Data center development has become a hot topic this summer. According to Hannah Wiseman, professor of law at Penn State Dickinson Law, homeowners may be in for a shock when they pay their power bills at the end of this month, and not just because of an uptick in air conditioning to stay cool during a record-breaking heat wave.
Wiseman recently authored a blog examining the impact that data centers are having on residential electricity prices across Pennsylvania. Electricity prices have been steadily rising over the last decade and show no signs of slowing in the face of massive, football field-wide data centers or suffocating temperatures caused by a global El Niño, she found.
In the following Q&A, Wiseman discusses why these facilities use so much power, whether they fare worse in the summer and what impacted communities or individuals can do to voice their concerns.
What is a data center? Why do they use so much water and electricity?
Wiseman: A data center is basically a big warehouse full of racks of servers that use computer hardware to power cloud computing, multiplayer video games, online purchases and other digital activities. Additionally, they train artificial intelligence (AI) models and use those models to answer our queries. When someone types in a query in most search engines, there's now typically an automatic AI result that pops up every time we search for an answer to a question. When we do that, though, we use a massive amount of electricity and water to both power and cool the center facilitating the search.
