
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