During a House Oversight Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) questioned Tyson Slocum, the Energy Program Director at Public Citizen, about the effects of data centers on local communities.
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00:00With that, I recognize Mr. Frost for his five minutes of questions.
00:04Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
00:05Artificial intelligence requires massive data centers.
00:09Meta's planned Louisiana data center will cover over 4 million square feet.
00:13When you realize how large these centers are, it's a little less surprising that a single center can consume as much electricity as an entire city's population.
00:22Mr. Slocum, can you talk to us about why data centers consume so much energy?
00:27Yeah, data centers consume so much energy because they are filled with sometimes millions of microprocessors that are doing computations, and that takes enormous amounts of energy.
00:40Increasingly, those microprocessors are computing those calculations more efficiently.
00:47But as you add more and more capacity, you are increasing energy demand.
00:53And so there are, I believe, requirements that data centers should have to improve the efficiency of these facilities.
01:05And a lot of that can be through things like demand response.
01:08Very often, very large data center operators, whether it's Meta or Blackstone or Google or Microsoft, they have data centers in multiple locations.
01:19And you can coordinate operations of these facilities and reduce consumption in one, increase consumption in another based upon peak loads of available generation, depending upon the hour of the day.
01:34There are all sorts of smart ways to use large energy loads.
01:39The concept of demand response has been around for more than a generation.
01:45We're not seeing it as widely adopted in the data center field as it should be.
01:49And so before we start committing to building a lot of new power generation assets and associated infrastructure,
01:57we should instead be asking one of the most profitable industries on earth,
02:02are you doing all you can to manage that energy load responsibly in concert with local communities that are asked to host these facilities?
02:12And just briefly, what are the impacts on working families in these communities?
02:18They can be significant.
02:19First, as you mentioned in your opening statement, sometimes these facilities are not significant job creators.
02:25They are often negotiate deals with disadvantaged local governments that are outlawyered and outgunned to give away lots of tax breaks that compromise local districts' ability to fund basic government operations like infrastructure and schools and so forth.
02:48But you also have discrete environmental issues.
02:51As you noted in your opening statement, these facilities come with massive arrays of on-site diesel generators.
02:58And so those generators kick on, sometimes during regular testing, sometimes because of issues with the regional power market.
03:08Those diesel generators are not clean-burning facilities.
03:11It's like parking rows of 18-wheeler trucks in front of your house and turning them on all at once.
03:18There's also noise pollution associated with these facilities.
03:21They're not always the best neighbor.
03:23Yeah, yeah.
03:25I appreciate it.
03:26You know, but at the same time, obviously, you know, it is here, right?
03:31And I think part of our job in Congress is to ask all the questions, right?
03:35We want to know how we can spur innovation.
03:38We also want to know how we can protect working families, and I think in terms of technology, this institution traditionally has not been the best at asking all the questions and then legislating, having all the answers in mind.
03:51And look no further than social media and where we currently are, where we drag our feet on passing good common sense legislation, and then we freak out when it completely gets out of hand and try to pass lazy legislation, like we have tried to do over the past few years on this.
04:09And so I think it's really important, and I know the chair brought up this pivot, which I think AI is going to be very helpful in a lot of different places, even in terms of figuring out how we're going to deal with the climate crisis, right?
04:23I think there's a lot here.
04:25However, when we use that, when we talk about the pivot, there's a lot of people worried about it, including people like my aunt, who spent a long time as a customer service representative, right?
04:34When we talk about manufacturing line workers, when we talk about the American worker, our job is not to ask the questions of just one set of people, but of all people, especially the working American.
04:43And I'd love to see us think a little bit more about this holistically as well.
04:49Just really quick, I have like no time left, but I'm just curious.
04:52There are ways, and you talked about it, that we can work at curtailing a lot of these environmental impacts.
04:58Do you have any other ones top of mind?
04:59Yeah, I think trying to make sure that you have zero emission, clean energy resources, wind, solar, coupled with onsite battery storage would be a very sustainable way that isn't going to be disrupting the local community.
05:13not adding to climate destruction, and providing reliable, affordable energy for these centers.
05:20Yeah, and I think this is a place where we can talk more about it.
05:23We've had meetings on this too, talking about permitting reform, especially as it relates to moving forward with clean energy.
05:29So, thank you. I yield back.