Why Environmental Activists Are Shifting Focus to Data Centers

This week’s conversation is with Sandy Field, leader of the rural Pennsylvania conservation organization Save Our Susquehanna. Field is a climate activist and anti-fossil fuel advocate who has been honored by former vice president Al Gore. Until recently, her primary focus was opposing fracking and plastics manufacturing in her community, which abuts the Susquehanna River. Her focus has shifted lately, however, to the boom in data center development.

I reached out to Field because I’ve been quite interested in better understanding how data centers may be seen by climate-conscious conservation advocates. Our conversation led me to a crucial conclusion: Areas with historic energy development are rife with opposition to new tech infrastructure. It will require legwork for data centers – or renewable energy projects, for that matter – to ever win support in places still reeling from legacies of petroleum pollution.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Given your background, tell me about how you wound up focusing on data centers?

We won a fight against a gas plant in fall of 2023. We started saying, Instead of focusing on what we don’t want, we’re going to start focusing on what we do want. We were focusing on supporting recreational projects in our area, because this is an area where people come to hike and camp and fish. It’s a great place to ride your bike.

Then, all of the sudden, people were saying, What about these data centers?

At first, it seemed benign. It’s like a warehouse, who cares? But we started to learn about the water use concerns, the energy use concerns. We learned about the Amazon one that’s connected to Three Mile Island, which is responsible for turning it back on. We learned about one in Homer, Pennsylvania, where they’re taking a former coal plant and converting it into the largest gas plant in the country in order to power a data center. The people in that area are going to get the pollution from the enormous power plant but none of the power. It started to be clear to us that, again, behind these projects is a push to build out more fracking and gas in Pennsylvania.

From a climate change point of view, this is exactly the wrong perspective. We’re running in the wrong direction. Between water usage, and this energy usage, people are becoming alarmed that the burden will be on us and data centers will be just another boondoggle.

The last thing I’ll say is that there is nothing right now in American politics that is reaching across the aisle. Our communities are coming together. Everybody – Democrats, Republicans – to fight these things.

This is also the only thing I’ve ever worked on that people hate more than plastics.

It sounds like how you learned about these projects was, it began as an anodyne issue but you began to hear about impacts on water and energy use. When I talk to people in the development space, some will call anybody who opposes development NIMBYs. But I’m feeling like this is an oversimplification of the problem here. If you had to identify a principle reason so many people are opposing data centers, what would be the big overarching motive?

I think it seems rushed. People are concerned because it's like a gold rush.

A gas-fired power plant takes five years to build. They’re talking about data centers right now. Where is that power coming from? The whole thing feels like a bubble, and we’re concerned that people are going to invest into communities, and communities will be accepting them only to be left with stranded assets.

When I hear you bring up the principle reason being speed, I hear you. Power plants take years. Mines take years. So do renewable energy projects. Help me get a better understanding though, how much of this is purely the speed –

They’re taking people by surprise.

Take into account where we are. We live by the Susquehanna River, the longest non-navigable river in the world. It doesn’t have a lot of industry on it because it’s too shallow, but we drink from the river and we’ve just gotten it clean. The river was so low this past year that historic structures were beginning to be visible that I’ve never seen, the entire time I have lived here. That was because of a drought.

Now, add to that a couple of data centers pulling millions of gallons of water a day and only putting a portion back in, with who knows what in there. People here are saying that back in the day this river was filled with coal dust, and then we had fracking, so its… enough is enough. Let’s put something into rural communities that will actually benefit us.

The small townships [deciding] don’t know enough about data centers to plan for them. So we’re trying to make sure they’re prepared for managing them. We go to these townships being approached and encourage them to have a protective ordinance that allows them to define parameters for these things. Setbacks, water use rules, things like that.

To your point about NIMBYs – there are a few around here who really are. But there are others who really do just have concerns about how this is a bad idea and we’re rushing in a direction we don’t want to go for our state. They felt this way about fracking, about advanced plastics recycling too, for example. It wasn’t that people didn’t want the projects in their backyards – it’s that they didn’t want them anywhere. Labeling us as NIMBYs or whiners or gripers is unfair.

On that note, I can’t help but notice that these efforts to get protective ordinances on data centers are happening as opponents of renewable energy are doing the same thing. Are you at all concerned that this increased scrutiny towards land use will lead to greater restrictions on renewables alongside data centers?

You’re right that a lot of this is about land use and there are similar arguments about renewable energy. Some of these arguments are being fed by the fossil fuel industry and its allies, and a lot of it is baseless. They’re feeding in concerns about glare and noise and whatever else that don’t even really exist about solar panels.

But it is, yes, often the same people talking about protecting their land. It does have similar elements, especially because of the agricultural land use being proposed in many cases.

We need to meet the concerns about renewable energy head-on. If you talk to people and show them a picture of solar panels with sheep grazing underneath and the land can be conserved for many years, this starts to be a different argument than building a data center for Amazon or someone else that people don’t even like, using the water and all that.