Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres: 'People are going to get screwed'

I can actually speak to this as someone in ruralish Pennsylvania whose town is going through one of these backlashes pretty heavily.

The major issue, at least in my neighborhood, is location more than anything else. We have a lot of industrially zoned areas that are great for data center location, and where they could be surrounded by other established industrial builds (think soda bottling plants, warehouses, transportation depos, semiconductor fabs, etc.) All the infrastructure is built out, electricity needs, etc. There is also a ton of land that exists that could be used for this purpose pretty distantly from town centers, if you can convince the gov/owners to part with it.

But despite this, the folks who want to expand data centers are instead trying to push instead into residential areas, or otherwise on land that would basically butt you up against pre-existing neighborhoods. Where I lack insight is if it's a matter of industrial property being too expensive compared to the swathes of otherwise unused land (at least that isn't used for state forests or whatnot,) or if there just literally is no room available for what they want to build out. But all the aspects of having bought your land to be in a residential area suddenly become way busy, value might go down because it's now in this weird quasi-industrial zone.

While there are legitimate concerns about the electricity/water usage, I (tinfoil hat) think that this is more of a game of influence/propaganda/state-level i […]