EDITORIAL: Don’t feed fossil fuel to an energy glutton

“Turning electricity into data is one of the most profitable businesses in the world.”

Those are the words of Brian Janous, co-founder of Cloverleaf Infrastructure, at a data industry conference in New York in 2024.

Cloverleaf is working hard to turn electricity into profits by bringing a data center to Port Washington to be operated by one of the world’s major data processors and artificial intelligence providers. It is expected to be the biggest data center in the country.

A strong argument can be made that a development of this enormous scale does not belong in a community whose character is defined by its small-town lifestyle and lakeshore aesthetics, but there is an air of inevitability about the looming data center.

In a posting promoting city approval of the data center, its head cheerleader, Mayor Ted Neitzke, wrote that one of the benefits to the city is that “we control the process.”

In his dreams.

With its zoning authority, the city will be

able to apply some requirements to the development, mostly of the cosmetic variety, but the sheer immensity of the data center complex will overwhelm any notion of city control.

This is the first project for the newly formed Cloverleaf company, whose role in what its chief called one of the world’s most profitable businesses is acquiring electricity for the still-unknown end user of the facility. There is a lot riding on the company’s ability to manage the astonishingly huge electricity demands of the data center in a way that will limit negative impact on the area that the development has claimed and on the environment beyond.

It’s odd that so little is known about the imminent arrival in Port Washington of the nation’s biggest data center. Even its identity is a mystery. And all that is known about the raw material for the project—electricity in mind-boggling amounts—is that as much as one billion watts of it, or a gigawatt, will be needed.

There has been talk of an electrical substation about the size of a stand-alone power plant on 40 acres of the data center campus and a high-voltage transmission line that will march across Ozaukee County land to the site on massive poles. But where is all of that electricity coming from?

We Energies, Wisconsin’s biggest electrical utility, is working on that as it eyes its own substantial share of the proceeds from the electricity-data-profit dynamic, but has provided no details to the public. What is known is that We Energies is proposing to build additional gas-fired power plants for some reason.

It will be an environmental crime if a glutton for electricity as hungry as the Port Washington data center is fed by fossil fuel.

Google, Apple and Meta meet 100% of the electricity requirements of their hyperscale data centers with renewable energy. Microsoft data centers are on schedule to be fully powered by clean energy before the end of the year; AWS (Amazon), now at 85% renewable energy, will soon follow.

This is the state of the art for data centers. Anything less for the Port Washington hyperscale data center, which will use more energy than any of those operated by the big five mentioned above, should be ruled unacceptable.

Cloverleaf’s responsibility is not to simply find enough electricity to run the data center; it’s to obtain electricity from renewable sources. This should include investment by its client in clean energy. It could start with a solar farm on the Town of Port Washington farmland Cloverleaf is scooping up by the square mile.

As one of the most profitable businesses in the world, the Port Washington data center has no business contributing to climate change.