Guy Gordon (00:01.323)
Hello and welcome to another edition of the Facts Matter Podcast. I’m Guy Gordon for the Citizens Research Council of Michigan. Today we’re going to tackle perhaps one of the most highly debated, highly charged issues in Michigan right now, and that is data centers. We’re going to try to lower the temperature. We’re going to try to take some of the emotion out of it. But if you listen to supporters, this is an economic opportunity that we would be foolish to ignore or to not exploit. If you listen to opponents.

This is something that will lead to environmental ruin, higher utility prices, economic problems, also a change in the culture of the areas in which these data centers are located. Where does the truth lie? Well, somewhere in between, and we’re going to try to give you the facts to make your own judgments today. Let’s get started with Eric Paul Dennis, research associate for the Citizens Research Council of Michigan for infrastructure, who has spent easily the last four months and probably more, if you include the OT looking into this. Hello, Eric.

Eric (01:08.822)
Howdy guy, great talking to you.

Guy Gordon (01:10.483)
All right, first off, we should take some of the the mystification of these data centers away for a moment because they’ve been with us for a long time. kind of give us a a little bit of a historical perspective on

Eric (01:24.162)
Yeah, data center is basically just a building that houses IT equipment, servers, CPUs, GPUs. It ho stores and processes data that we all use. And they have been with us since basically as long as computers. but they have been evolving first with the transition from storing and processing data on, you know, our own computers to this cloud compu

cloud computing concept. and now with new artificial intelligence tools, the investments in data centers and the size of data centers is becoming bigger and much different.

Guy Gordon (02:10.219)
So we’ve had data centers for a long time. What changed the discussion? And they were not controversial. What changed the discussion? Was it their association with AI or their size, these hyperscale centers?

Eric (02:25.1)
I think both. the

This new concept of AI hyperscale centers is actually evolution and somewhat different from what we had even seen before. the first hyperscale centers were built about a decade ago and were essentially just scaled up versions of what we had before, but they were doing normal computing things. this is the kind of stuff that allowed us. So, for example, when I started at the Citizens Research Council, we had

An interior office in our main office in Livonia with a rack of servers. And that our president Eric Lufer was our data center operator, and he managed that’s where our email lived and our website lived and things like that. recently we moved to Microsoft Cloud. So now all of the Citizens Research Council data lives somewhere else, maybe Ohio or Indiana, but in the cloud. and so

That those were those are usually hyperscale centers, but they’re not quite as hyperscale as these mega AI centers that are yeah, using gigawatts of electricity.

Guy Gordon (03:37.355)
Hundreds of acres.

Guy Gordon (03:43.691)
So I I mean we we we certainly understand that people have concerns about this hiking utility bills and we’ll get to all of those reservations and consequences in just a moment. But how much is just the general fear of AI muddying up the discussions about data centers and just the term data center now, no matter the scale, apparently i has become an issue.

Eric (04:09.848)
Yeah, I think quite a bit. even before data centers were the center of this controversy, this concept of tech lash emerged. a lot of people just not being really comfortable with the way that society was going based on the way that these very large technology companies are influencing it, which I understand. these are some of the most powerful.

entities that have ever existed in human history and they’re changing our life very quickly in ways that isn’t always comfortable.

Guy Gordon (04:49.865)
Right. And but one of the main takeaways I think from your paper, which for our viewers and listeners can be found at CRCMish dot org, is we really need to separate our concerns about AI, the consequence of AI, the disruptive nature of AI. We really need to kind of separate that into a separate bucket and talk about the data centers without the fear and the debate over that clouding the issue. They really need to remain separate and distinct and really look at

all of these data centers on a case by case basis because we’re seeing what would normally be considered benign data centers getting shot down.

Eric (05:27.566)
Correct.

Whatever happens with the advancement of AI and its deployment into society and the economy, we really can’t impact that by denying a data center in Michigan. they’ll just go to the next state. If a bunch of states somehow deny them, they’ll go to the next country, maybe they’ll go underwater or on the moon, who knows? But by fighting data centers, it’s not a very effective way to have discussions about the

implications for artificial intelligence.

Guy Gordon (06:04.636)
Right. And if that’s your mission is to kind of slow the role of AI, this isn’t a very effective way of doing it. Is is that one of the conclusions?

Eric (06:13.282)
Yeah, and I think concerns about AI are very valid. but denying a data center doesn’t get to that concern.

Guy Gordon (06:17.153)
Absolutely.

Guy Gordon (06:24.737)
Should we consider hyperscale? And let’s I think for the the purposes of this discussion, we’ll narrow this discussion to hyperscale developments. Should they be considered critical infrastructure? Do we lose something here in the state of Michigan if we don’t have them here? Or can we still have the benefits of A well, I mean, well, would we have to forego the benefits of AI if we didn’t locate them here?

Eric (06:50.734)
Even within the hyperscale category, there are

Eric (06:58.328)
There are hyperscale sites run by companies like Google and Microsoft that are basically supporting the cloud. We are probably our conversation is probably being routed through and processed by a hyperscale center, somewhere possibly a co-location center. These AI data centers, is that critical infrastructure? Probably not yet. are these

Language learning models, this distinct type of artificial intelligence that is being focused on now, probably wouldn’t reach the level of critical infrastructure, but it might at some point. but generally data centers, I think, are absolutely critical infrastructure. They anything that you do on a computer or phone, all sorts of business transactions, banks, hospitals, governments, we’re all using data centers.

Guy Gordon (07:49.94)
Right.

Guy Gordon (07:56.097)
But I guess I’m thinking of it in context, for instance, medically. if a a family member of mine is gonna be going to a major research hospital here and they’re going to be using and leveraging AI as a diagnostic tool, does it matter whether we have data centers, hyperscale data centers located here in Michigan or not? Can we still access all the benefits of AI without having them located here?

Eric (08:21.474)
Yes, we have been. data travels at basically the speed of light. The speed of light through fiber optic is a little bit slower than it is through a vacuum, but it’s still thousands of miles per second. Data can travel from here to California in a fraction of a second.

Guy Gordon (08:22.633)
Okay.

Guy Gordon (08:33.994)
Right.

Guy Gordon (08:37.439)
Because when Eric Lufer and I were in in Macon, one of the things that was continually from the business community thrown out there was, you know, to design a vehicle in the future, to shorten the timeline of a vehicle turnaround, we’re going to need to leverage AI and for that we need data centers. Certainly the first two points are probably true. Is the third one true? Do we need to have them here? And it sounds like that they could be anywhere and we can still get the full benefit of AI development for however we may use it, good or ill.

No matter where those hyperscale centers are.

Eric (09:10.21)
Well, the automotive companies have their own data centers. they’re probably not using the commercial LLMs that are, you know, being supported by the new hyperscale AI facility that’s going to be used by OpenAI that runs ChatGPT and Celine now. they’ve got their own tools. I honestly really don’t see the link between the automotive industry and hyperscale AI data centers at a at a local level. to the extent that they

Guy Gordon (09:37.483)
Yeah.

Eric (09:39.778)
do use LLMs, it they don’t need to be anywhere near them really. The people that manage these artificial intelligence tools aren’t even anywhere near them. They’re usually a corporate center or working remotely somewhere.

Guy Gordon (09:55.613)
Okay, let’s break down the economic argument here and the economic benefits of these hyperscale centers. First and foremost, if if we look at them, the major benefit is going to be the construction. If we look at the Celine township, I think it’s twenty five hundred construction workers and the wages they’re getting are better than average, aren’t they?

Eric (10:21.59)
Yeah, because these developers are trying to get these facilities up and running as quickly as possible. They’re paying premiums to the contractors that are able to meet those accelerated schedules who are paying premiums to bring workers in, get everything up and running as quickly as possible. So it is absolutely a boon for the construction industry, contractors and laborers.

Guy Gordon (10:46.057)
And I mean we’ve seen premiums as high as twenty to thirty percent to to draw the labor for these construction projects.

Eric (10:53.782)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that’s one of the big reasons when, you know, there’s public meetings, they usually have some union representatives there speaking in favor of the project.

Guy Gordon (11:02.497)
Sure. Okay, so we get this major benefit, and it’s I mean, we’re talking billions of dollars that are being invested. That is an immediate benefit to the construction industry and those that depend upon it. we have called hyperscale data centers AI factories. That kind of makes it sound like an autofactory or another kind of factory. Do they generate the kind of full time employment positions, so called FTEs?

that a an auto plant would? Do they have the same spin-off jobs that an auto plant would?

Eric (11:38.803)
Not even nearly. so an AI factory is basically turning electricity into data. there’s not a supply chain, it doesn’t take a lot of labor. I my basic my baseline for a hyperscale center is probably gonna be around a hundred FTEs. sometimes less, maybe sometimes a little bit more, but

Guy Gordon (12:01.824)
Okay.

Eric (12:06.082)
They’re they’re not job creators either directly. And there are economic impact studies that have concluded that there is what they call a multiplier effect of sometimes up to nine or ten. that gets into a broader discussion on the methodology and uses of economic impact studies. I think that all multipliers are a little bit high, but especially in this case,

Guy Gordon (12:20.383)
Right.

Eric (12:36.46)
Those multipliers may have been developed years ago when data centers had a different role, probably were still high then. I’m open to the idea that there’s a reasonably high multiplier with data centers. If somebody could just explain to me, specifically, okay, you have this data center with really no local supply chain, 100 people working there. Where are these other nine jobs going to come from? If somebody could just walk you through that and

Guy Gordon (13:03.264)
Right.

Eric (13:05.026)
Give me some detail, I might be on board. But

Guy Gordon (13:07.867)
Right, because an assembly plant for the auto industry, an assembly plant, not a supply plant, but assembly w they always said for one job there were between seven and nine additional jobs to support that assembly plant. So the spinoff effect there, the multiplier effect was quite large. Now we should point out in Celine Township, and this one may be the outlier, in addition to the twenty five hundred construction jobs, there they’re talking about four hundred and fifty permanent jobs.

And at least in Washtenaw County, they’re claiming, according to Crane’s fifteen hundred spinoff jobs.

Eric (13:41.238)
Yeah, that’s not a formal agreement. That’s a statement they made that is still on their website. And I will be surprised if it’s much more than one hundred.

Guy Gordon (13:52.225)
Okay. So we’ve got the initial burst, we don’t have the same crack of the bat or impact that we get from conventional manufacturing sites. is there

a property tax benefit here? Or is there an income tax benefit from the the property, the th in this case these huge servers, expensive servers that are gonna be on site?

Eric (14:23.934)
in operations, there’s very little income tax benefit. again, you’re probably not getting more than a hundred employees or so. Maybe with an average wage of around sixty, seventy thousand dollars. the property taxes can be significant. For Celine Township, their property taxes are going to more than double. and so they’ll be getting.

about two thirds of their revenue from one facility that requires about one percent of their land area. So it’s it can be and that’s with some property tax exemptions, by the way. They’re only paying about half of the millage rate for at least to the to the township directly that goes into their general fund. so it can be an absolute game changer for local governments.

Guy Gordon (15:15.476)
Right.

Guy Gordon (15:20.245)
And that can be translated into a number of things. Better services, better rec centers. Now I think in in Celine there was ten million dollars to the Saline Recreation Center, and I think another fourteen million to fire departments, farmland preservation efforts, things like that. So there are community benefits agreements that can be side agreements as well when they negotiate these things.

Eric (15:43.853)
Yeah, I don’t have those details right in front of me, but it’s very typical that local communities negotiate community benefit agreements not only for monetary contributions, but conditions on the development. and that can be as much of a benefit as the property taxes themselves.

Guy Gordon (16:03.969)
So if they draw two thirds of their current revenue from just this one source, is there potential for property tax rollbacks for individual ratepayers, individual landowners? Loudoun County, Virginia, which has one of the largest cluster of data centers in the county, I think it was eight hundred and ninety million in projected property tax revenue that was twenty six times what it will cost to maintain

the site from the county standpoint. they’ve actually offered tax relief in Loudoun County because of the huge windfall from those hyperscale centers. can is this something that can be written into law? Missouri’s got a a data center piece of legislation that says there must be a tax relief component.

Eric (16:57.336)
I don’t know if it’s necessary to write it into law. We’ve in Michigan, we’ve actually kind of practically done that. the data centers here seem to be getting the what’s called the industrial facilities tax exemption, which decreases most of their millage rates by half. And they’re from what I can tell, not planning on paying any personal property tax. They’re getting

A eligible manufacturing personal property tax exemption, which I think is usually good for at least 15 years, that has to be approved by the Michigan Strategic Fund Board. But so actually, both of those property tax exemptions are, I believe, proposed by the local government, but must be approved by the state. And I suspect that’s actually in part being driven by the state. So it’s part of this overall.

tax exemption policy to attract these d proposals.

Guy Gordon (18:03.435)
So in terms of the

The other side of the tax coin here, there are significant giveaways as well. Sales taxes, use taxes. is that a significant cost that needs to be factored into the equation here, or is that one of those things where, like so many of the government giveaways to get things like this, you say, well, we wouldn’t have any of this if but for?

Eric (18:32.566)
Yeah, I think in at least for the sales and use tax, the AI hyperscale centers almost certainly would not be interested in Michigan without that exemption. this is gonna sound crazy, but I suspect that that AI data center in Celine, they’re probably gonna fill that with about fifty billion dollars of graphic processing units. And so

You know, six percent on that is significant. And actually, those things only last in an AI data center. They’re spooling up and down all the time. They only last three or four years, so they have to replace them frequently as well. So the economics might be the economics are certainly different for traditional smaller co-location centers. They might be different for hyperscale cloud centers. they might be able to

still make the economics work if they have to pay some sales taxes. But at least for these AI data centers, they probably would have no interest in any location where they would be paying paying sales or use tax on those GPUs.

Guy Gordon (19:39.851)
Full boat. We also may have misspoken a few moments ago when we said that property taxes will increase. We meant to say property tax revenues could could double in Celine Township, not taxes. Okay. No, I I it was I just wanted to make sure we clarified that before people began grabbing their chests.

Eric (19:55.406)
Correct, I’m sorry.

In in fact that

Eric (20:05.484)
No, in fact, that could potentially, if Celine Township decides to go this route, they could reduce property taxes and still maintain the same amount of revenue. in fact, one of the there’s been some research that suggests that property values tend to increase in municipalities that host data centers because they can keep property taxes lower because of the revenue.

Guy Gordon (20:13.716)
Exactly.

Eric (20:33.848)
Provided by those data centers. I don’t want to imply that property values always increase. I think there’s some specific instances, if you’re right across the street from one, where your property values might decrease, like if your view shed was part of your property value. But generally in areas of data center concentration, property values tend to be higher.

Guy Gordon (20:38.966)
Right.

Guy Gordon (20:59.659)
So, you know, that kind of leads us into our next discussion. Whether or not your property values go up or down will be impacted by how well the local community, the developer, big tech, and regulators insulate surrounding people from things like pollution, noise pollution, heat islands, a number of the detractions and the downsides, potential downsides, that you illustrate in this. So let’s

We’ve looked at the benefits. Let’s look at the consequences. number one, let’s start with utility impacts, specifically electricity consumption. We know that these hyperscale centers are huge consumers of electricity. The one in Saline, I believe it’s one gigawatt. Can you put into context just how much juice one of these centers will will suck up?

Eric (21:55.245)
Yeah, so

Roughly on average, every person is constantly using about a kilowatt of energy. so a typical household averages about two kilowatts, and you know that can be from one to four or more people. So a gigawatt center that’s the equivalent of basically one million people. So it’s huge. the

Caveat to that is we’re using maybe one kilowatt on average, but sometimes, you know, if we have our air conditioning on, if we’re charging an electric vehicle, if our fridge and dishwasher are running, we’re using more. So things scale up and down, and there’s the electric utilities have to accommodate that grid capacity for when a lot of us are using a lot of power at the same time. So

Guy Gordon (22:53.375)
MISO, the the which is the big regulatory agency that oversees the grids, they build in a a big buffer, right?

Eric (23:02.476)
They do that at the regional level, but each utility also has to do that at the local level. and it gets complicated, but there’s there are redundant policies to make sure that we don’t run out of electricity, which is why it occasionally happens, but very rarely.

Guy Gordon (23:21.651)
Yeah, but if you if you were to drop a million more people into Celine Township rather than a hyperscale center, from a local standpoint, what about the reliability? That seems like, I mean, just that’s a that’s a one of those gobsmacking factoids that you just gave us, Eric. How can the grid accommodate that?

Eric (23:44.813)
Well, because that one gigawatt actually I think it’s one point four at capacity, that one point four gigawatt data center will be drawing basically directly from the transmission grid, which serves the entire region. So it’s almost separated from where residents are getting their power.

Guy Gordon (24:07.627)
So there are overlaid grids here. You have the transmission grid, which is the big towers that we see. And then you have w what is it called? The residential grid or individual grid. The distribution grid. And these overlap.

Eric (24:19.106)
Just the distribution grid. Yeah, the little the they’re connected. So power is generated at power generation stations, then converted through transformers to a different voltage and current and goes through the transmission grid where then it goes it’s distributed through substations of

And then goes to the distribution grid, and that’s where everybody gets their power, including these hyperscale data centers, but they have their own personal distribution circuit. So they’re on a completely different circuit than the rest of us, drawing directly from that transmission grid. And before they can be connected to that transmission grid, there has to be studies to make sure that there’s enough power available for them to connect before they’re allowed to do so.

Guy Gordon (25:17.279)
Which means they may have to have an expansion of generation capacity.

Eric (25:22.296)
Potentially, but in Michigan we have excess generation. so I was saying before, we’re usually using about a kilowatt constantly of power. that

Guy Gordon (25:34.465)
Mm-hmm.

Eric (25:39.395)
Means that sometimes we’re using a lot more and there has to be generation capacity to allow us to use a lot more. And so most of the time there is infrastructure just being unused. And so getting a large data center on the grid makes that infrastructure more efficiently utilized, which actually decreases costs for everyone on that network.

Guy Gordon (26:06.337)
So I mean economics one one would dictate that if you were to add one point four gigawatts of demand into the system, that any time you see that kind of massive increase in demand, there’s going to be a corresponding massive increase in price, right?

Eric (26:25.396)
Utility economics doesn’t follow exactly supply demand economics in the way that you would think. largely because there are returns to scale. utility companies can be much more efficient if they actually are providing more power.

Guy Gordon (26:44.959)
Right. And we we saw this in the seventies with natural gas. The cost of the pipeline can get spread over a greater number of people when you have more gas in the pipeline. So increased demands, you’ve punching you’re you’re putting more production through there. That lowers the at least the fixed cost of maintaining that that system, that distribution system overall.

Eric (26:58.669)
Right.

Eric (27:09.846)
And consider there’s there could be one or two customers that are using half of your natural gas, and so they’re consuming half of that product, but using only a tiny fraction of the infrastructure required to deliver it, which reduces infrastructure costs, which lowers costs for everybody.

Guy Gordon (27:27.211)
So we know that Northern Virginia and Ohio have been kind of leading the league in the construction of these hyperscale data centers. What has been the experience there? Because you you have a graphic that kind of shows this.

Eric (27:42.856)
yeah, so should I pull that up? Actually, so there’s a couple. I’ll start with actually how let me share my screen.

Guy Gordon (27:45.355)
Please.

Eric (28:10.648)
So let’s start here. this is some research that was done by UC Berkeley Energy Laboratory. And they looked at state by state retail electricity prices going back several years and did this really good regression analysis to try to determine why prices were higher in some places than others. And the

Main impact that they found, the the most influential variable is that states with a increasing demand in electricity have lower rates. So more than any anything else, more than renewable energy mandates, more than solar power being on the grid, more than your climate, if you can increase your electricity demand.

You are more likely to provide lower rates.

Guy Gordon (29:10.059)
So we would expect to see almost a hockey stick if it were driving up rates, right? And instead, we see an L-shaped grid where the the horizontal line has a slight decline. Not a massive. I mean it’s not a huge amount of savings or decline in rates, but in Virginia it’s it’s it’s more it it’s about one percent.

Eric (29:33.665)
Yeah, and this was actually this trend was actually more pronounced until just recently. So I will say that in 2025 we may have hit some inflection point, particularly in the PJM transmission region, which includes Virginia and Ohio. in just the last couple of years, they have started seeing their rates increase faster than the national average.

And there are multiple reasons for that. there were some fossil fuel power plants that were brought offline, there was some spikes in natural gas costs last year, but at least a fraction of that was due to this mismatch of projected demand and projected generation, which translated into higher.

Costs in their capacity markets. And so just recently, a few states in the PJM region have seen part of their rate increases related to data’s data center build-out. but that could be a temporary phenomenon. part of that was this happened so fast that the the market

the market structures that they used weren’t really set up to accommodate the uncertainty there. And so regulators at multiple levels are have pretty much gotten their head around that and are dealing with that. So I think that’s likely to be a transient phenomenon. And in the context of overall bills that people are getting, it’s very, very

Guy Gordon (31:26.687)
Well opponents will point to this Eric and say that this is evidence that rates are going up. But is that true or is it a temporary anomaly?

Eric (31:37.684)
It is evidence that rates could go up.

If the market structures and regulatory structures are not ready for it, which happened in the PJM region in the last year. They seem to have gotten on top of that. other places in the country, particularly my we’re on the MISO grid. We were able to learn from that and adjust our policies and markets, and that doesn’t seem to have happened. In fact, so it was the specifically the capacity market in the PJM region.

That saw a price increase due to data center build out. MISO’s last capacity auction is actually down year over year. so we decreased thirty, I think it was about thirty percent for our summer rate in twenty twenty six versus twenty twenty five.

Guy Gordon (32:31.435)
So let’s let that’s that’s a really comprehensive look at the electricity and utility demand and rate equation. And again, we invite listeners and viewers to look at the the the larger piece if you are deeply concerned about this. But that’s a great explanation, Eric. let’s move to water. Michigan has more water. We th we have a natural abundance of it. It seems like we’d be an ideal location for for that reason alone to be a a location for for hyperscale centers.

And I I guess we should point out that again, not all hyperscales are created equal. Not all are huge consumers of water. So break down for us. This is all about cooling. How we cool those massive servers, they use water for that in some cases. Does it necessarily mean that it is, you know, a a huge consumer, or is it the equivalent of of of other developments that we see, like farms and golf courses?

Eric (33:31.156)
It in some cases it can be on the same scale as farms and agriculture. more often than not these days, they’re ac hyperscalers are actually using closed loop systems. it so it’s a a heat exchanger, a heat pump. It’s kind of works the same way that your air conditioner works, right? You expel it it it uses fluid, but then it uses a pressure differential to

Guy Gordon (33:52.587)
Right.

Eric (34:00.729)
Cool down to remove the heat from that fluid, which just is expelled as hot air. So for data centers that are using these closed loop systems, Celina is one of those. They are using water basically for the bathrooms, f the fire system, maybe some maintenance activities, but they’re not really using any more than like a similarly sized office building.

Occasionally they could use evaporative cooling, which basically continually takes water and removes the heat by heating up the water and boiling it off. In that case, water use and consumption can be significant. up to three, maybe even five million gallons per day. If you extend that out over a year, that’s a billion gallons of water. That’s something like two.

thousand Olympic size pools or a small lake. So if you’re drawing that from a sensitive aquifer, that could certainly be problematic. But if you’re drawing it from a source like the Detroit River or Lake Michigan, it’s kind of literally a drop in the bucket. We we can accommodate that.

Guy Gordon (35:19.393)
But if it’s evaporative, we’re not sending that back to sewage treatment, right? It’s it’s lost to the atmosphere.

Eric (35:26.572)
Yeah, that’s also true. Even so evaporative cooling systems do have blow down it they’re not evaporating all of it. Some of it is sent to the wastewater treatment system, but not nearly as much as they’re using.

Guy Gordon (35:44.779)
So if we’re concerned about this and and the the water demand and water usage, why not just put clauses into these agreements with big tech saying you if you’re gonna build here, it’s gotta be a closed loop system.

Eric (36:01.089)
That may make some people feel better, but I’m not really concerned about the water usage, or even consumption. In some cases, it’s probably the most efficient and least impact thing to do to use evaporative cooling. The proposed Google data center in Van Buren Township is actually going to at least in part use evaporative cooling.

they’ll be getting their water through the local utility which gets their water from the Great Lakes Water Authority, which draws water from the Detroit River, I believe. And that en okay, that entire system is actually kind of quite overbuilt. they are set up to deliver a lot of water to industrial uses that no longer exist or have become much more efficient. And so having that lar as with the the power dynamic

Guy Gordon (36:39.679)
Or port here on, yeah.

Eric (36:59.87)
having that large water user on their grid, a giant customer purchasing water with marginally more infrastructure requirements is probably going to help them keep rates low for not only Van Buren Township, but to a lesser extent, everybody on the Gliwa network.

Guy Gordon (37:17.451)
So there there would be an increase in demand from say Gliwa to bring the water in. What about increased sewage treatment and treatment costs on the other side when you send that water back? Or with evaporative cooling are you not sending much water back?

Eric (37:29.74)
Yeah, it’s an interesting question.

Y you are sending some, so that would be worked out between the Van Buren Water Treatment Authority and the data center. And from what I’ve heard, they are confident that they can handle that marginal input from the data center.

Guy Gordon (37:54.623)
And you actually have a gr another graphic that that shows that in the last five years, our water usage in the state of Michigan has dropped precipitously, interestingly enough.

Guy Gordon (38:14.465)
There we go.

Eric (38:16.106)
Yeah. Yeah. So in this

I don’t want to put this forward as being a baseline or a ceiling, but just to provide some context. So, worst case scenario, a hyperscale data center might use consume about three million gallons a day on site. In certain cases, the water consumption

Associated with the power generation, maybe about equal to that, maybe about five million per gallons per day. But let’s say absolute, absolute worst case scenario, probably worse than has ever has ever happened. Maybe you’re using 10 million gallons per day. Michigan is currently used consuming about 450 million gallons per day, which is down about 25% from just in 2020. And that trend, going back in history, is actually

That extends. We we were using much more water 10, 20 years ago than we are now, largely due to decreases in water consumption associated with thermoelectric power plants. And so that that’s one of those things. So that’s right now we’re looking at a bar chart that shows water usage from 2020 to 2024. And at the top there is a light blue bar that is

Guy Gordon (39:28.019)
Mm-hmm. Palisades went offline.

Eric (39:44.539)
self-supply thermoelectric power production, recirculated cooling. And from 2021 to 2022, there’s a big drop. Most, probably not all, but most of that is Palisades, which is scheduled to come back online. But when it comes back online, it’s gonna be a different system, much more efficient. probably using only about 20 million gallons per day, I believe, maybe 25. I don’t recall the specifics, but generally I think we can expect this trend.

at least from thermoelectric power production to continue in the future we’re going going to be using consuming less and less water.

Guy Gordon (40:25.077)
There does, we should point out, with all of this, this is all subject to regulatory influences, the Michigan Public Service Commission, local water utility regulators and and managers. So there is a certain amount of faith that has to be put in that their planning will accommodate all this, correct?

Eric (40:48.29)
Yes. recurring theme in this report is that, you know, we can accommodate data center development, we can handle handle the power requirements, we can protect water resources, but that is relying on government to do its job to enforce the laws that have been in place for fifty years now to protect natural resources.

Guy Gordon (41:16.533)
Right. So we we’ve we’ve covered water usage, which is certainly a a big part and big concern. and

But there’s also the issue of water pollution, that there could be emissions from these plants that could have localized impact. you’ve talked a little bit about this, that if they use glycol or as a as a cooling agent, that there could be releases of that. Take me through the the the kind of the water pollution scenario. There’s been a lot of pretty inflammatory stories about the the potential of

for pollution or actual pollution. You’ve done some s significant investigation into that.

Eric (42:02.08)
Yeah, when I began researching this, I did expect to find that this would be a recurring problem. what I instead discovered was that a lot of the discussion is about concerns about what is unknown and what could happen. we do know that data centers add different chemicals to their cooling water.

in many cases, especially in closed loop cooling systems, they’re adding enough chemicals that it would be considered hazardous waste, in which case it would be a maintenance procedure. Very occasionally, maybe every year, maybe five years, they’d maintain that system. They’d remove the cooling fluid, but it would be trucked off and treated however hazardous waste is treated. in other scenarios,

They might be discharging it down the drain like we would. So it would often go to a municipal wastewater treatment plant. The municipal wastewater treatment plant has procedures in place to know what’s coming into their plant to make sure that they can remove whatever harmful constituents are in there before they discharge it to the watershed. If the municipal

Plant determines that they don’t have the facilities to treat that water properly. They may require pretreatment on site. So there might be a combination of pretreatment and treatment at main treatment at the water plant. But in any event, there are we have the Clean Water Act and we have state regulations to enforce the Clean Water Act. And assuming that laws are enforced to the extent that they should be, there’s

Really, not much reason to believe that data centers could impose pollution. so when I started looking at

Guy Gordon (44:02.153)
In fact, right, I I want you to get to that ’cause you looked at these allegations and complaints about pollution quite closely.

Eric (44:11.468)
I did. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, basically asking the question, okay, so I can’t find anything concerning to me. Why do people think that this is a concern? And so I I went through a series of press articles that, you know, have have headlines like this. Now we’re looking at a a Rolling Stone article. The headline is the precedent is Flint.

Guy Gordon (44:35.861)
A Rolling Stone article.

Eric (44:41.602)
How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis. Subtitle Amazon has come to the state’s eastern farmland worsening a water pollution problem that’s been linked to cancer and miscarriages.

Guy Gordon (44:53.609)
Okay, so the implication from the subhead is that somehow Amazon is introducing toxins into the water.

Eric (45:00.62)
Yes. When you read past the headline, this is actually very good reporting. I I didn’t need to look at any other sources to figure out what’s going on here. And so I spent an hour and created this very technical diagram on the right to kind of explain what’s going on here. From lit so in this part of Oregon, there are a lot of farms, including concentrated animal feed operations or CAFOs, and they have a system set up.

To pipe the waste from animal feedlots to a wastewater treatment plant that then partially treats it. And after they partially treat it, there’s still a lot of nutrient pollution, particularly nitrates in that water, which they then dispose of through land application, basically use it as crop fertilizer, but that

Cycle has been mismanaged. They’ve been doing this for decades, and they’ve basically been putting too much they’ve been putting more nitrogen on the ground than crops were able to uptake, which led to nitrate pollution in the groundwater. And nitrate is a carcinogen and causes it, it’s a pretty bad pollutant. If it’s in high concentrations in your groundwater, it does cause chronic and other health issues. And so

Amazon built a data center in this area, began drawing groundwater, evaporating most of it off, and sending the rest of it to this wastewater treatment plant, which means they’re actually so they’re drawing this nitrate-lad, concentrating it, and sending it back to the treatment plant, which then becomes part of this cycle. But so Amazon didn’t contribute to the nitrate pollution.

They’re just moving it around. And there are accusations that them moving it around makes the problem worse. They are sending more nitrates to this treatment plant that is then disposing of nitrates on the land. but it’s not clear to me that they’re actually increasing the problem at all.

Guy Gordon (47:11.988)
Right.

Guy Gordon (47:18.113)
They weren’t the originator. And the implication of the headline and the subhead is that somehow they’re producing toxins and that they’re sending it to municipal water supplies by equating it to flint. Two things that are absolutely not true.

Eric (47:34.563)
Yeah, the s the headline is based on a quote that’s in the article. there’s an environmental actin activist that said the precedent is Flint. but again, if you actually to and it’s a very in-depth article, if you actually take the time to read it, it’s good reporting, but it very quickly gets away from the data center into this hor historical cycle of pollution that’s actually created this problem.

But this story probably wouldn’t have gotten a fraction of the clicks that it ended up getting if data centers weren’t in the headline.

Guy Gordon (48:05.267)
If anything, it appears to me, and again that’s it’s just my opinion, is that it seems that the data center’s involvement here actually brought a spotlight and a focus on a maybe a bigger problem that wasn’t being addressed.

Eric (48:21.058)
Yeah, I think that’s fair. And I could go through more of this stuff if you’d like. Here I’m showing there’s an XAI data center in Memphis, which has problems, but one of the problems they’ve been accused of is they promised to reuse gray water rather than drawing water from a well, and they’ve put off doing that, and so that’s become a big deal. But again, it’s not their problem. So in Memphis, they actually have this

They’re very fortunate. They have this historical, what’s they call the Memphis sand underground aquifer that the entire city draws their water from. It’s crystal clear 2,000-year-old well water. Above that layer, above that aquifer is a confining clay layer, and above that confining clay layer is very polluted surface water. And so there has been a concern for decades that if Memphis uses too much water from their aquifer.

It could draw that polluted water down into their their their intakes where they get their water. And so they would then have to start treating it, which would cost a lot of money. And so this data center just showed up in Memphis and started drawing water and became a fraction of this issue, but that’s that’s creating headlines.

Guy Gordon (49:44.961)
Okay, so th there’s a a little bit of media inflammation here that is being exploited by opponents. And I mean it’s not that their questions and concerns aren’t legitimate, but when you looked at this universe of complaints about data centers creating pollution or generating toxins, did you find one instance where that was true?

Eric (50:12.727)
I did not.

Guy Gordon (50:15.329)
So it it certainly looks like that the the the the mainstream media to some degree is kind of exploiting some of the fears I’m not gonna use the word hysteria, but the fears over these AI centers. Yeah. Well, guilty as charged. I’m s I’m a recovering journalist. so let’s there’s there’s there is one pollution aspect though that I find very compelling and and you write about it extensively in your in your research.

Eric (50:28.952)
Imagine that.

Eric (50:32.866)
Yeah.

Guy Gordon (50:45.461)
And that is the idea of noise pollution. And certainly during construction, you got a lot of gravel trucks, you got a lot of you got a lot of traffic, you’ve you’ve got the you know the the pollution that the construction will generate. But after that, there is a form of noise pollution that may not be registered because we don’t normally measure noise pollution that way. Take take us through that explanation.

Eric (51:11.924)
Yeah. And I th this was a avenue of research that I didn’t expect to go down. So to be honest with you, when I started looking at noise pollution, what I thought that I would find, I did this after I looked at the water thing. And so I was like, this is going to be another thing that’s over exaggerated and ginned up in the press. But I very quickly changed my mind. There are

More and more complaints about noise from data centers, even when those data centers are in compliance with the local ordinances around noise pollution. So my assumption was if a if a city has an ordinance or a township has an ordinance, it’s probably reasonable. If the data center is in compliant, there’s probably nothing to complain about. The thing is, the way that noise ordinances are

Designed and enforced uses so a decibel is a measure of noise volume, right?

Guy Gordon (52:11.937)
Mm-hmm.

Eric (52:20.884)
Noise ordinances and sound studies use something called A-weighted decibels. And A-weighting is a metric that was introduced in the 1930s. And it is a very useful metric to relate how humans interpret sound. actually I’ll pull this up too.

Guy Gordon (52:46.337)
Well bottom line is it it’s basically measures higher frequencies and gives them greater weighting than lower frequencies, right?

Eric (52:58.442)
Yes. So now I’m showing a chart that has it shows how a weighted decibels are reported in comparison to unweighted decibels. So unweighted decibels are this green line. if you have so you can have a a hundred decibel sound at ten hertz, that would be

Still 100 decibels, but if you Aweight that it’s only going to be reported as 30 decibels. So these lower frequency sounds do not get reported as loud as they actually are in most sound studies. And in most cases, that’s probably appropriate. But

In the context of data centers, especially hyperscale data centers, especially hyperscale data centers near sound sensitive locations like homes and schools, there can be an awful lot of noise coming from this lower part of the spectrum, below 60 hertz. And so this isn’t exceeding a threshold that would require mitigation or

be considered a violation of a sound ordinance. But there’s so much sound, low frequency and even ultra low frequency sound coming from these things that it’s still affecting people. People are still complaining. And so a point that I’m making in this report is we actually need to update our standards and the way that we we think about this here. We’ve never before in history had this type of

industrial scale cooling equipment making so much noise and so much low low frequency noise so near sound sensitive locations like homes and schools.

Guy Gordon (55:07.795)
Right, or cattle.

Right? Depending if you’ve if if if you got on a rural if you you got a dairy farm and you’re in a rural area, you don’t know how it’s going to affect We saw a debate about this maybe 40 years ago. This is the the this is an OG moment, where we had this extremely low frequency submarine communications. And there was a lot of concern at the time whether the ELF, the ELF system, was harmful because we just didn’t have enough research as to what the impact is.

Eric (55:12.139)
Again, that that’s

Guy Gordon (55:41.525)
for affected populations. And I get I’m getting the same kind of vibe, pardon this expression, on this, which is w we really don’t know. And it and just because it isn’t harmful doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly annoying.

Eric (55:55.993)
Well just because it’s I would say the other thing is just as likely to be true. so

Various different noises can actually impose a stress response in our system without you thinking about it. And so if you’re living next to something that is constantly making a certain kind of noise, you might be under cr chronic stress. And this can happen even if you’re not aware of it. So there was a study that showed that, in fact, people who are

less consciously bothered by the noise are more susceptible to the chronic stress response caused by the noise. So actually being annoyed by something seems to have something of a protective effect in your physiological system that is reducing that stress response. So not only can it be annoying, but even if it’s not annoying, it could be putting you under chronic stress. And chronic stress causes all sorts of related health issues.

cardiac issues, diabetes, things like that.

Guy Gordon (57:05.227)
So the main takeaway here, greater exploration needed because this is an effect or an affect that we really haven’t explored much because we don’t have a lot of experience with it.

Eric (57:17.422)
Correct. and we do have some. So the when Michigan kind of cook took control over where renewable energy facilities could be cited, the Michigan Public Service Commission promulgated some regulations around noise pollution. And I think they’re pretty good, but so getting back to the animal thing, one interesting thing about that is I was looking at a a case where a

solar facility was sighted and they have some electrical equipment that can make some noise there and I think that the noise restrictions are appropriate generally appropriate. But so there was a woman who had a horse farm. she was actually offered, they offered to buy out our land, but she resisted. So now the solar facility is com completely surrounding her horse farm. And she said, Well have you thought about what this noise is going to do to my animals? And the answer is nope.

there’s no research on that. It’s not considered in the legislation, it’s not considered in the regulation. So that I mean that’s an interesting problem to look at if we’re going to keep citing these things in agricultural areas.

Guy Gordon (58:29.745)
There’s another kind of, and I I don’t I hesitate to call it pollution, but there is another environmental consequence to this that you dive into in your research and was really kind of a surprise is that the heat island effect, that because they generate so much heat, and we’re talking about hundreds of acres involved, it can ri raise the corresponding temperature of that area significantly.

Eric (58:55.938)
Yeah, and it’s I was kind of surprised that there hasn’t been more research on this because it’s not just a data center thing, it’s actually a cooling tower thing. I think of standing next to your air conditioner. there’s hot air coming out of there in the summer that’s being expelled from your home. Multiply that by a thousand, and that’s what’s coming out of these cooling towers.

which does happen in like thermoelectric power plants, but it’s never been studied before what that heat where that heat goes after it leaves those cooling towers. And just within the last few months, there’s been some research showing that actually it kind of significantly may impact not only the air temperature in the surrounding area, but through thermal effects, increase the ground temperature, which then again increases the air temperature by as much as five degrees or more.

Guy Gordon (59:53.705)
Right, and we we really don’t know what, if any, environmental consequences there are to that. and whether they’re just localized or whether there is a th an impact on the surrounding area or what it may be. but again, it’s one of those things that you would probably want a little bit more research on. So

Eric (01:00:11.628)
Yeah, and I think I think a year from now we’ll know more than we do, but it’s something to pay attention to.

Guy Gordon (01:00:18.707)
So that kind of encapsulates the the cost benefit fact story here. And you’ve done a great job putting that into perspective for us. One of the other things that’s been raised, and it’s given experience with the dot com bubble, it’s it’s it it’s it’s somewhat I think important to look at, and that is whether not we’re overbuilding AI and overbuilding data centers and whether or not

They will begin they will, from a revenue standpoint, be able to monetize them. So, I mean, it it raises the specter of spending billions of dollars building these centers and then them becoming white elephants if the ability to monetize them doesn’t present themselves or we have overcapacity. Will local communities be on the hook to some degree for a lot of the the consequences? Will they be left with a brown field?

Eric (01:01:16.974)
So actually, I think not. there is definitely a lot of really weird circular funding going on here and speculative investment. And I think that most of these companies are going to end up writing a lot of it off. Some of these companies may wash out, but the general trend is for an increased need for compute capacity, an increased need for data centers and

In the absence of some kind of paradigm-shifting technological advance, like quantum computing could be a wild card here, we are going to need these things in increasing volume for at least the next decade, probably the next several decades. So even if it changes hands, you’re going to have a site with sufficient power, enough water to serve that facility, access to high-speed internet.

And so I think these are gonna be valuable sites put to use for at least a couple decades for the foreseeable future.

Guy Gordon (01:02:23.167)
Are are there things that local communities can do to kind of give them a backstop in th you know, in the event of of a shutdown?

Eric (01:02:28.546)
Yes. So in the event that in the event that I’m wrong and it doesn’t happen, there are things you can do to protect yourself, which Celine Township has done. they have required a ten million dollar decommissioning surety bond from the developer. So they’re just going to be holding on to ten million ten million dollars at least, and they have the option to request more money every two years if they determine that

demolition and decommissioning procedures would get more expensive. So in Celine, if that site sits vacant for more than five years, which I think is very unlikely, they’ll just put that bond to use and return the site to a greenfield.

Guy Gordon (01:03:11.689)
And that I guess from a land use standpoint is helpful, but they could get into I wouldn’t call it a bait and switch, but they can have the the the trapdoor fall out from under them if they begin to be over dependent on the property tax revenues from that site, which then suddenly evaporate.

Eric (01:03:29.826)
Yeah, that’s a concern. That is something that local governments are gonna have to navigate and

It’s actually one of the reasons this is gonna sound weird, but I don’t hate the local property tax abatements that are being offered because it does offer some protection from being over reliant on a single landowner.

Guy Gordon (01:03:53.695)
Right. one of the other things that I guess is is a a journalist that that really annoys me is this whole lack of transparency in the process. And I think it just it it inflames a lot of the mistrust and distrust of what’s going on there when you see I I guess in one instance in Celine there were thirty nine non disclosure agreements that were thrust upon

People working for the Michigan Public Service Commission as they were reviewing the DTE and open AI agreements. Now, I understand the idea that you’ve got to protect your intellectual property and also the t details of what you’re doing for competitive reasons. But does there need to be greater emphasis on maybe scaling back some of these NDAs and to give more transparency? Because it just adds to what already is healthy mid tr healthy mistrust of big tech or unhealthy mistrust of big tech.

Eric (01:04:52.066)
Yeah, I think that would be helpful. the more transparent you could be, I mean, I I’m biased because I’m a researcher and I’d like to know as much as I can. I kind of bel I tend to believe that there are

justifiable reasons for most of the things within an NDA, but I think they could certainly do a better job of communicating what and why is not publicly available at the very least. And I think in a lot of those cases, what they consider proprietary might not be necessary to actually be be proprietary. They’re just overly protective as a matter of course.

Guy Gordon (01:05:35.275)
There is some pending legislation in in Michigan that would basically ban the use of NDAs in the in the development process for hyperscale AI data centers. is that a thoughtful way of of of approaching it, or is that maybe overkill? Will you chase away most of these data centers if they can’t protect their IP?

Eric (01:06:02.124)
I don’t know. it would be unusual. We have always used NDAs in the development process. it might be capricious and arbitrary to target them in a way like that and it might not stand up to legal scrutiny. But if if they can accommodate that, I wouldn’t mind.

Guy Gordon (01:06:25.013)
Yeah. one other thing and you’ve discussed and then we can we can wrap it up and g get some of your last thoughts, but the the idea that w we do rely on our regulatory infrastructure to handle a lot of the concerns here. Environmental regulations, regulatory agencies that will protect us against hyper rate increases.

But we’ve seen down with with a with a an AI center, I believe it’s in Mississippi, where it’s almost as if the federal government is putting the thumb on the scale and trying to subvert some of the challenges and the l access to the legal system to complain about or to confront some of these things or at least get to the truth. where Elon Musk’s ex AI plant down in Mississippi.

is using unlicensed gas turbines on a they claim on a temporary basis to power this data center. when the NAACP in in league with some other environmentalists filed suit, we had the Trump DOJ come in and say, wait a minute, you don’t have standing, which is from the the the Clean Air Act totally off what has been both tradition statutorily and from a regulatory standpoint.

Bitcoin. What do you think about that? And doesn’t it undermine if it if they if they ignore these challenges, doesn’t it undermine the ability o of folks in these communities to at least try to get more information?

Eric (01:08:02.732)
Yeah, what’s going on with XAI in Mississippi and Tennessee, I think is problematic. I referenced those couple of data centers. There’s a couple different compounds on either side of the border in Tennessee and Mississippi a few times in this report as kind of the worst thing that could happen. And what’s happened in the press is they often look at these things and say, look at the

bad thing that’s happening here. And I will agree, I’m not comfortable saying how much has been done outside the bounds of law and regulation, but I will say that between that developers and the state regulators, they have not done their due diligence to protect the local population. and I

Guy Gordon (01:08:58.049)
So we should point out that they I mean the th the state of Mississippi said that these were okay, these turbines, because they were being used on a temporary basis. Therefore, you don’t need certification, you don’t need licensing, you don’t need permitting.

Eric (01:09:11.414)
Yeah, and there is a legal argument for that, but that provision of the Clean Air Act wasn’t really meant to accommodate this. it I don’t think it’s a good faith argument. I don’t think that the regulators in that case were really concerned with following at least the spirit of the law.

Guy Gordon (01:09:33.803)
And we should point out the EPA is siding with the challengers in this case, that have brought this suit and say they do have standing. And so you’ve got kind of the once again, the weird thing where you’ve got the EPA fighting its own Department of Justice, which normally would be helping them enforce their regulations.

Eric (01:09:53.677)
Yeah. And it if you get into the details of this case, it gets complicated because there’s multiple gas turbines that were installed at multiple times over i in two different locations. And so there’s different legal issues around e each of them. and I never really got my head around everything that’s going on there, but what I’m pretty comfortable saying is that

This is one of the main reasons that data centers can be painted with a broad brush by environmentalists to say, look how bad these things can be. I really wish that both the developer in this case and the state regulators would have been more concerned about doing this in a way that protects communities.

Guy Gordon (01:10:32.043)
Right.

Guy Gordon (01:10:42.975)
Right, because i again it feeds the optics that the regulatory system can’t be trusted to protect the impacted. but again, as as you point out, if you get deeper into the facts, it’s not necessarily the way it’s been portrayed in the media, and there are some l legitimate arguments for saying, Look, this is this is just on a temporary basis. and and maybe it’s just a hole in the regulatory protections. But let’s let’s

quickly wrap this up, Eric, some main takeaways. Number one, we’ve got to separate our concerns about AI from our concerns about hyperscale data centers.

Eric (01:11:23.864)
Yeah, I think so. And I again I have a lot of concerns about AI and how it’s being instituted in society and the economy. But that and those are necessary discussions, but I think need to be separated from development.

Guy Gordon (01:11:40.543)
Right. Economic benefits. They are short term and they are limited, not to be compared to the kind of economic benefit that we would get from, say, an auto assembly plant, but they are could considerable if you look at the potential property tax revenues from these sites.

Eric (01:11:58.841)
Yeah, the the idea that inviting a data center in is going to stimulate some kind of high tech economic base. that’s just flawed. That doesn’t happen. But for the community that hosts it through the property taxes, you can decrease taxes on others or provide better services that could stimulate the economy through tertiary effects like that. Absolutely.

Guy Gordon (01:12:24.769)
Could be game changing for a community. And a local basis, at least local communities, not necessarily the state, because there are a few benefits at least that we’ve seen from that standpoint.

Eric (01:12:35.882)
Yeah, through our current tax regime, the state is basically giving up most of the opportunities to benefit from these developments.

Guy Gordon (01:12:46.817)
All right. And looking at the the costs that have seen so much attention. Number one, electricity generation. This is something that MISO and other grid regulators have been accommodating. That the transmission grid that they rely on is different than the distribution grid that we rely on. So with with the with the buffers built in, we should be fine with again putting our trust in regulators and planners.

Eric (01:13:14.71)
It’s a little bit more complicated than that, but the main point is that there are a lot of smart people at the utilities and the RTOs and frankly in our Michigan Public Service Commission and their staff, I think they actually do a really good job. I’m confident that we can accommodate data center development in a way that is not going to negatively impact ratepayers.

Guy Gordon (01:13:37.803)
We need to look closer at noise pollution and heat island effects, but that’s one of those things that we just need to explore. The main impact could be water usage, and that’s dependent largely on how this is negotiated at a local level. It could be actually good for the water system.

Eric (01:13:56.547)
Potentially. if you are a utility that has excess capacity and you can get a large water user to purchase more of your product without building a lot more infrastructure, that could allow you to operate more efficiently and contain costs for other ratepayers on the system.

Guy Gordon (01:14:15.283)
And just as an aside, that means that they’re probably during the siting process, maybe the state, maybe some other entity needs to play a better coordinating role to make sure that there are ample water resources in the areas where these centers are going to be sited.

Eric (01:14:32.302)
Possibly, but from what I can tell, we have those processes in place and they’re working. I I don’t see any so far, I haven’t seen anything proposed that would appear to me to cause a problem. And I expect that if a proposal were to cause a problem, somebody would catch that and require modification of the pro proposal or simply deny it.

Guy Gordon (01:14:55.956)
Right.

Guy Gordon (01:15:00.233)
All right. And finally on the issue of pollution, I guess the takeaway from your research is be wary of the headline grabbing stories about pollution because on closer inspection there may not be any pollution at all or it may not be actually generated by the data center in question.

Eric (01:15:18.86)
Yeah, I and by the way, I have a lot of concerns about water resource management across Michigan, but data centers are not even nearly one of my top concerns.

Guy Gordon (01:15:31.347)
All right. Just as long as you’re not picking on golf courses, Eric, I’m I’m I’m fine with that. Eric, thank you so much for your research and it just is comprehensive. Obviously, normally our our podcasts go only twenty minutes. this one has been more than four times larger. I appreciate your time and we encourage people to tell your friends about this because it really does take the emotion. I think a lot of the heat, again, no pun intended.

Eric (01:15:34.539)
Yeah.

Guy Gordon (01:15:59.517)
away from this. We’ve used closed loop cooling on this podcast. Eric, thanks so much. And we thank you for tuning in. And if you support the kind of unbiased research that we perform here at the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, we do invite you to go to CRCmish dot org, perhaps drop a few coins in the bucket for us as we celebrate a major anniversary here. And in the meantime,

Eric (01:16:03.414)
Yeah.

My pleasure.

Guy Gordon (01:16:26.259)
Encourage your friends to sign up and get the hashtag FactsMatter Podcast on Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. Encourage others who may appreciate this kind of fact-based reporting and research. Until next time, I’m Guy Gordon. Take care.