The other anti-data center movement: California's sky-high electricity prices
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The nation is awash in data center hate and California is no exception.Temporary bans have cropped up across the state as residents from Imperial County to San José fight proposals in their communities.Monterey Park became the first city in the country earlier this month to permanently ban data centers by a popular vote.
And a recent poll sponsored by the environmental group Net-Zero California showed 70% of state residents don’t want data centers in their communities.But unlike in Virginia, Texas, Ohio and other states where residents are fighting 400-plus megawatt hyperscaler facilities in their backyards, California has some major barriers keeping data centers at bay.Sky high industrial electricity prices are more than double the national average.
Long wait times to connect to the grid have some new data centers sitting empty in Silicon Valley.And the state regulates the size of the backup generators that keep the centers running when the grid goes down.
That has limited most facilities to a fraction of the size that artificial intelligence increasingly demands.That all means that California is seeing less of a boom — fewer proposed data centers, and smaller in size — than in the country’s hot spots.
“California isn’t even on the map today,” said Mehdi Paryavi, chairman of the International Data Center Authority.“Taxes are high, land is expensive, water is scarce, energy is difficult to find, communities are pushing back.
There are all kinds of problems.”Northern California and Southern California were hubs for an earlier generation of data centers.“But over time, as the sector has grown, the overwhelming majority has been developed elsewhere,” said Andrew Batson, head of data center research at real estate intelligence firm JLL.
“Almost all the data center demand being generated from California is being serviced by adjacent states,” from places ...