A century ago, people had concerns about a new issue of safety, economics, and environmental justice — the motor vehicle.
The invention was initially seen as a dangerous threat and few people understood how they worked or how they could transform the world.
Even as vehicles became safer and more efficient, it was the advocacy of dedicated organizers that held automobile manufacturers accountable to making improvements and we owe them our gratitude for features like seat belts and air bags.
Today, we are in the middle of another advancement in technology that has us again asking important questions about safety, economics, and environmental justice — the data center.
Also called a data barn, data centers are large buildings where computer servers process huge amounts of information at rapid speeds and carry data across networks. They are already widely used around the world, and unless we’re ready to go back to paper records in medical offices, cutting down an unsustainable number of trees to print every document we need for work, stop using email, social media, apps, websites, streaming videos, cloud storage (a misnomer that makes us forget our photos are simply stored on a company’s server) and pretty much everything else our phones and computers can do, it’s time to move the conversation past a hard no to technology we’re currently using and ask how we can be effective advocates for the best possible agreements and legislation affecting data center construction and operation.
There are important facts to be clear on about data centers: Because technology is still advancing, the servers developed so far require significant cooling systems to prevent overheating, just like the fan in your laptop. There are a number of cooling methods such as fans and air-conditioning, rack-level cooling, liquid-cooling cold plates, submersion, heat exchanges, and hybrid models.
Today, companies are finding innovative ways to be environmentally responsible, such as a closed loop of water that doesn’t require new cold water to circulate, doesn’t ever return water to public use, and only uses the amount of water that an average office building does.
Some have also expressed worry about noise, but communities like DeKalb and many others have welcomed data centers with no reported noise complaints. It’s worth taking a trip to one of these recently built centers to see and hear for yourself what they’re like.
Concerned residents in Rockford have also asked whether the city intends to incentivize the development of a data center, and I applaud the attention to how our tax dollars are used.
The City of Rockford has no money going into a potential data center project and TIF money cannot be used for it. A Tax Increment Finance district is an economic development tool to spur projects in underserved areas that require a recipient of funds to demonstrate that it passes the “but for” test, which means that but for additional local government resources, the project would not be financially possible. Data center operators typically have sufficient capital to build and operate these facilities without any incentives.
A project the size and scale that other communities have welcomed (there are approximately 220 data centers in Illinois) also generates hundreds of well-paying union jobs and supports a city in developing a workforce pipeline and giving young people access to training opportunities in their school.
As a Rockfordian who cares deeply about my city, I’m in favor of a data center coming to Rockford and strengthening our tax base and our workforce.
Like the generations of organizers before us, we will continue working to hold technology manufacturers accountable to high standards of safety and responsibility.
There are so many incredibly important issues that are deserving of our attention and our organizing efforts in this political moment, locally and nationally.
It is my hope and my prayer that as we work together to build the kind of world we want for future generations, we will put our energy into initiatives where our voices urgently need to be heard by elected officials: housing and food security, equal rights, criminal legal system reform, health care access, voting rights, outlawing unethical AI use and surveillance, comprehensive immigration reform and an end to concentration camps, and so much more.
Keep speaking out, and keep the attention on justice issues that impact those with the least political power — that’s where your voice is needed.
Rev. Violet Johnicker is the executive director of Rockford Urban Ministries.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: It’s time to move past the hard no to data centers | Opinion
Reporting by Violet Johnicker, Special to the Rockford Register Star / Rockford Register Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Violet Johnicker, Special to the Rockford Register Star | USA TODAY Network
