Across the United States, thousands of data centers are seeking to break ground — sometimes forming clusters when several are planned near one another. How much pollution might big groups of data centers like these create?
Typically, local zoning boards or planning commissions consider each data-center proposal individually, not as a group. But in one corner of Pennsylvania — where more than a dozen data centers and power plants are being proposed — officials are trying to change that by studying the total air-quality and health effects of all the proposed projects together, before approving them.
“What happens if you put them all in the same valley, around the same neighborhoods?” said Bill Gaughan, a county commissioner in Lackawanna County, where the new study is being undertaken.
As opposition grows nationwide to the pollution caused by data centers and the immense power plants they require, officials in Lackawanna County said they hoped their approach might set a new precedent for how proposals are reviewed in other communities.
Mr. Gaughan said there are more data center proposals in his county than anywhere else in the state, and perhaps the country. But seldom do local officials have reliable data about how proposals overlap, he said, or the cumulative health effects if several data centers spring up near one another.
“Every developer wants us to look through a keyhole at their individual project,” Mr. Gaughan said. “I want to open the door and look at the entire landscape.”
Lackawanna County, which is home to the city of Scranton, recently approved an independent study of the air pollution and health effects that are likely to result from the cluster of data centers and fossil-fuel-burning power plants proposed there. The study, to be completed by EmPower Analytics Group by the end of the year, will assess how much pollution the facilities would add, where it would go, who would be exposed to it and what that could mean for public health countywide.
“People don’t breathe one permit at a time,” said Michael Cork, a Harvard-trained environmental health scientist who founded EmPower, and Lackawanna County amounts to “a major proposed infrastructure build-out, concentrated in one county.”
The study will also identify choices that developers could make to reduce public health harms, like the types of generator engines, limits on how long they run and considerations for where they would be placed.
In a separate study released in July, EmPower found that a single data center proposal in Lackawanna County, called Wildcat Ridge, that proposed a collection of 588 diesel backup generators could “produce meaningful adverse public health impacts” and $14 million in annual health-related damages based on what it called relatively limited operation. If dirtier generators were to be used more often, the research found, those public health damages could rise as high as $124 million, with as many as eight additional premature deaths per year.
A representative for Wildcat Ridge said the project’s developers were confident that the project would “comply with regulatory requirements, which are protective of human health,” adding that the company was committed to contributing to the local community “by improving the tax base for its citizens” and “improving education for its children.” The company also said Dr. Cork’s analysis had “multiple flaws,” including calculations that did not reflect emissions limits from state and federal permitting requirements.
Representatives from several other proposed data center projects didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Officials like Mr. Gaughan said they hoped the results of the new study would provide data to help them more fully understand how the projects could affect the community. “We’re going to get a really good independent study on what the impact is going to be on our lungs, what it’s going to be on our health and who is going to be affected by it,” he said.
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