Data Center Consent Was Bought Locally, in Writing

In June the town of Rural Hall, North Carolina, did something its council had spent weeks resisting: it approved a data center. The project had not changed. What changed was that the developer put it in writing — the town could annex the site, pulling it inside its own borders, and collect the tax revenue from it. ^[1] That is the mechanism, and it is the only one that worked all year: money written into a local instrument, where the people it is owed to can enforce it. Mayor Terry Bennetts did the arithmetic out loud.

If the county decides to do it, and we do nothing, we get nothing. — Terry Bennetts

Set that transaction down as the measure for everything after it. For the rest of the year, an offer of money for a data center cleared or failed on one question: was it written where a town could enforce it? Where the money is written, the price is real. In Virginia's Loudoun and Prince William counties, fifteen years of taxes on computer equipment have lifted education spending per resident 77 to 82 percent and let some homeowners' property-tax rates fall. ^[2] The economist Yingqi Xu cautions that tax revenue does not turn into public spending dollar for dollar. The refusals are as instructive, each carrying its own number. Nobles County, Minnesota, turned down a 400-megawatt project promising 1,000 construction jobs and $12.8 million a year in new taxes. ^[3] In Killeen, Texas, commissioners rejected a project pitched as a stabilizer for the local grid, and one resident asked the question no presentation answered.

I’ve not seen a single citizen say that it was beneficial to their community. That’s why I’m asking you, where can I find if you’re saying that this is beneficial to us? — Scedric Moss

In Liberty, Missouri, residents are fighting a project that already carries $1.4 billion in bonds and $200 million in tax abatements — the breaks that erase a property owner's bill. ^[4] TigerDC walked its $3 billion project out of Spartanburg County, South Carolina, after the council reversed on incentives, saying it would focus on communities ready to move forward. ^[5] In Wisconsin, developers paying up to 17 times fair-market value for land reached the sellers, not the towns. ^[6] The one time a state wrote the check, the check shrank. Indiana's HB 1210 was drafted to compensate local governments for the strain a data center puts on roads and utilities, but after private meetings between lawmakers and industry lobbyists it was cut from a Senate-endorsed minimum of 1 percent of electricity and equipment costs to at most one penny of the seven-cent sales-tax exemption — a $500 million electric bill now sends locals at most $350,000 instead of at least $5 million. ^[7] The bill's sponsor conceded the result.

I don't know that's really going to move the needle. — Craig Snow

The meter keeps running regardless. In July, 173,598 households in ten states had their electricity shut off, up 28 percent in the hottest month on record. ^[8] In the PJM grid — the auction where utilities buy the right to future power — capacity prices jumped from $28.92 to $329.17 per megawatt-day. ^[9] More than 300 municipalities have paused data center approvals, and the governors of Texas and Pennsylvania pulled back — one pausing approvals on roughly 1,800 Texas projects, the other signing an executive order to rein the technology in. ^[10][11] The year's federal instruments have all been voluntary: the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, with roughly 200 signatories, was dismissed by the Sierra Club as "paper-thin." ^[12] The stick ran beside the carrot, in the president's own words.

You can’t fight it. You have to go with it. — Donald Trump

On September 29, the president proposed paying host communities directly, with dividends and bonuses to residents and teachers. ^[13] He named it the way a person names a thing they want heard as a payout.

The people are going to benefit directly, whether its teachers that get paid a bonus, whether its people that live in the community that get paid a dividend you could call it a dividend because a dividend sounds right, they are going to greatly benefit by what's happened. — Donald Trump

The proposal landed the same afternoon he signed another non-binding accord with six AI companies, insisting that the companies policing themselves mattered most. ^[14] What the year's record requires of any such offer is money written where a county can enforce it. Nothing in the dividend is written where any town can hold it. The one demonstrated way to clear a host community's opposition is locally written, enforceable revenue; the one way to falsify that pattern is a dividend legislated into binding local payments that demonstrably clears opposition. That has not happened. And the idea is not a lonely one — Bernie Sanders and Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon have pushed versions of the same payout from the other side of the aisle. ^[15] Dividend is the language of money a recipient can count on. Nothing in the proposal yet does that counting for any town. The year's transactions say nothing short of it has cleared a vote.