Q&A: Minnesota environmental group leader talks data center review process

By BRIAN JOHNSON

BridgeTower Media Newswires

The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy has played an active role in the discussion of proposed hyperscale data centers, raising concerns about project impacts on water resources, energy supplies and other issues.

The nonprofit advocacy organization — which is dedicated to protecting “Minnesota’s environment, its natural resources and the health of its people” — has filed lawsuits against four Minnesota cities with data center projects under consideration, according to its website.

Among other things, the MCEA is calling for more robust and transparent reviews of hyperscale data center projects, and better guardrails to protect the environment. It’s a hot topic, as roughly a dozen projects are proposed or under review in Minnesota. A handful of cities — including Eagan, Inver Grove Heights, Rosemount and Minneapolis — have enacted moratoriums on new projects.

In the following interview, MCEA Executive Director Kathryn Hoffman talks in depth about data center project impacts, the environmental review process for proposed hyperscale data centers, and other topics. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Let’s dive right into the A Topic, which is data centers. What are your biggest concerns in general about these projects?

A: It’s not an environmental concern, but I would say it’s a concern that’s pretty fundamental to democracy and our values in Minnesota, and that’s that a lot of these projects are moving forward in secrecy. What’s happening in many communities is the developer and the city have signed non-disclosure agreements. And those non-disclosure agreements forbid the city employees from talking publicly about the project, in some cases even from naming that it is a data center. In some cases the cities had been planning for six months or even over a year already with the developer, but the residents didn’t know. And that’s, I think, a real problem for transparency and democracy.

And it eventually becomes an environmental problem, because what happened next was many of these cities were going through the environmental study, or the environmental review, which is a required step for pretty much any big project in Minnesota. And they were doing so while the non-disclosure agreement was in place. And that meant that a lot of important information about what was being proposed, including whether it’s a data center in some cases and how much energy it would use. How much water? Are there air pollution concerns? Noise, light, other concerns for folks that live nearby? Those things were not being addressed within the environmental study.

Q: You mentioned that environmental review documents don’t always specify that a data center is proposed. What are some code words that suggest a hyperscale data center project might be under review?

A: Sometimes these will be referred to as things like a technology park or light industrial development. Terms like that might be clues that it could be a data center. There are some building codes associated with data centers that we found deep in these documents. It can be a bit of a challenge. For folks who think that they might have a data center proposal in their town, I would certainly encourage them to contact us. And also to contact their city and request documents. They’re entitled to documents under our Data Practices Act law, which is like our Freedom of Information law here in Minnesota.

The non-disclosure agreement doesn’t make documents private. They’re still public. So even if there is a non-disclosure agreement in place, you can ask for the non-disclosure agreement. You can ask for documents associated with this development. I definitely encourage people to do that, to see if they can find out more, if they have something that looks like a big industrial development near them, because that quite possibly could be a data center.

Q: How do you think the environmental review process can be improved?

A: The gold standard for environmental review in Minnesota is an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and that’s a process that large projects go through in Minnesota. There’s a specific rule or statute that says this type of project has to do an EIS. Because hyperscale data centers are new to Minnesota, it’s less obvious what category this falls into. But the EIS is ideal for something of this size.

An EIS has the advantage of having very robust public participation. In particular, it has three comment periods, so there’s one at the beginning, which is kind of an open-ended, like, ‘Hey, we’re thinking about building a data center; what should we be looking for?’ And it allows people to put in suggestions about what should be studied. It has a second one at the draft. Here’s a draft EIS. What are we missing? What else needs to be in here? And then there’s one at the final.

And so it’s robust, and the agency in charge needs to actually look at those and respond. They don’t have to do everything the public says, of course, but they need to at least look at it and say, ‘We considered that, and we took these steps, or we don’t think that’s important, and here’s why.’ There needs to be a response.

An EIS also has the advantage of being done by the state as opposed to a local entity. I personally think it’s a little bit unfair to leave cities with the responsibility of analyzing these big projects. I mean, cities don’t have the tools necessarily to look at regional water use or statewide energy grid impacts. It makes more sense for cities to analyze something like local developments, shopping, residential, things like that.

Q: Is it possible to build a “green” hyperscale data center?

A: There’s so much work being done in this area, it’s really interesting. Our technology sector in the United States is very innovative, and I feel like these are solvable problems.

I’m not an engineer, so I can’t necessarily speak to what the best outcome would be. But I will say, and I probably sound a little bit like a broken record on the EIS, but one of the advantages of an EIS is that it allows the project proposer to look at alternatives, and so it’s perfect for this kind of situation, where they can say, ‘OK, we can design the data center with this cooling strategy, or that cooling strategy.’

People will often ask me, ‘Is air cooling better, or water cooling? Are we supposed to do something else?’ I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it depends on the particular facility and the location. There might be places where relying more on air cooling is better; there might be places where relying on water cooling is better. And laying it out in these alternatives allows us to see it side by side, and see the pros and cons of each strategy.

Frankly, it tends to push the project proposer toward the environmentally best option. If we really want to push these environmental and innovative solutions … we do need regulatory guidelines in place to do that. We can’t really rely on companies to simply do that voluntarily. There isn’t a lot of incentive.