(The Center Square) – It’s a big achievement–Pennsylvania won out over other states for the largest capital investment in its history, $20 billion from Amazon for data centers and technology infrastructure.
Though the project promises to create over 1,200 jobs, at least initially, not everyone is happy about where things are going.
At the June press conference when Gov. Josh Shapiro announced the historic influx of capital, there was a protest nearby. One reporter asked Gov. Josh Shapiro for his message to the people who oppose the erection of data centers in their communities.
“Obviously local zoning decisions are going to be made by the local government, and we’re going to work hard to make sure we incorporate concerns of the neighbors to make sure this project gets built and also people’s interests are protected,” said Shapiro.
The Center Square sought to better understand some of the common concerns around data centers and why they’ve received pushback in states across the country.
In terms of job creation, the overall number of people working in data centers has risen dramatically nationwide, a 60% increase between 2016 and 2023 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s largely a product of the rapid proliferation of the industry.
Shapiro says job creation means local students in towns like Berwick have “the most to gain” from the new centers, but many argue that these jobs are primarily in construction. According to a 2023 study conducted by the commonwealth of Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, a 250,000 square foot data center can expect to employ about 50 full-time workers after construction has been completed.
That means, while construction jobs will abound in Luzerne and Bucks County where the first two of Amazon’s new centers are being built, in as little as two years, the centers’ employment impact will likely dwindle to a much smaller footprint.
Meanwhile, regardless of where centers are built, the expansion of AI technology itself promises to shift the nature and availability of family-sustaining work globally. In what has been dubbed by many experts as the upcoming “Job Apocalypse,” it’s essentially impossible to predict the future employment landscape for today’s students.
On the other hand, once online, the carbon footprint of those centers will expand, perhaps as exponentially as the technology they harbor has. In Virginia, unconstrained demand for energy is expected to double in the next 10 years, largely as a result of the centers that are springing up in the northern region of the state.
Virginia, like Pennsylvania, gets its power from the PJM grid, one that is already engaged in tan ongoing struggle to keep consumer costs down.
The Amazon center in Luzerne County will be hitching its wagon to the existing Salem Nuclear Power plant, just as Microsoft has cut a deal to bring Three Mile Island back online to power its AI technology.
The Center Square spoke with Quentin Good, a policy analyst with Frontier Group, about the impact of data centers on energy and the environment. Good said that the first thing that happens when a data center is announced is that the local utility will begin to incorporate it into their planning, sometimes delaying the expected closure of coal or gas-fired plants or even considering opening new ones.
This doesn’t just increase the state’s reliance on the fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. It also results in strain on the energy grid and expensive upgrades. According to Good, the infrastructure required to connect data centers to the grid is expensive.
“Those infrastructure costs to an extent, especially in the short run, will be passed on to normal, everyday ratepayers like households and small businesses,” said Good. “And, you know, prices will go up likely in the short term for energy.”
Amazon as a company has a 2040 goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, which is good news for those concerned about environmental harm from the centers, but in the meantime, Good says clean energy sources simply aren’t coming online fast enough to meet the demands of big tech. That’s where some see nuclear power as a promising option, even if its potential hasn’t yet been met.
“They’re also sort of banking on new nuclear technology that hasn’t really been advanced yet to the point where it’s going to be effective in the way that we think it is. And that’s something called small modular reactors,” said Good. “I think there’s a great hope among data centers and the AI industry that small modular reactors will be a technology that sort of matures over the next 10 years and become more widely available.”
Good added that at this point, a good way to way to store or dispose of the nuclear waste created by power plants still hasn’t been developed. Salem, like most other nuclear facilities, stores it on-site, an environmental concern that has long plagued the otherwise clean energy source.
As for protests from local community members?
“We have seen pushback from communities, from local groups, but they are not approaching it as much from the environmental angle,” said Good. He said they’re saying, “It’s big and ugly and really loud, and it’s ruining my perfect idea of the town that I wanted to retire in.”
