While opposition to data centers continues to grow, including here in northeast Indiana, Allen County's project is already well into construction.
A few weeks ago, in the middle of November, more than a hundred people showed up to make sure the Indiana Department of Environmental Management heard their opposition to a data center being built in southeast Fort Wayne.
“We’re not just here to defend our neighborhoods in the backyard of this data center, we’re here to defend everyone down river," Kelly Atkins said to represenatives from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management at a hearing about the latest request from the Google data center. At the end of the hearing, the crowd of speakers began chanting at the representatives; "Deny, deny, deny."
Hatchworks LLC, a subsidiary of Google, is requesting an additional 143 diesel generators to support the campus.
To understand the opposition to the build, first, a look at how the data center came to Fort Wayne, when it was known only as “Project Zodiac.”
How the data center came to Fort Wayne
In October of 2023, what was then described as an “unnamed Fortune 100 company” proposed a data center campus around Adams Center and Paulding roads, using nearly 900 acres of land and requiring an annexation of more than 700 acres into Fort Wayne.
The months that followed included a “super-voluntary” annexation, land sale and tax abatement approvals. In January 2024, after everything was finalized, the anonymous company’s name was released; Google would be building a data center campus with up to 12 buildings.
Community development director Jonathan Leist recalled how the property sale went through.
“So we sold our portion of the property for a little less than $12 million, $11.4 (million) I believe, something like that," Leist said. "So that was over and above our last appraisal that we had of the property. So definitely market rate on the land sale.”
In December 2023, Mayor Sharon Tucker was still serving as the city council representative for the sixth district, the area where the data center is currently being built. Following a visit to a similar data center in Columbus, Ohio, at the December 22, 2023 city council meeting, Tucker spoke in favor of approving the project.
“There have been a multitude of bad projects that have tried to be dumped on the south side and I have fought every single one of them," Tucker said at the December 2023 meeting. "This is not one, council, that I’m fighting.”
In her visit to the campus in Columbus, joined by Leist, he said their concerns specifically about sound pollution diminished.
"I think what we saw and heard there was that the only sound really being emitted was construction," Leist said. "Like there was no unique data center sound that I think people in other locations had.”
A change in the energy landscape
The Midwest has become something of a breeding ground for data centers, due to cooler temperatures that require less energy-intensive cooling than Southern states. Great Lakes states like Indiana, Ohio and Michigan have seen a boom in data center builds over the last several years.
There are 72 facilities under construction in Indiana alone.
Earlier this year, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan published a study into what happens when data centers come to towns.
The study found that, while many data centers propose to eventually run entirely on green energy, the green energy needed for that much energy running all the time isn’t currently possible.
And in cases like Fort Wayne, the company then asks for more of the old energy sources.
Molly Kleinman is the managing director of the science, technology and public policy program at the Ford School.
“I haven’t seen solid justification for the humungous embrace of as much energy, dirty as it needs to be, as we can get now, and we’ll worry about clean energy down the line," Kleinman said.
But it isn’t just about not using green energy. In many cases, the issue is the way data centers have increased reliance on fossil fuels. In many areas, increased energy needs from data centers are helping coal and gas plants slated for closure to find a second life.
“We’ve seen that data centers have eaten up all of the renewable capacity that the countries added over the last several years, and then gone beyond it," Kleinman said. "They have essentially canceled out all of the gains that we had previously made in renewables.”
Bryce Gustafson is program organizer with Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer and environmental advocacy group based out of Indianapolis.
“This may come as a shock to some people, but Indiana was on a trajectory of getting away from fossil fuels," he said. "This has completely upended that trajectory.”
Indiana Michigan Power just got permission to acquire an existing 870-megawatt gas-fired power plant in Ohio. NIPSCO announced plans in September to build a natural gas plant, through separate company NIPSCO GenCo, to address the increased needs from data centers throughout the state.
Find part two of this story here.
