Hi John,
You’ve probably heard about massive data centers eyeing up Wisconsin for our land and water. But what are these facilities and why should we care?
In our new video, “Data Centers 101,” Anton Kapela takes you inside a small data center in Madison. He shows how even modest facilities use enormous amounts of power and explains how the much larger ones being proposed across the state could use as much energy as entire cities.
All that power doesn’t come cheap. Data centers already eat up about 4.5 percent of all U.S. electricity, and that number is expected to nearly triple by 2028. If utilities keep meeting that demand with gas and coal, we’ll all pay the price through higher bills and more pollution.
These projects also use millions of gallons of water a day and take up hundreds of acres of land, often replacing farmland or open space. It’s a big shift with real consequences for communities across Wisconsin.
But there’s a better way forward: requiring tech companies and utilities to power these projects with clean, renewable energy. And, we need to make sure that data centers pay to ensure that our energy grid stays reliable, affordable, and sustainable.
🎥 Watch “Data Centers 101: An inside look at a Wisconsin data center” to see the inside of a real data center and learn what’s at stake for Wisconsin’s future.
