00:00A city council in central Ohio just turned down $5 billion and told the developer no.
00:06Two states away, protesters outside a utility open house held signs reading,
00:12you can't drink data, and an energy investment firm now says up to half of every data center
00:18planned in this country may never get billed on schedule. We begin in Pataskala, Ohio,
00:26a city east of Columbus, where the city council voted unanimously to accept its planning and zoning
00:34commissions. Recommendation and deny Align Data Center's proposal outright. The project would
00:41have been a 200-megawatt campus, three buildings inside the city's industrial park. Align told
00:48residents the facility would bring more than 100 permanent jobs and more than $5 billion in
00:54investment. The council said no anyway, and the fight is not finished, because residents had
01:01already gathered more than 500 signatures to force a public vote. That means in November,
01:08Pataskala voters will decide whether to ban large data centers in the city altogether,
01:14regardless of what any developer brings them next. That same anger showed up two states away,
01:21outside a Duke Energy open house in Moxville, North Carolina. Residents who have spent months
01:28fighting data center development in Davie and Davidson counties, turned the utility's public
01:34information session into a protest, holding signs that read, we pay the bill, Duke takes the profit,
01:42and you can't drink data. Duke is proposing new gas-fired generation across both counties.
01:48Yadkin Riverkeeper Nicole Eastman was among the crowd, warning about what those plants,
01:55and the data centers behind them, would mean for the river's ecosystem. Her argument was blunt,
02:02these additional power plants are really just to meet the need of data centers.
02:07So it is not something the community members of Davie and Davidson County will be using.
02:14That opposition is now making its way into courtrooms in Wheeling, West Virginia. Residents fighting a
02:21data center planned for the former center foundry site in Warwood staged what they called a very public
02:28data center hearing. In the third floor ballroom of Waterfront Hall, it was a forum they organized
02:34themselves. With city council members and community critics on the panel, alongside attorney David
02:41Croft, who has served as legal counsel for the developer, Silicon Foundation, that group has
02:48proposed investing more than $100 million in the vacant Brownfield site. Meanwhile, the residence's
02:55civil suit has pulled in the state itself. Attorney General J.B. McCuskey moved to intervene,
03:01because the complaint argues that House Bill 2014, West Virginia's law governing high-impact data
03:09centers, is unconstitutional. And the money is starting to notice. Kimmeridge Energy Management
03:17told Bloomberg that as many as half of the data centers currently proposed in the United States are
03:24at risk of delay or cancellation, not because demand for computing has softened, but because of
03:31political backlash and the sheer difficulty of building physical infrastructure. Managing partner
03:37and co-founder Ben Dell put it this way. The Silicon Valley model is running into a real-world infrastructure
03:44constraint. The firm points to rising litigation at the local level and bipartisan opposition in
03:51Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio, states once considered friendly to these projects. Kimmeridge has skin in
03:59the game, holding stakes in natural gas producers. Indell says those delays would likely force cuts to gas
04:07demand forecasts. The pressure on the grid is only half the story, and water tells the other half.
04:16Austin is trying to write its rules before a single large campus is proposed inside city limits.
04:23Council members held a dedicated data center work session this week, ahead of action to begin amending
04:29the city's land development code. City staff recommended new siting and zoning standards for higher
04:36impact facilities, along with requirements covering water efficiency, noise and lighting. Council member
04:44Vanessa Fuentes went further, saying she is pursuing a full ban on large-scale data centers in Austin
04:51and would back a moratorium in the meantime. Her framing was direct. It is clear that data centers
04:58present real risks to our people, environment and local resources, and the city will not wait for a
05:06crisis to happen here. Meanwhile, the federal government is keeping old power plants alive to cover the gap.
05:14The Energy Department issued an emergency order under Section 202C of the Federal Power Act,
05:22directing PJM and Constellation Energy to keep Units 3 and 4 of the Eddystone Generating
05:28Station in Pennsylvania available to operate. From August 23 through November 20,
05:35each unit carries a capacity of 380 megawatts. The reasoning sits in the department's own
05:42reliability analysis. PJM is facing roughly 25 gigawatts of projected load growth, 15 of that from
05:51data centers alone, against about 17 gigawatts of announced fossil fuel retirements. That is a 13-state
05:59grid plus the District of Columbia. And the math no longer closes without plants that were supposed to be
06:06gone. Voters are about to get the final word in one Kansas City. The Emporia City Commission voted
06:15unanimously to place two citizen-initiated petitions on the November 3 general election ballot. Resolution
06:23number 3799 submits a proposed ordinance prohibiting high-impact data centers. A bar that could hold for as
06:32long as 10 years. A second question would ban battery energy storage systems. Both petitions grew out of
06:39citizen organizing that began after commissioners approved zoning changes this summer, opening the
06:46door to data center development. The effort has already been through a Lyon County courtroom, where a judge
06:53ordered the question onto the ballot. Even if voters approve it, the ordinance cannot be published or take effect
07:00until the pending legal questions are resolved. And the financial commitment on the other side of this
07:08fight is staggering. Commissioners in Columbia County, Georgia advanced a memorandum of understanding
07:15covering a data center project worth at least $17 billion. Among the largest private investments in the
07:23county's history, the counterparty is Kinetic Infrastructure Solutions, a subsidiary of Alphabet, and Google would occupy the
07:32campus. Roughly 23 buildings across about 1900 acres at the White Oak Park property. In Appling, county leaders are
07:42explicit about the goal, which is to use that revenue to eliminate the county's share of property taxes. Currently about
07:5040% of its
07:52budget, Google has committed to covering 100% of the energy infrastructure costs. And the site falls under a data
08:00center
08:00zoning district requiring 500-foot residential buffers, a 65-decibel noise cap and closed-loop cooling.
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