St. Joseph County Council candidate Jan Cervelli Wednesday evening moderated a panel talk about the data center that Microsoft plans to build there. Two statewide advocates urged the tech giant to be more transparent, and they called on county officials to watch out for their constituents.
Fire officials had to limit attendance after more than 200 people packed into a community room at the Harris Library. They heard a panel discussion organized and moderated by Democratic St. Joseph County Council candidate Jan Cervelli.
The panel consisted of Sam Carpenter, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, Ben Inskeep, with Citizens Action Coalition, and Bill Schalliol, the county’s economic development executive director.
Carpenter said state and local officials will need to do more to protect Michiana residents from higher electric bills, once the Microsoft data center is operating.
”In areas where a data center has been developed," Carpenter said, "a lot of times you see increases on everyone’s utility bills, so that’s one of the things we’re concerned about, and we need to make sure the communities have the ability to put protections in place that are enforceable when these types of developments come into place.”
Inskeep, with the Citizens Action Coalition, said he worries about reliability at peak demand times.
”We all rely on a reliable grid to keep our lights on and have all the essentials of participating in day-to-day society, right?" Inskeep said. "So if a data center threatens that reliability, it really is a threat to the community. That’s where we have a lot of concern too because data centers with the amount of power draw, 1000 megawatts or more potentially, these are loads that the utility has never had to do deal with, and certainly not had to deal with many of them on the grid at the same time, operating in ways that they might not have planned for in advance. And when we talk to the grid experts working on these reliability issues, who are the grid engineers, they are very worried about this too. This isn’t something that’s just from the advocates.”
Inskeep also said he hopes Indiana Michigan Power will make Microsoft pay more of the power generation costs than it has with Google’s new data center near Fort Wayne.
“I and M spent hundreds of millions of dollars just to connect them to the grid," Inskeep said. "And instead of sending them the bill, they’re socializing that bill across all AEP customers, so they’re not making the data centers pay. Now I hope that Microsoft is different but there’s been nothing that I’ve seen to date that would suggest that it’s going to be any different. And that’s a big concern. When the data centers aren’t paying their fair share it means that we are paying some of the cost of that.”
Inskeep said AEP is building two natural gas-fired power plants to power the data center.
Carpenter said the county should ensure Microsoft agrees to compensate the county if they ever stop using the data center, or if they use its buildings much less as technology changes.
”There’s uncertainty about how AI is even going to function," Carpenter said. "These big centralized power draws, is that going to be the model in 10 years? There’s a lot of companies that are exploring different options about how to power these things, more kind of grid-edge they call, and smaller scale. So I think it’s a good question to have, is what are the protections in place if the data center does stop operating. Is there a decommissioning bond on all the technology that’s in there on the cooling systems, different things like that, to protect the community in that instance where the technology shifts, the operation shifts. I think those are good questions to ask.”
Carpenter said local governments need to be freed from nondisclosure agreements, or NDAs, that data center developers make them sign, so there can be more transparency. Schalliol, who is in the middle of negotiating a development agreement with Microsoft, said he is, in fact, under such a non-disclosure agreement.
“In full transparency, yes, we’re operating under an NDA," Schalliol said. "It’s a practice that happens all over the state, we’ve been doing it for years, it’s just the way it works.”
