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Spotlight

Renewables Swept Up in Data Center Backlash

Just look at Virginia.

A data center.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.

The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.

“This is something that we’re just starting to see,” said Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow with the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s one thing for environmentalists to support wind and solar projects if the idea is that those projects will eventually replace coal power plants. But it’s another thing if those projects are purely being built to meet incremental demand from data centers.”

We’ve started to see evidence of this backlash in certain resort towns fearful of a new tech industry presence and the conflicts over transmission lines in Maryland. But it is most prominent in Virginia, ground zero for American hyperscaler data centers. As we’ve previously discussed in The Fight, rural Virginia is increasingly one of the hardest places to get approval for a solar farm in the U.S., and while there are many reasons the industry is facing issues there, a significant one is the state’s data center boom.

I spent weeks digging into the example of Mecklenburg County, where the local Board of Supervisors in May indefinitely banned new solar projects and is rejecting those that were in the middle of permitting when the decision came down. It’s also the site of a growing data center footprint. Microsoft, which already had a base of operations in the county’s town of Boydton, is in the process of building a giant data center hub with three buildings and an enormous amount of energy demand. It’s this sudden buildup of tech industry infrastructure that is by all appearances driving a backlash to renewable energy in the county, a place that already had a pre-existing high opposition risk in the Heatmap Pro database.

It’s not just data centers causing the ban in Mecklenburg, but it’s worth paying attention to how the fight over Big Tech and solar has overlapped in the county, where Sierra Club’s Virginia Chapter has worked locally to fight data center growth with a grassroots citizens group, Friends of the Meherrin River, that was a key supporter of the solar moratorium, too.

In a conversation with me this week, Tim Cywinski, communications director for the state’s Sierra Club chapter, told me municipal leaders like those in Mecklenburg are starting to group together renewables and data centers because, simply put, rural communities enter into conversations with these outsider business segments with a heavy dose of skepticism. This distrust can then be compounded when errors are made, such as when one utility-scale solar farm – Geenex’s Grasshopper project – apparently polluted a nearby creek after soil erosion issues during construction, a problem project operator Dominion Energy later acknowledged and has continued to be a pain point for renewables developers in the county.

“I don’t think the planning that has been presented to rural America has been adequate enough,” the Richmond-based advocate said. “Has solar kind of messed up in a lot of areas in rural America? Yeah, and that’s given those communities an excuse to roll them in with a lot of other bad stuff.”

Cywinski – who describes himself as “not your typical environmentalist” – says the data center space has done a worse job at community engagement than renewables developers in Virginia, and that the opposition against data center projects in places like Chesapeake and Fauquier is more intense, widespread, and popular than the opposition to renewables he’s seeing play out across the Commonwealth.

But, he added, he doesn’t believe the fight against data centers is “mutually exclusive” from conflicts over solar. “I’m not going to tout the gospel of solar while I’m trying to fight a data center for these people because it’s about listening to them, hearing their concerns, and then not telling them what to say but trying to help them elevate their perspective and their concerns,” Cywinski said.

As someone who spends a lot of time speaking with communities resisting solar and trying to best understand their concerns, I agree with Cywinksi: the conflict over data centers speaks to the heart of the rural vs. renewables divide, and it offers a warning shot to anyone thinking AI will help make solar and wind more popular.

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Spotlight

Data Centers Collide with Local Restrictions on Renewables

A review of Heatmap Pro data reveals a troubling new trend in data center development.

A data center and a backyard.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Data centers are being built in places that restrict renewable energy. There are significant implications for our future energy grid – but it’s unclear if this behavior will lead to tech companies eschewing renewables or finding novel ways to still meet their clean energy commitments.

In the previous edition of The Fight, I began chronicling the data center boom and a nascent backlash to it by talking about Google and what would’ve been its second data center in southern Indianapolis, if the city had not rejected it last Monday. As I learned about Google’s practices in Indiana, I focused on the company’s first project – a $2 billion facility in Fort Wayne, because it is being built in a county where officials have instituted a cumbersome restrictive ordinance on large-scale solar energy. The county commission recently voted to make the ordinance more restrictive, unanimously agreeing to institute a 1,000-foot setback to take effect in early November, pending final approval from the county’s planning commission.

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Hotspots

Feds Preparing Rule Likely Restricting Offshore Wind, Court Filing Says

And more on the week’s most important fights around renewable energy projects.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Ocean County, New Jersey – A Trump administration official said in a legal filing that the government is preparing to conduct a rulemaking that could restrict future offshore wind development and codify a view that could tie the hands of future presidential administrations.

  • In a court filing last Friday, Matthew Giacona – Trump’s principal deputy director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management – laid out the federal government’s thoughts about re-doing the entire review process that went into approving the Atlantic Shores project. The filing was related to the agency’s effort to stay a lawsuit brought by anti-wind advocates that officials say is unnecessary because, well … Atlantic Shores is already kind of dead.
  • But the Giacona declaration went beyond this specific project. He laid out how in the Trump administration’s view, the Biden administration improperly weighed the impacts of the offshore wind industry when considering the government’s responsibilities for governing use of the Outer Continental Shelf, which is the range of oceanfront off the coastline that qualifies as U.S. waters. Giacona cited an Interior Department legal memo issued earlier this year that revoked Biden officials’ understanding of those legal responsibilities and, instead, put forward an interpretation of the agency’s role that results in a higher bar for approving offshore wind projects.
  • Per Giacona, not only will BOEM be reviewing past approvals under this new legal opinion, but it will also try and take some sort of action changing its responsibilities under federal regulation for approving projects in the Outer Continental Shelf. Enshrining this sort of legal interpretation into BOEM’s regulations would in theory have lasting implications for the agency even after the Trump 2.0 comes to a close.
  • “BOEM is currently beginning preparations for a rulemaking that will amend that provision of the regulations, consistent with M-37086 [the legal opinion],” Giacona stated. He did not elaborate on the timetable for this regulatory effort in the filing.

2. Prince William County, Virginia – The large liberal city of Manassas rejected a battery project over fire fears, indicating that post-Moss Landing, anxieties continue to pervade in communities across the country.

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Q&A

What Rural Republicans Say About Renewables

A conversation with Courtney Brady of Evergreen Action.

Courtney Brady.
Heatmap Illustration

This week I chatted with Courtney Brady, Midwest region deputy director for climate advocacy group Evergreen Action. Brady recently helped put together a report on rural support for renewables development, for which Evergreen Action partnered with the Private Property Rights Institute, a right-leaning advocacy group. Together, these two organizations conducted a series of interviews with self-identifying conservatives in Pennsylvania and Michigan focused on how and why GOP-leaning communities may be hesitant, reluctant, or outright hostile to solar or wind power.

What they found, Brady told me, was that politics mattered a lot less than an individual’s information diet. The conversation was incredibly informative, so I felt like it was worth sharing with all of you.

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