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This week’s conversation is with Duncan Campbell of DER Task Force and it’s about a big question: What makes a socially responsible data center? Campbell’s expansive background and recent focus on this issue made me take note when he recently asked that question on X. Instead of popping up in his replies, I asked him to join me here in The Fight. So shall we get started?
Oh, as always, the following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Alright let’s start with the big question: What is a socially responsible data center?
So first, there’s water, which I think is pretty solvable.
Part of me thinks water is not even the right thing to be focusing on necessarily, and it’s surprising that it became at least for a while the center of the controversy around data centers.
I think there’s energy, which is mostly a don’t-raise-people’s-bills kind of thing. Or in extreme cases, actually reducing people’s access to energy.”
I think air pollution is another key. This is one of the biggest own-goals our [climate] space is making, because people are installing behind-the-meter power and we can talk about why they’re doing that, the shifting reasons, but the real shame in it is you really shouldn’t have to run those 24/7. If you’re building your own power plant, it should enable you to get a grid connection, because you’re bringing your own capacity and they can provide you firm service, and you should only have to run that gas plant 1% of the year, so air pollution is a non-issue. If only the grid and its institutions could get their act together, this is a no-brainer. But instead people run them 24/7.
There’s noise, which has been very misunderstood and bungled on a handful of well-known projects. That’s just a do-good engineering and site layout type of problem.
And then there’s other. Beyond the very concrete impacts of a data center, what else can it do for the community it's siting itself in? That’s going to be specific for every community.
There’s going to be a perspective that data centers are takers. They get tax incentives. They’re this big new thing. If data centers were to bring something compelling when [they’re] siting in communities, and it is specific to whatever they’re dealing with, maybe they’d be considered socially responsible.
I don’t think I have the master answer here. Everyone’s trying to figure it out.”
What do you hear from other folks in decarb and climate spaces when you ask this question? Do you hear people come up with solutions, or do they knock down the entire premise of the question — that there isn’t such a thing as a socially responsible data center?
You get both. You definitely get both. It depends on who you're talking to.
I can understand both sides of the equation here. There’s definitely solutions, first of all. I do think there’s a group of people whether it is in the energy world or the data center world or tech who would have this incredulous disbelief that anyone could not want what they’re doing. And that then, after being poked and prodded enough, transforms into a very elitist, almost pejorative explanation of everybody’s just NIMBYs.
I think that’s really unproductive. It kind of just throws gas on the fire.
But there’s a lot of people working on solutions, too. The non-firm grid service thing is just a huge opportunity. To be able to connect these sites to the grid in such a manner they either get curtailed some small amount of hours per year or they show up with accredited capacity, absolving them from curtailing. I mean, we can do that. It’s very doable.
The second question becomes, what are the forms of accredited capacity that can be deployed quickly? I think that’s where there’s a lot of cool stuff around VPPs and such. Sure, build a gas power plant, run it once or twice a year. If anything that’s good for a community — back-up power at grid scale.
There’s also other solutions. A really cool effort right now, former Tesla people building a purely solar and battery DC microgrid in New Mexico.
And there’s also a lot of inertia. The folks making decisions about data centers have been doing stuff a certain way for 20 years and it’s hard to change. The inertia within the culture combined with the enormous pressure to deploy just makes it less dynamic than one would hope.
On my end, I’ve been grappling with the issue of tax revenue. We’re seeing a declining amount of money for social services, things that can really help people for both personal and academic reasons. There's quite a bit a lot of people could say on that topic. At the same time, this is another form of industrial development. People are upset at the amount of resources going to this specific thing.
So when it comes to the data center boom in general, where do you stand on social cost-versus-benefit analysis?
That’s a good question. I’m not an expert. I’m mostly just someone who designs energy projects. But I can say where I’m at personally.
Yeah, but isn’t everyone in the energy space talking about data centers? Shouldn’t we all be thinking about this?
Of course. I’m not in a place to proclaim what is right but I’ll tell you where I’m at right now.
With any large-scale industrial build out it is tough relative to other technological changes that were simpler at the infrastructure layer. Like, the smartphone. Massive technological change but pretty straightforward in a lot of ways. But industrial buildout stresses real physical resources, so people have much more of an opinion of whether it’s worth it or not.
I’m pretty optimistic about AI generally. It’s very hand-wave-y. It’s hard to cite data or anything, because we’re talking about something that hasn’t happened yet, but I’m very optimistic about increasing the amount of intelligence we have access to per person on Earth.
A similar thing I think about is when everyone stopped getting lead poisoning all the time, we all jumped five IQ points and killed each other less. Intelligence is good. A lot of our story as a species is about increasing intelligence and learnings-per-person so we can do more. The idea that we would be able to synthesize it, operate it as a machine outside of our own bodies. It feels pretty inevitable.
There’s questions about what that [AI] will do to the economy and jobs, which is what people are really concerned about and is the case with any major technological change.
Are data centers being deployed at a rate and in a way that is responsible? Like, does it need to be this fast? That’s a question people ask and that’s in a way the question being posed by the moratoriums. They’re not saying let’s ban this forever. They’re saying, let’s take a breather. And I do understand that.
There’s a lot of good solutions that could just be pursued and it’s hard for me to separate my feelings about the current path data centers are taking from what I think is objectively right. We could just be doing way better.
On the energy front, what do you make of the way our energy mix — carbon versus renewables, our resilience — is headed? And where do you think we’re heading in five years?
For the energy and climate world, this is the real question. Data centers are a complicated thing but at the end of the day, for us, they’re a source of electricity demand.
From an electricity perspective, there’s been no growth for 20 years. So the theory of addressing climate change was, as the old stuff breaks we’ll replace it with new clean stuff. That was what we were doing, while saying, a lot of the old stuff we’ll keep around. We’ll layer on the new clean stuff.
It was always the case though that we could enter a new phase of electricity growth. Actually, five years ago, when the phrase “electrify everything” was coined, it explicitly became our goal! We were going to massively and rapidly grow the electricity system in order to switch industry, heating, and transport off of fossil fuels. That’s the right prescription, the right way to do it.
My understanding of it is that while this feels really big, because we haven’t grown in so long, compared to the challenge we were all talking about doing is not big at all. It increases the challenge by 15% or 20%. That’s meaningful. But it just seems like we should be able to do this.
From a climate perspective, as someone who’s been trying to do everything I can on it for a while now, I can’t help but feel a little dismayed that today the growth we’re experiencing is some tiny, tiny percentage of what we actually set out to do. And it’s causing chaos. We’re institutionally falling apart from a single percent of what our goals should be.
This is the time for the electrification case. We can all demonstrate this is possible over the next few years. I think confidence in the electricity system as our energy path can remain high. Or this utterly fails, where it’s really hard to imagine governments and businesses making any sincere attempt at a high electrification pathway.
