This article was originally published at The Empowerment Alliance and is re-published here with permission.
As anyone living in states with contested U.S. Senate and House races can attest, data centers are at the heart of this season’s political attack ads. Candidates who have expressed past support for the facilities that power artificial intelligence are portrayed as villains responsible for the rise in energy costs and a myriad of other societal ills – with the attacks often coming from candidates who themselves once supported data centers.
“Politicians Who Once Championed Data Centers Are Now Bashing Them,” blared a recent Wall Street Journal story. “The Data Center Backlash Bursts Into the Midterms,” chimed in the New York Times over the weekend. News outlets across the country are repeating the same refrain. One Ohio state lawmaker with whom I recently spoke recalled a conversation with data center backers who were pointing fingers at others for demonizing the facilities.
“You want to know who to blame?” he said he told them as he clicked the mirror feature on his phone and held it up to their faces. “That’s who to blame,” he told them.
Indeed, the data center industry and the public officials who helped attract them to their states have done a lousy job of explaining their benefits and pushing back on unfair accusations. And they have been slow to allay understandable community concerns about impacts on electricity costs and the environment. But it’s a sign of how misguided many of the attacks can be when media outlets from across the ideological spectrum agree that they’re out of bounds.
Let’s start with the liberal media. A recent New York Times article headlined “What If America Went Completely Dark?” examined the precarious condition of the U.S. power grid. While the article went too far in presenting what almost amounted to a blueprint for bad actors on how to destroy the grid and plunge the U.S. into chaos, buried within the story were data center facts that deserve much more elaboration.
Far from being a detriment to the overall energy picture, data centers will more likely be part of the solution. The Times, almost reluctantly, acknowledged as much, admitting that data centers are driving important changes in the bulk power system.
“If you squint, you can envision data centers as a vehicle for bringing about all sorts of useful changes to the grid,” the Times story conceded, apparently with a hard squint.
Increasingly, new data centers are taking advantage of advancements in battery technology and their increased size and storage capacity. As the Times story noted, “Batteries, in turn, allow us to make better use of the power already available on the grid: If they can kick in at moments of peak demand, we can operate much closer to that peak around the clock.”
While the proliferation of data centers might include short-lived price spikes, their long-term value and the innovation they bring will be well worth any short-term pain. Another major liberal newspaper, the Washington Post, also recently awoke to the unfair attacks on data centers and their indisputable value.
In an editorial on Aug. 20 headlined, “How data centers can stanch the political bleeding,” the Post – acknowledging that data centers have been losing the PR war – nevertheless noted that they “are an important national resource,” and pointed to Virginia’s Loudoun County as creating a roadmap for how local communities can take full advantage of the benefits of data centers.
“Taxes on data-center equipment are expected to bring in about $1.3 billion next year, roughly 40 percent of county revenue,” the Post editorial noted. “The municipality has built beautiful new schools, parks and recreation centers while allowing officials to cut residential property-tax rates by about 30 percent over the past decade.”
The Post added that data center construction “is creating well-paid work for electricians and Americans in other skilled trades,” and that the emerging AI technology can make people “wealthier and more productive.”
On the other end of the political spectrum, the conservative National Review also recently weighed in courtesy of a column by senior writer Noah Rothman headlined, “Is There No Cure for the Data Center Hysteria?”
After recapping the political attacks and countering with facts and the benefits that AI will ultimately bring, Rothman effectively gets to the bottom line: “The nation that achieves AI dominance sets the rules of the road and cements its dominance in a field that everyone on earth will want a piece of. If China is the victor, not only does the U.S. lose that market, it will find itself playing catch-up in the field of AI military applications — faster real-time decision-making, refined targeting and coordination capabilities, better autonomous systems, and such.”
Who knows whether the opposition by many voters to data centers – driven in part by a China-backed social media campaign – can be reversed by the midterm elections. But a crucial solution to the United States’ energy challenges should not fall prey to misleading attack ads and fearmongering smear campaigns.
Data centers are facilitating the very technology that can help modernize the grid, enhance our energy security, and ensure that the U.S. – not China – is the world leader in the technology that will shape the 21 st century and beyond. We should be championing those objectives, not cowering from them.
Gary Abernathy is a longtime newspaper editor, reporter and columnist. He was a contributing columnist for the Washington Post from 2017-2023 and a frequent guest analyst across numerous media platforms. He is a contributing opinion columnist for The Empowerment Alliance, which advocates for realistic approaches to energy consumption and environmental conservation.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
