Americans oppose data centers in their communities

A Gallup survey in March found seventy-one percent of Americans opposed data center construction locally.

Google's Minnesota data center plan

Google proposes a seven hundred eighty megawatt data center in Pine Island, Minnesota, a town of about four thousand residents an hour southeast of Minneapolis.

Google's cloud business drives revenue growth

Google's cloud business powers its own Gemini AI and brought in nearly twenty-five billion dollars in second-quarter revenue, an eighty-two percent increase from a year earlier.

Google and Xcel's grid upgrade plan

Google plans to finance the addition of one thousand four hundred megawatts of wind, two hundred megawatts of solar and three hundred megawatts of battery storage to Xcel's grid.

New power serves all local customers

Xcel Energy said the new power will serve all customers in the local area, not just Google. The upgrades will help advance the local grid's carbon-free energy supply.

Google's financial commitments to the grid

Google will pay for at least seventy-five percent of its contracted capacity even if it uses less.The company would owe up to eight years' worth of minimum demand charges if it terminates the agreement early.

“Nobody wants to have a big buildout and then have nowhere for that power to go and nobody to pay for that power. That's where these protections come in.”

Data centers driving historic power demand

New data centers will account for most of the projected increase in electricity demand over the next decade, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.More than seventy percent of U.S.

Smaller data centers could use existing capacity

Jigar Shah, a partner at Multiplier consulting firm, said data center operators could build smaller facilities where the grid already has unused capacity. This would minimize the need to build new generation or transmission equipment.

“If you fit the load growth that the data centers want into the existing grid, everybody's rates go down by a lot.”

Why companies build larger data centers

Shah said data center operators build one thousand megawatt facilities instead of forty twenty-five megawatt facilities because it is easier to contract one large data center than to coordinate multiple smaller ones.

“And so the question really is, why are people not doing these twenty-five megawatt data centers? Why are they doing one thousand megawatt data centers? And it turns out people are just lazy.”

Utilities profit from new infrastructure

David Pomerantz, executive director at the Energy and Policy Institute, said utilities enjoy around ten percent returns on new investments funded by Wall Street investors.

Google's project pending regulatory approval

The proposed agreement between Google and Xcel Energy is pending approval by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.