This post was originally published on The American Spectator.
They’re big. Like really big.
So big, in fact, that as you drive by them on the highway, your brain plays tricks on you. You know this because the nearby trees look like wooden toy trees from a child’s train set.
Colossal buildings assigned colossal tasks necessarily take up colossal resources and put a colossal strain on local communities — or so the logic goes among residents who are worried about practical things like the cost of electricity and water wherever data centers are being built. You can argue until you’re blue in the face about whether data centers are really all that bad, but the fact is, they’re wildly unpopular. (RELATED: Why Aren’t Our Modern-Day Robber Barons Giving Us Robber-Baron Benefits?)
Gallup polling from a few months ago found that seven in 10 Americans are either strongly opposed or somewhat opposed to data centers being built in their local area. For comparison, just 53 percent of Americans said the same about nuclear power plants when asked in the same poll. (RELATED: The Backyard Problem of Data Centers)
It’s not split down party lines either. The 56 percent of Democrats who are strongly opposed to data centers in their communities are joined by 39 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of independents. As a general rule, the Midwest and South are slightly more anti-data-center than everyone else.
What, you ask, is the problem with data centers? Well, the responses vary. Some opponents are concerned about noise and pollution. Others are worried that the potential demand on the electric grid could drive up electricity costs while the massive amount of water needed to cool down computers could deplete an area’s water resources. To be sure, there are responses to most of these concerns, but what matters here isn’t the content of the debate, but its context. (RELATED: Electricity Affordability — Trump’s Achilles’ Heel?)
Data centers, it turns out, seem to be turning into a crucial issue for November
Take the Senate race in Ohio, which is…
