Madden Mischief

As data center development surges, so is the opposition to them in communities across the country, which is worrying Republicans that it could flip the Senate.

Voters are unhappy with their rising energy costs, heavy water use and the billions the centers are receiving in tax breaks, which is opening opportunities for Democrats in Ohio, Texas, and Iowa, traditionally red states.

With control of the Senate on the line, Republicans are scrambling to respond to the data center frustration now crossing party lines.

Before no one even knew what a data center was, the industry’s leaders would plunk a data center somewhere and nobody cared, but in the past year, all that has changed.

Today data centers are facing pushbacks as communities across the country are up in arms, especially over the large, hyperscale projects behind booming artificial intelligence.  The U.S. is in an all-out AI race with China that President Trump is determined to win.  He’s even given artificial intelligence a new name, now calling it “Super Intelligence” or “SI” signaling there’s nothing artificial about it.

But just providing modest benefits to a local community in exchange for hosting a data center now is not enough.

At last month’s Data Center World meeting we saw an industry grappling with the sudden eruption of community objections to data center projects nationwide.

Rushing to AI

While Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is pausing developing new data centers amid the growing opposition and concern over their environmental effects, a dozen other states have introduced or are considering legislation imposing bans, moratoriums, or heavy restrictions on new data center construction.  Under scrutiny is the strain these gargantuan projects bring to local power grids, causing steep increases in local electricity demand and even driving up residential utility costs.

Cooling requirements for massive hyperscale centers draw millions of gallons of water daily, triggering even more opposition especially in drought-prone regions besides fears of the havoc AI itself could wreak in the wrong hands.

More recently, air pollution from the natural-gas-burning plants powering these data centers has raised community concerns especially as more data centers rushing to go online are proposing to build their own power plants, rather than face a yearslong wait to connect to the electric grid.

The bottleneck is the grid itself. As of 2024, well over 10,000 generation and storage projects representing roughly 1,400 gigawatts of capacity were stuck in the U.S. grid interconnection queue mud.

Thus, there is more capacity waiting in line than the entire existing U.S. generation fleet. The Department of Energy estimates by 2028 data centers will consume from 6.7 to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity, up from 4.4 percent in 2023.

Cleaner Power to the Rescue

While infrastructure to deliver that baseload power exists, it will take years to build new power plants and new transmission lines to serve such a demand. 

Ironically what can help in supplying the extra power needed is a ubiquitous resource that has now a much cleaner bill of health, and has become not only cleaner, but a safer, more resilient energy source so plentiful in America. They call it coal.  And there’s a whole lot of it around.

More than 200 coal-fired power plants are still operating across the United States, and they are already connected to the grid, already permitted, and staffed.

Frontieras North America

Frontieras is one of the companies developing a cleansing technology — specifically its patented FASForm™ Solid Carbon Fractionation platform and its FASGEN™ co-location deployment model — that can modernize those existing plants in place.

Rather than building a whole new generation from scratch, FASGEN integrates alongside an operating coal plant, processes the plant’s coal feedstock into a cleaner solid carbon fuel called FASCarbon™, and returns it to the existing boiler.

Meanwhile the plant keeps its turbines, its grid connection, water rights, and workforce. No new transmission. No multi-year interconnection queue. Baseload power is delivered from assets that are more environmentally friendly, cleaner and already there!

A Critical Point

Data centers are building their own natural gas plants precisely because the grid cannot deliver power fast enough. But those gas plants bring their own problems such as air pollution, permitting battles, and community opposition.   

FASCarbon™, the upgraded solid fuel produced by Frontieras’ FASForm™ process, delivers natural-gas-equivalent emissions performance — a 97 percent reduction in sulfur oxide emissions and almost 100 percent elimination of airborne mercury — while burning in the same existing coal boilers that are already built, permitted, and connected to the grid.

Communities hosting these plants get cleaner air without the disruption of new gas plant construction.

So, this should be good news to those environmental groups demanding administrative hearing and filing lawsuits challenging air pollution permits granted to data center projects.

Soon data centers and the communities allowing them to operate may see cleaner energy suppliers such as Frontieras limiting environmentally troubling emissions.

Yes, definitely the old, under-the-radar way of doing data center business is over.

Data center developers need to be more transparent in providing information early and more often, such as the tax revenue and other benefits they can bring to communities, especially when implementing cleaner energy sources.

And soon as possible they should be talking to the leading clean coal-burning companies in America, such as Frontieras, since coal is one of most plentiful energy sources America has at its disposal and now there’s technology that makes its emissions much cleaner and safer to the environment.

Tom Madden tells it like it is, which he learned to do as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and now as head of one of the leading public relations firms, TransMedia Group, which he founded when he left NBC, and today his very busy and productive daughter Adrienne Mazzone manages as its president.