In her March 26 Voices piece on a proposed Pine Island, Minnesota, data center, Jennifer Granholm wrote: “Residents have questions…those questions didn’t derail a project. They helped design a better one.” As a resident of Pine Island who’s been actively trying to have their voice heard regarding the Google project, I would say that Granholm should have talked with real people before writing her commentary and setting it as a gold standard.
As residents, we showed up to City Council with critical questions: How much energy is this going to use? How many backup generators? This needs to be zoned heavy industrial, why didn’t you do that? Who’s the end user? We also showed up with resources to aid our city leaders in decision making, providing packets with zoning ordinances for data center projects, local policy recommendations and questions city officials need to ask before approvals — light pollution recommendations, community benefit agreement examples and toolkits for using water resources responsibility. Every single question, every single resource, every single opportunity for an equitable solution has been ignored.
Residents got four months of knowing about the project until final approval was voted on by the city. The city, Google and Ryan Companies got two years facilitated by NDAs. Pine Island and Ryan were warned they would be sued if they didn’t make environmental review changes. They ignored that warning, not only pushing the project forward but getting every project approval possible done as fast as they possibly could.
They got sued and now are complaining that an injunction would cause them harm. They announced the project was for Google and partner Xcel Energy after months of backlash as a means of damage control, pairing it with news of 1900MW of clean energy and the world’s largest battery, as if no harm was done and nothing else mattered. Lie all you want, cut all the corners you want, exploit all the rural towns you can, it’s all good because hey, clean energy.
Right after that announcement came court records showing the energy usage of phase one is 300MW, more than all of Rochester, with full buildout being 2700MW, equivalent to Seattle’s grid. That information should have been disclosed during environmental review.
But instead it’s buried in a Ryan Companies memorandum, along with an announcement that three more data center projects are going up beginning in two to four weeks. This is the first I’m hearing about it as a resident. Where is this world’s largest battery going? Where’s that environmental review? There’s been no conversation on whether our volunteer fire department has the resources to put out that kind of fire. The intersectionality and imbalance of wealth, power, race, class, sovereignty and the ethics of these decisions is nothing to scoff at.
And we haven’t even touched on the water yet. Google’s environmental review said there’d be no industrial water usage. But now there’s documented effluent discharge from their air cooled system that has undergone no environmental review, that contains undisclosed chemicals that would be dumped offsite somewhere in unknown quantities in addition to being discharged into the Zumbro River. On top of that, court documents show the water estimates are 2-3x higher than what was reported in the environmental review.
The blueprint Granholm is trying to promote is abuse and exploitation, plain and simple. Minnesota’s handling of data center projects so far most definitely is not the “new standard.” Pine Island is one of the worst examples you could possibly pick to emulate. It’s actually a cautionary tale of what not to do. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise, like Jennier Granholm, is being paid off by Google or another perpetrator that’s causing the harm.
Aubree Derksen is a Pine Island, Minnesota, resident.
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