Almacenamiento solar y de baterías para Tonawanda Coke, No centros de datos!
In case you missed it, the Buffalo News recently covered the plans for developing a 300 MW data center at the former Tonawanda Coke site for Artificial Intelligence. We urge clicking through and reading the excellent coverage.
For close to a decade now, we’ve been warning of the threats that unregulated data centers present to both the immediate neighborhood, like noise pollution, as well as regionally, like spiking energy prices for all other ratepayers from the consumption of hundreds of megawatts (sometimes even gigawatts!) of power at each site.
Por último, the issues of modern “hyperscale” data centers stem from the fact that the modern data center presents a new and unregulated industrial sector. While data centers in some shape or form have been around for nearly a century, until this past decade these have been much smaller operations, often just a room in an office building. Even during the 2010s as reliance on cloud computing grew, the impacts were relatively restrained – it’s the very recent growth of AI, (particularly Generative AI), and cryptocurrency mining, as well as political decisions at the federal and state level, which have led to the current nationwide crisis around data centers, especially around energy consumption.
We have a lot of concerns about a proposed data center at the former Tonawanda Coke site – pero the top line issue that we really want to emphasize is that residents in Tonawanda want to see a Just Transition. They do not want to see a data center there, and they want instead to see the River Road industrial corridor as a whole utilized for unionized renewable power generation and storage, and other manufacturing reuses of the blighted land in the corridor in ways that will build our economy for the 21st century, rather than perpetuate the extractive economics that dominated our region for the 20th century.
An unregulated data center used by the private sector for AI or cryptocurrency mining fundamentally cannot meet this threshold.
We have many, many, many ideas for how a data center can be designed in ways that reduce the negative impacts which we will be sharing at a public meeting in May (date TBD), as well as better industrial uses for the site that we are advocating for.
The good news is that, while the site developer (Riverview Innovation Technology Campus, which is an affiliate to Ontario Specialty Contracting) has stated that they would like to start Phase I of the redevelopment by Quarter 3 Debido a estas continuas quejas de los vecinos sobre su calidad de vida, there are quite a number of steps they need to go through first before they can even start this first phase, and we expect to have several years before the data center can come online. All throughout this process, we will share avenues for public involvement, how to voice your concerns, and how to fight for alternative uses.
En el futuro próximo, if you are interested in fighting for renewable energy at the former Tonawanda Coke site instead of a data center, please consider taking one of the following steps:
- Make a donation to Clean Air to become a member to support our work
- Reach out to Bridge to express your interest in becoming a community leader in this fight
- Sign up for a lawn sign to make your opposition visible in the community
- Attend the next Town of Tonawanda meetings to the elected officials as well as to appointed boards – we will be there as well!
- Contact your elected officials in Albany and voice your support for the proposed statewide three-year moratorium on all industrial-scale data centers – we will have a truncated legislative session, so your voice is crucial in making this bill a priority this session!
We will be making a formal announcement in late April to announce a specific campaign on this topic.
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