alt Hacker NewsWhat I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Just make them pay!
Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.
I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.
Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
Replies
My community tried that. They were coerced into a tax break instead.
https://www.wemu.org/wemu-news/2026-07-18/saline-township-re...
> So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents.
This is actually what happens in most places. It's even what happens in many cases when the data centers are given a discount, because the "amortize fixed costs over more units of generation" thing still happens.
Higher rates are essentially a time lag. You want to add load to the grid today but it will take five years to add that much new generation and in the meantime the only way to make a higher demand curve match up with the existing supply curve is at a temporarily higher price.
You could raise the price of electricity on only the data center by so much that it removes the increase in demand, but what that actually means is not building it there, and then it also isn't there after generation catches up and the local power company would have been able to spread their fixed costs over more units.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
Data centers are asset dense. A large one would have a value of e.g. a billion dollars while the neighboring plot of land has an assessment value of a million dollars. That's why they offer tax incentives -- a tenth of the rate on 1000 times the assessment value is a huge revenue win over the 100% of nothing you get if they build it somewhere else.
Or to put it another way, it allows the towns with a higher mill rate to keep themselves in the running instead of being excluded from the outset.
They do pay, that's why these towns are doing all these shady things to minimize public input.
The problem is that the towns generally want to spend the money on new stuff rather than give the money back in tax cuts.
>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Noise, pollution, energy costs (which you cover in your comment!) and water usage / contamination. I don't want more of those things. I don't want a bunch of strip malls of golf courses in my community, either.
You can't make them pay. And even if you could, real people wouldn't see the revenue.
It's far cheaper to buy local politicians.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
> Loudo[u]n County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
> What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers. Just make them pay!
What kind of question is that? Communities that don't want them?
You think money can fix and buy everything?
Besides, they pay already.
>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Well maybe if you were in community with the people protesting them you'd understand their perspective.
They don't pay as much. They get their electricity at industrial bulk rates while we pay the residential rate. Their demands require more power lines to be run, but those costs are spread out and blended with consumers. It's a legal form of stealing.
Because people don't like living next to them. They're loud, they're large and monotonous, they don't provide many jobs after construction, they use a lot electricity and decent amount of water, and the ones that rely on fossil fuels pollute.
That plus all the tech bros have gone out of their way to advertise loudly AI as a replacement for humans. So why would a community of humans want to support that?
I'm also in favor of making them pay, and in the end I'm expecting/hoping that's what will happen. But either way, when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa. Plus I'm sure some DCs would just pick another spot if forced to compromise; there's always some red county out there willing to do whatever just for a company to build there, that's why a lot of the DCs are being build in LA/AL/MS etc.
It might also be more complicated than you might think though due to the complexities of increasing power supply. Power companies also use prices raises to discourage residential use and conserve the existing supply for larger customers. They can't refuse to service residential but they also can't increase supply yet, so they just raise the prices until residential users "choose" to lower their power consumption.
My old power company told me it would be a temporary increase until supply was increased, but they said that the last time and it never happened. which, speaking of NOVA, was caused by the Loundon County allowing more data centers to be built. They get the money but since the power grid is regional everyone gets the bill :) .