Public has key role in scrutinizing data centers

Area residents looking to stop the Vantage Data Centers’ Lighthouse campus in Port Washington have three opportunities to do so, speakers at a discussion about the environmental impact of data centers said last week.

They can oppose the formation of a tax incremental financing district by the City of Port Washington, the issuance of an air permit for the diesel backup generators at the data center by the Department of Natural Resources and fight the transmission lines proposed by American Transmission Co. and under consideration by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, attorney Michael Greif of Midwest Environmental Advocates, said.

All of these actions include opportunities for public comment, Greif told the roughly 90 people at the meeting sponsored by Riveredge Nature Center at its Town of Saukville facility.

“It might feel like you’re screaming into the wind,” he said. “Those letters and calls do mean something. Building the chorus of voices ... is an important thing to think about.”

Melissa Scanlan, director of the Center for Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences, said that those concerned about the data center should band together to fight it.

“It does require collective action,” she said.

There are about 500 data centers in Great Lakes states, Scanlan said, but as of December 2024 “a couple hundred more have been proposed.”

“In Wisconsin, the new ones that are proposed are enormous,” she said, adding that Wisconsin has far fewer proposed data centers than other Great Lakes states.

The reasons Wisconsin is attractive for these developments include the fact that the state exempts the infrastructure for these facilities from the sales tax, Greif said, and electric utilities have recruited data centers to increase their customer base.

Local officials have also been “quite supportive” of data centers, he said.

“They see them as economic development,” he said.

Among the areas of concern with data centers, they said, are energy and water use.

Part of the difficulty in determining the impact, Greif said, is that the numbers have changed over time. In the case of the Port data center, Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which began the process, talked of needing 3.5 gigawatts of power, while Vantage, which is building the campus, said it will need 1.3 gigawatts.

Cloverleaf originally talked about using one million gallons of water a day, he said, and today Vantage is talking about 22,000 gallons a day.

“It’s frustrating to anyone trying to understand the impacts,” he said.

Equally frustrating, he said, is that there has not been an environmental impact statement done for any hyperscale data center in the state.