Washington Is Giving Tax Breaks to Data Centers That Threaten the State's Green Energy Push

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https://www.propublica.org/article/data-centers-clean-energy-washington-state

Washington Is Giving Tax Breaks to Data Centers That Threaten the State’s Green Energy Push

In 2019, Washington adopted legislation requiring electric utilities to go carbon-neutral in a decade. Yet lawmakers continued to promote the growth of energy-guzzling data centers with generous tax incentives.

by Lulu Ramadan and Sydney Brownstone, The Seattle Times, photography by Karen Ducey, The Seattle Times
July 28, 5 a.m. EDT

Co-published with The Seattle Times

[...]

Then wealthy companies, catering to the insatiable demands of our digital world, arrived in the county. Attracted by the cheap electricity, they built power-guzzling data centers — the warehouses filled with computer servers that back the modern internet. Local officials welcomed the industry’s economic potential.

But with demand soaring and the power from dams finite, Grant County has been forced to look to other sources of energy. The problem is so acute that the county is headed for a daunting choice in the next six years: violate a state green energy law limiting the use of fossil fuels or risk rolling blackouts in homes, factories and hospitals.

[...]

State lawmakers set the stage for this reckoning. In 2019, the Legislature passed a measure to make Washington’s utilities carbon-neutral by 2030. At the same time, in the name of bringing jobs to rural areas, lawmakers encouraged the explosive growth of the data center industry through a massive tax break.

Remarkably, Washington in recent years has gotten a smaller share of its electricity from renewable sources than it did two decades ago, according to the most recent state data. That’s despite the fact the state produces a quarter of the nation’s hydropower.

[...]

[TheFarseer]

1. This is a huge problem

These data centers and crypto miners are using a lot of resources and not contributing much if anything to society.

[Lonestarblue]

2. And you know what is stored in these data centers? Every aspect of our personal lives.

Tech billionaires have gotten rich by monetizing our private data—and our politicians have just mostly encouraged it. People like Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Google technocrats sweep up our data and make billions selling it. I wish we would do more of what the EU is doing to put on some controls.

[Wounded Bear]

3. I think most of them are crypto mining centers doing nothing for the general public...

Those should be taxed more than simple cloud storage facilities.