The factories in Maine employ thousands of people. Bath Iron Works alone has over 7k employees.
The Lewiston datacenter that was planned to be built was expected to employ less than 30.
The people that own these data centers have only themselves to blame. They’ve been obnoxious, at scale, for so long that damn near everybody knows how much they suck, and they’re losing their ability to railroad locals into eating their turd sandwiches.
Edit: I know it’s gauche to talk about votes here, but this comment trended upward consistently for 45 minutes. In much less than 10 minutes, it collected more than half that amount in downvotes. I’d eat my hat if there wasn’t some kind of organized/automated brigading happening here.
Edit again: Now close to 70% gone. Not exactly surprising given the forum, but pretty depressing nonetheless.
They really shouldn't be.
There is a need for them and they aren't inherently damaging. There's no reason they can't be placed under some environmental regulations that cancel all their negatives, at least on some places. And they would still pay taxes.
But no, datacenter owners are using their connections to remove any regulation instead.
The cynicism of residents is reasonable. They've have to be highly educated to actually understand the implications of what they're doing and how that revenue can be distributed. America's decline lends itself toward small-town corruption, where patronage is more important than communitarianism, due to large and accelerating net worth inequality, and an economy where outcomes are based on inheritance over labor.
This explains the logic behind an outright ban. You don't have to be vigilant about corruption and the principle-agent problem if the thing is just banned.
I dont think this is entirely true. Maybe not the first wave of data centers, but there are a lot of factors that go into the cost calc and its possible that it would still be worth it to build them even if taxed.
About a decade ago, a bunch of data center companies got fantastic deals with my city (low/no tax). People are pretty upset about it. A few years in there was a report on how many people they employeed. I think combined it was under 10 who lived in the area.
there are real competitive differences to locations and the best locations will likely be able to afford to tax. lets say they all go solar power, then places that are good for solar and it doesnt snow or have as many cloudy days relative to other places will be able to tax more than other places and possibly still have it be the most economical choice.
They also cant build them all in the same spot or move them that easily after they are built. It might be smarter to agree to be taxed and have an amicable relationship with the community you build the data center in rather than risk them changing the law after its already built because youre screwing them over.
The community is a heck of a lot poorer now because they were convinced to offer incentives for a factory that never came. Once these firms can dangle hope in return for tax treatment or infrastructure, then you have a zero-sum game between townships where the winner — if there is a winner — ends up being the firm first, and the loser — if there is a loser, will be the township first.
So basically steal legitimacy from real environmentalists by applying their label to something that's not really motivated by environmentalism but can be construed that way?
"They don't actually want what I'm selling so I'm gonna dress it up as something else, they'll never know"
AreWeTheBaddies.jpg
The other problem you're gonna have is that this isn't an original thought. You're at least 20yr late to the party. So, so, so much absolute garbage has sailed under the flag of environmentalism that the public is starting to be more critical (see for example the kerfuffle over wind turbines off Rhode Island) and it's not unforeseeable that eventually the environmentalists are gonna have some sort of purge or reformation or reversion to more traditional environmentalism and serving corporate interests in order to reclaim some lost respect/legitimacy. Trying to sail "obviously not primarily about the environment" stuff under the flag of environmentalism is only gonna hasten that.
In a particular state in the midwest. The regulator has adopted the policy of "no new septics". You have to do a mound system at great cost. No rule, no code, no performance standard, just an unofficial policy of "we don't approve those". I know someone who's got a textbook perfect property for a traditional septic. They don't care. The shit pump people are laughing all the way to the bank.
It's all so tiresome.
One solution: local taxes on the economic value generated by the data center. MNCs love to play accounting games, so a simple formula based on metered GWh multiplied by reported worldwide revenue with a scaling factor a fraction of a percentage. This fund should be ring-fenced be address whatever externalities are introduced by the data center, including electric bill subsidies, infra maintenance, and funding independent oversight.
Many municipalities are unequipped to deal with a "datacenter" because on paper it is the same as an office building (that draws a lot of power), where it should be treated like an industrial site (rail yard, factory).
The old datacenters are analogous to office buildings that emit some unusual noise and consume large amounts of electricity.
The new ones (ie gigawatt class) consume enough electricity for ~1 million households and at minimum enough water for 100k households (but possibly many times that).
It's the sort of externality that could be solved with a well placed megaproject. A related question to my mind is why we're building such expensive strategic assets in the open rather than under a mountain.
Delved too greedily and too deep learning!
Unlock the FUN
Can datacenters load shed when requested? If not, they should be paying a premium/spot market prices for power if they arent participating in load management.
Local utility would ask them to shunt to the generators now and then during potential rolling blackout situations.
If we put them anywhere — and I’m not convinced we really need all of the data centers we have, let alone all the ones we’re building — they should not be in the middle of densely populated areas like Lewiston.
i completely agree that we should be looking into modelling this in terms of what is possible to mitigate its impact and what does that look like with current technology and costs, and where would we need to develop new tech, and what would be the critical values to hit to consider mitigation a success
Noise from data centers is a real issue, but Benn's measurements and analysis are not great (speeding up the sample rate to demonstrate frequency effects is just wrong, among other issues).
- It's not really fair to blame datacenters for using the municipality's electricity and then blame them again for being loud and generating electricity instead of using the municipality's electricity. Any given datacenter is only doing one of these.
- Presumably, the municipality's tax dollars benefit the people who live in the municipality in the form of better services
First, the gp comment says the data center is not good for existing residents - obviously true for housing too, which you didn't refute.
Then it assumes statewide ban should be based on personal preference of local residents. That is just a definition of nimbyism. While in reality I am a YIMBY and the end was part sarcasm, I would genuinely prefer living next to a data center, rather than next to non immigrant poor in the US. I grew up lower middle class or poor by US standards, and also live in Seattle, lots of experience. So I say along with data centers we have a statewide ban on anyone who is lifetime net consumer of tax money anywhere near my backyard.
My national government is currently giving massive tax breaks for one of these. It's going to be, after all, "the biggest foreign investment in the country ever"...
And presumably everybody in Lewiston already has lunch somewhere, so a new sandwich shop that was successful would put another lunch spot out of business, for a net zero jobs.
Edit: the larger point here is that jobs, particularly skilled jobs, don't grow on trees (much like money). New technologies and new jobs replace old technologies and old jobs. If you put a ban on new technologies and new jobs, you'll just have more unemployed people.
Tack a new building that size onto Bath Ironworks? That’s a huge boon. Heck even an Amazon warehouse would be an improvement. But a data center? For the people in Lewiston, it would be far more of a negative than a positive — and that’s the way it works in this country. We value money over people. If private equity, venture capitalists or huge corporations want something that you don’t want, you lose. Getting a policy win is a rarity and I’d be surprised if it didn’t get successfully challenged in court.
If so, thirty jobs are on the plus side. What's on the minus side?
* further down east than Lewiston but, there was a time I was the damm foreigner from the big city.
a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more than 30 people.
(the # of jobs angle is not the right approach if you are a proponent of new datacenters. there are much stronger arguments to be made)
Fast food chains are damaging to human health.
replace "mcdonalds" with "specialty health foods" or "flower shop" or "independent book store" or whatever and my points remains unchanged: job numbers arent an argument in favor of datacenters, they are an argument against them.
You have a guard, some remote hands, maintenance, maybe additional security or two, times 4 for the various shifts. 30 sounds about right.
Even 20 years ago the datacenters I worked with often had fewer employees onsite than "visitors" - because they rented out racks.
Count the cars here: 36.242186561973, -95.32619746715035
[…]the data center would have employed only about 30 workers, the city estimated.
I'm not trying to be facile here but let's be honest the environmental concerns are silly. I don't want to hear about electricity shortages from a state hellbent on NIMBY-ing itself out of power[1],[2].
I understand people are threatened by this technology, the tech CEOs' loud pronouncements can cause that and that these arguments are basically threat responses. I buy that. But to hear otherwise smart people say non-chemical industrial factories are a serious environmental threat but if they provided more jobs it would be fine while everyone nods along, feels like I'm living in an Adam McKay satire.
[1]: https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-04-08/bill-removin...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-reject-q...
You're right that there's tension between 'not enough power' and 'no new heavy loads' but it's not hypocritical to argue that megawatts of power should be allocated towards 7k jobs rather than a few dozen if possible. That's exactly the kind of tradeoff a power-constrained state should be explicitly making. The logic behind it is not satirical, it's just triage.
On top of that, this is not a blanket ban of AI datacenters. It's a temporary blocking of any new datacenters that require more than 20 megawatts until late 2027 pending a PUC study on how these datacenters will affect their existing grid. It also creates a new council for researching and coordinating the creation of new datacenters, so this really doesn't seem like any sort of NIMBY action here.
Honestly the only major issue I have with the bill is that it neglects to distinguish self-powered facilities that don't provide much strain on the grid. Though it could be argued that water consumption of these centers might be the reason for it.
Indeed! And we also shouldn't forget the CO2 and NOx emissions from gas-powered turbines (on some)... Also IIRC 9+°C warming in the surrounding areas, loud droning noise, and I seem to recall that there might have also been local water well pollution.