The impact data centers have on Georgia residents (and what can we do about it)

The ACC Democrats hosted a town hall on data centers last Thursday. This comes as ACC commissioners are in the process of debating a set of potential regulations on data centers, which they may approve as early as tomorrow.

Read the article or watch the full video on athenspoliticsnerd.com:

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TRANSCRIPT

The ACC Democrats held a town hall meeting on data centers last week. Olivia Asher of Science for Georgia described just how much power these things really use.

“If all of the planned data centers and crypto mines are built, they will use more power than all of the homes in Georgia.”

Public Service Commissioners recently approved a 10,000 megawatt expansion of power plants just to power data centers.

“10,000 megawatts would power every single household in this state and we’re building that for data centers. We don’t even need to build all those power plants if we just ask data centers to curtail their energy during peak periods for just a few hours.”

That’s not going to happen as long as we have a Republican-controlled public service commission.

In the meantime, we’ll probably have to deal with data centers one at a time as they come up here locally. That means, we’re going to have to talk about environmental justice.

“We don’t want data centers in our Black and marginalized neighborhoods only. But that is where it stands, that’s where these data centers would be. Really, our community, we’re saying we don’t want data centers. And it’s not because we are against technology, because it’s the way of the world, we have to have it. But there has to be a balance, there has to be a concern for all residents in Athens. It’s not right that we on the one side of town has to bear the burden of everything that has to go against us having good water of us being in the way where we have to pay for energy. That is not right.”