Turning data into carbon

Remember climate change?

It’s understandable that the overheating of Earth’s atmosphere might not be the top worry at a time when the economy is burning up in the economic conflagration ignited by the Trump tariff war, with recession looming and retirement and college savings left in the smoldering ruins of the stock market. Still, global warming is taking its toll in environmental damage and human suffering unabated.

Climate change, along with the understanding that it is caused by humans burning fossil fuel, is almost universally accepted as a menacing fact of life that must be resisted. Even the loudest deniers have mostly gone quiet, probably to avoid looking even more ridiculous. And yet, as the intensity of the weather disasters related to climate change accelerates, the U.S. is moving backward in efforts to counter it.

In just over two months, the Trump administration has threatened or killed numerous federal efforts to address climate change, including clean energy grants, permits for wind energy developments, tax credits for electric vehicle buyers and environmental regulations.

Besides the climate consequences, the dismantling of the federal response to climate change is having an immediate effect on the once-burgeoning clean energy industry. Companies providing EV and solar energy components are cutting back with accompanying job losses. The administration’s anti-clean energy agenda is so troubling 21 Republican members of Congress have called on the president to relent.

As the weather chaos caused by Earth’s warming destroys property and lives in real time, the future impact of climate change is coming into focus. Living in some parts of the U.S. is predicted to become so unpleasant, expensive and risky that it will spur a migration to areas less affected by climate change. Because it is one of the states regarded as least vulnerable to climate risks, Wisconsin is considered likely to be a destination for so-called climate refugees.

Lucky us. Wisconsin has become warmer and wetter as the worldwide warming has progressed, but so far has suffered less from dangerous heat, flooding and wildfire than other places. Along the Lake Michigan coastline, the lake-effect breezes that render springs an extension of winter but make summer days cooler are getting new appreciation.

Our place on that coast is about to be witness to one of the great conflicts of the climate-change era—the existential need to curtail fossil-fuel emissions versus the skyrocketing demand for electrical power for data centers.

News reporting about the data center soon to be built in Port Washington has made “gigawatt” a household word. The facility covering more than three square miles of land now occupied by farms and houses will need at least one billion watts of electricity to operate.

Burning natural gas to power this cyber extravaganza would be a backward turn in technology and an accelerant to the carbon clogging of the atmosphere. Elsewhere, a number of data centers are at or near 100% reliance on renewable energy. It is becoming obvious that will not be the case for the Port Washington data center.

If existing wind and solar power sources here are inadequate, the data center should be put on hold until they catch up. But as things stand, it is speeding toward Port on skids greased by federal, state and local government entities and the economic power of the corporate giants of the data industry.

We Energies is gearing up to provide adequate electricity for the Port data center and the Microsoft center under construction in Mount Pleasant. Most of the power it will sell to its these needy customers will apparently be derived from fossil fuel, at least for the foreseeable future.

We Energies has already submitted plans to the Public Service Commission for $2 billion in natural gas infrastructure to meet data center demands that a company spokesman described as “unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

We Energies has promised to invest $9 billion in renewable energy over a period of years, but has said nothing about what role, if any, this will have in meeting data center electricity needs.

In some parts of the country, the rush to power data centers has come at the expense of other ratepayers, with the cost of the infrastructure needed only by data centers added to electric rates paid by businesses and homeowners.

Fortunately, that probably won’t be happening in Wisconsin if the PSC approves the special rates proposed by We Energies for data centers. Under the proposal, the cost of the high-voltage transmission lines that will pass over homes and yards in the Town of Port Washington on the way to the data center, the 40-acre substation and other electrical infrastructure to be built will be charged to the data center owner but not other ratepayers.

This is welcome news but small comfort if the electricity delivered by that infrastructure is generated by carbon-producing gas.