Amazon data center is a bad deal for locals

VICKSBURG, Miss. (VDN) — Aside from the immediate concern from farmers about the huge strain that data centers put on local aquifers, there is also rising worry that there have been NO assurances from Amazon that energy costs will not rise for locals, nor have they agreed to any standard for potential workers.

The intense demands that data centers place on regional resources make for complicated decision-making at the local level. Communities and regional water officials must engage in discussions about data centers early on, and with a coordinated, holistic understanding of existing resources and potential impacts on the energy grid and the watershed.  Vicksburg, with its award-winning drinking water, should be concerned.

Amazon’s data center in Morrow County, Oregon (constructed 2011) is using water that’s already contaminated with industrial agriculture fertilizer runoff to cool down its ultra-hot servers. When that contaminated water hits Amazon’s sizzling equipment, it partially evaporates—but all the nitrate pollution stays behind. That means the water leaving Amazon’s data centers is even more concentrated with pollutants than what went in.

After that extra-contaminated water leaves Amazon’s data center, it then gets dumped and sprayed across local farmland in Oregon. From there, the contaminated water soaks straight into the aquifer that 45,000 people drink from.

The result is that people in Morrow County are now drinking from taps loaded with nitrates, with some testing at 40, 50, even 70 parts per million. (For context: the federal safety limit is 10 ppm. Anything above that is linked to miscarriages, kidney failure, cancers, and “blue baby syndrome.”)

There are less water-intensive ways to cool data centers, including closed-loop water systems, which require more electricity, and immersion cooling, in which servers are submerged in a bath of liquid, such as a synthetic oil, that conducts heat but not electricity, but these methods are more expensive for Amazon.

Data centers are among the reasons ratepayers nationwide have seen their electric bills increase at twice the rate of inflation in the past year. Part of that is the new infrastructure data centers will require, such as new power plants, transmission lines, or other investments. Those costs, as well as ongoing grid maintenance and upgrades, are typically shared by all electric customers in a service area, through charges added to utility bills.

If a utility makes that huge investment, but the data center eventually closes or needs much less electricity than projected, it’s the ratepayers who will foot the bill, not the data center.

Though data centers make significant contributions to local coffers, most of the jobs they create are rooted in their construction, not their ongoing operation, and thus are largely temporary.

AOL had its headquarters in what’s known as Data Center Alley in Virginia.   At its peak, it had 5,300 employees on that site. The campus has since been demolished, and three large data center facilities are being built on the site.  There’s a big fence around it for security purposes, so it’s totally isolated from the community now, and it is only going to employ about 100 to 150 people on the same piece of land. 

In Prince William County Virginia, on-site diesel generators—thousands of them, each the size of a rail car—spew diesel fumes, creating air quality issues. While such generators are officially classified as emergency backup power, data centers are permitted to run them for “demand response” for 50 hours at a time.  That’s a lot of air pollution locally. That’s particulate matter and NOx [nitrogen oxides], which impacts growing lungs of children, can add cases of asthma, and can exacerbate heart disease and other underlying diseases in the elderly.  Not to mention the noise.

It is also worth mentioning that union electricians at the Compass Data center in Statesville, NC start at $15/hr, less than a fast-food employee.

Vicksburg needs its elected officials to fight for a good deal for its community before Amazon is given carte blanche to exploit local resources.  We need assurances for fair, local hiring practices, no rising electricity costs and transparency surrounding impacts on air and water.

-Nina Nichols