North Carolina: data centers are coming for you, too.

We’ve all seen the horror stories by now: smog over Memphis, brown water in Georgia. Data centers form the infrastructure which make the internet, telecommunications, and even card transactions possible, but they can also be a huge detriment to nearby communities with their massive appetite for power and water. 

Still, it’s hard to connect your search query or chatbot message to the rural Georgia resident forced to use bottled water to flush the toilet. For most of us, the problems caused by AI are distant, almost entirely abstract.

Small problem: data centers are coming to North Carolina. As of now, our state is home to about 90 data centers, mostly in an area around Charlotte called the “data center corridor.” With the rise of AI, however, a gold rush of speculative projects are seeking permits across the state, threatening significant harm to local communities for little benefit. 

In Stokes County, the Board of County Commissioners recently approved an 1,800-acre data center complex along the Dan River atop the historic Saura Town, a site sacred to the Occaneechee Band of the Saponi Nation. The data center complex will likely use a closed-loop cooling system, reducing water concerns, but will be using methane generators on-site until it is connected to the grid, releasing a highly potent greenhouse gas with connections to worsened asthma and premature deaths in the meantime. The site’s rezoning permit was approved on Jan. 12 in the face of public outcry, despite being completely speculative: the project doesn’t even have a buyer lined up. 

If a tech company wants to build a data center in your town, it doesn’t matter if there’s a sacred place or a historic site in its path. It doesn’t matter if it will poison your air or sap your water. It doesn’t even matter if it’s profitable. The mere thought of AI money is often enough to get the stamp of approval.

Even if none of these data centers are coming to your neighborhood, their impact will be felt throughout the state as power-hungry servers put a strain on the grid. According to Duke Energy’s latest Carolinas Resource Plan, the Carolinas’ energy needs grew by about 10 terawatt-hours over the last 15 years. Over the next 15 years, it’s expected to grow by 80 terawatt-hours–almost equivalent to South Carolina’s 81 terawatt-hours in total energy consumption in 2023. Data centers account for over 85% of this new load growth. 

The plan to power all this extra demand? Natural gas – and lots of it. After Senate Bill 266 became law over Governor Josh Stein’s veto in July, North Carolina scrapped its mandate that Duke Energy must reduce its carbon emissions by 70% before 2030. Unbound by this interim mandate, Duke Energy’s latest Carolinas Resource Plan has tapered back its solar plans, eliminated wind power from its 2040 Base Planning Period, and even pushed back its plans to retire some of its coal plants to 2040. 

If the plan and its constituent projects are approved by the N.C. Utilities Commission, Duke Energy will add up to 12.3 gigawatts of fossil fuels to its portfolio by 2040. But don’t worry–as of today, the 2050 carbon neutrality mandate is still the law. Duke Energy definitely won’t lobby that out of existence. They’ll just retire all of that freshly-built infrastructure and replace it all with renewables within that 10-year window!

In the meantime, the rush to build out fossil fuels to power data centers in North Carolina and elsewhere is manifesting in dirty, polluting projects across the state, harming local communities and wrecking our climate goals.

Hyco Lake in Person County is home to Duke Energy’s Roxboro coal plant. For decades, the community there has suffered from contaminated groundwater and air pollution. Person County residents are in the 97th percentile for infant mortality, and the area has higher rates of stroke, cancer, chronic heart disease, and COPD than 70% of American adults. On average, someone born in the area has a life expectancy that is 6 years shorter than someone born in certain parts of Durham.

Under Duke Energy’s 2023 carbon plan, the Roxboro Plant was scheduled to be retired in two phases: two units by 2028, and the other two by the end of 2033 at the latest. Now, both dates have been pushed back by at least a year.

At the same time, Duke Energy is seeking to replace the plant with two natural gas turbines with greater capacity. With the retirement of the Roxboro Plant postponed, the company expects to run the coal and gas plants at the same time for an undefined period–perhaps as many as five years. 

Could you imagine living in the same area as two natural gas plants and a coal plant?

In his testimony in favor of the second natural gas plant in May, Scott McKinney, chair of the Person County Economic Development Commission, directly cited Microsoft’s purchase of a 1,350-acre “mega park” in the county as support for the project.

Microsoft has yet to announce its plans for the mega park, but the American Petroleum Institute certainly seems to think it’s a data center. In the institute’s March 5 presentation to the North Carolina House Energy and Public Utilities Committee, the site is specifically pointed out as one of the data centers driving North Carolina’s growth and necessitating further investment in fossil fuels. 

Duke Energy is hoping to develop 12.3 gigawatts of fossil fuel projects across the state by 2040, enough to power nearly 11 million homes. Data centers make up the majority of the demand for new power, but it’s North Carolina’s ratepayers that will have to pay for it.

Senate Bill 266, the Power Bill Reduction Act, altered the state’s Construction Work in Progress mechanism, which helps utility companies recover construction costs by passing on some of it to the consumer through their base rate payment. Previously, this would only be applied if the Utilities Commission determined that it would be in the public interest and “necessary to the financial stability of the utility” to do so, but SB 266 allows utilities to incorporate construction costs for unfinished projects on an annual basis, potentially leaving ratepayers on the hook for projects that won’t be functional for years, or at all. 

The Utilities Commission Public Staff’s analysis, based on past fuel costs, estimated that the Power Bill Reduction Act would shift at least $24.8 million per year in fuel costs from large commercial customers to residential ratepayers. 

When I first covered this issue for Media Hub in early November, these ratepayer costs were simply hypothetical. Now, Duke Energy is following through: the utility has proposed a 15% rate hike for customers and asked to take in a further 1.7 billion in profits starting in 2027.

In 2021, North Carolina was–at least outwardly–on the path to decarbonization. House Bill 951 mandated that Duke Energy cut carbon emissions by 70% by 2030 and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Now, the AI gold rush has given the legislature and Duke Energy the pretext to roll back carbon mandates and roll out a massive suite of fossil fuel investments.

If you live in a municipality that won’t build a data center in your neighborhood, that’s great. But for the sake of your fellow North Carolinians and our shared climate future, it’s time to cut back on AI.