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As a tenant rights advocate by profession, and a renter myself, I know that every dollar counts for working-class families like mine. So I also know that if a data center’s power use drives up the local electric rates, it would be catastrophic to our carefully-balanced budgets.
A single hyperscale data center can use as much energy as 50,000 homes. The US Department of Energy forecasts that data centers will represent up to 12% of all US electricity consumption by 2028, and more than half of their electric power comes from fossil fuels. They have increased the cost of electricity for hundreds of thousands of Americans, including right here in Oregon, and they further strain already-overburdened power grids. As a candidate for Springfield City Council, I stand opposed to higher power bills being imposed on Springfielders or our neighbors.
There’s more than just the cost burden to worry about; they’re also damaging communities. One large data center can use up to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day, enough to supply thousands of households or farms. They emit high-pitched humming noises that disrupt wildlife and nearby residents. Data centers increase local ambient temperatures, creating ‘heat islands’, which is particularly concerning when the Pacific Northwest is now reaching triple-digit temperatures in the summer.
The destruction these sprawling facilities cause to our beloved wilderness is antithetical to our Oregon values. Just one data center can inexorably harm the water, landscape and health of a given city, and yet AI companies are constantly seeking to build and take more.
While the technology has some promise, AI is still a relatively new technology that is woefully unregulated. AI is the foundation for mass surveillance, has inundated the world with false information, and is built on stolen work without compensation. AI threatens our personal privacy, our wellbeing and everything that makes Oregon a wonderful place to call home.
AI companies cite an increase in jobs or economic opportunities as a tempting reason to allow for these data centers, but while they do create short-term construction jobs during the building phase, they don’t offer significant long-term employment opportunities once they’re up and running. The already questionable benefits do not outweigh the very real risks. Let’s utilize our tradespeople for green energy projects that will improve our community instead!
It is for all these reasons that I find myself entirely opposed to the construction of hyperscale data centers, and so I join countless community members in calling for a moratorium on new data center development, along with statewide regulations on existing facilities that, at minimum, address power consumption, water usage, pollution, heat emission, and negative health impacts on surrounding communities.
The working class should not be expected to take on the burden of increased utility costs brought on by data centers. Springfield deserves better than to have its resources plundered by multi-billion-dollar corporations, while they violate our rights to privacy and a livable city.
More than 100 communities across the US have enacted moratoriums. We should be one of them.
