In our series Thin Ice 2025: Wisconsin’s Warming Winters, WUWM is looking at the potential negative impacts if Wisconsin winters continue to get shorter and warmer.
Some scientists hope climate change could be slowed by cutting greenhouse gas emissions from big sources like power plants, for example. But the growth of large computer data centers may impede that clean up.
For nearly a year, construction crews have been putting up low-rise buildings in the Racine County community of Mount Pleasant — on some of the land formerly set aside for the Foxconn project. This data center owned by Microsoft will house many computers that will power what are called cloud computing systems.
Construction along state Highway 195, formerly known as County Road KR, continued this month.
Microsoft has also bought land for another large data center in the Kenosha County Town of Paris, and officials and a developer in Port Washington are discussing a possible data center there.
UW-Madison computer science professor Matt Sinclair says the plan is to use centers here and elsewhere to help handle massive amounts of data.
“Facebook has over 350 million images uploaded every day. Every minute of the day, if you believe it. YouTube has over 500 hours of video being uploaded, and Walmart every hour, they get 2.5 petabytes of new customer data they want to work on, and parse through," Sinclair recently told a Wisconsin Energy Institute forum.
A petabyte is one million gigabytes.
Once built, the data centers only employ a few hundred workers apiece, and they take a lot of electricity to run them.
Sinclair said seven years ago, the centers consumed about 2% of energy in the U.S. Now, the amount is 4.4%.
“And by 2028, we’re expecting to be somewhere between 7 and 12% of all energy consumption in the United States. So, this proportion is getting larger and larger. It’s not a problem unique to the United States. Many other countries have the exact same issue," Sinclair said
Sinclair added that designers are trying to make the computers more energy efficient, though there’s a risk consumers would then just buy more of the hardware.
So, part of the debate now is whether to build more power generation to run the data centers. Some people who oppose a natural-gas fired power plant We Energies wants to construct in northern Kenosha County say the Town of Paris plant would add greenhouse gas emissions just to serve the private sector.
New Berlin resident Nick Donofrio told a public hearing this month that he thinks, as a society, we can do better.
“I feel very strongly that we need to rise to the technical challenge of basing 100%, not 80%, not 90% —100% of the data center infrastructure on energy sources that have zero negative impact on the environment," Donofrio said.
We Energies spokesperson Brendan Conway said the Paris plant is designed to meet increasing demand for electricity along the I-94 corridor, including the Microsoft data centers. He’s not backing down on using natural gas, but Conway said the utility and tech giant are talking about a new rate that would be applied to all large electricity customers.
“That would ensure, because we want to protect our customers, that they are paying for their fair share. They would pay for any new equipment we would have to build to serve them," Conway told WUWM.
Conway said a proposal will be filed soon with the state Public Service Commission, or PSC.
Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Wisconsin, said that plan, and subsequent PSC review, will help determine how much power the data center really needs.
“With the data centers there’s a flurry of activity. Maybe you could call it a blizzard of activity. And it’s a fever pitch. And how much of it is hype, and how much is reality, is a real question," Content said.
Regardless of the amount of energy needed, Cassie Steiner of the Sierra Club said the renewables are being tried elsewhere to power the data centers.
“Many of the owners of these data centers have made these commitments, and are doing so in other states. It’s only because we haven’t required them to do that here that they’re getting away with polluting," Steiner said.
Gobbling fossil fuels to power computers, she said could lead to more releases of greenhouse gases that could affect Wisconsin’s climate.
