Battleground grows in Mass. against AI data centers

Detailed summary

People in Sutton are "expressing fear of a harsh reality," writes one reader. Another warns, "Areas of the country and the world that don’t have plenty of data centers will be left behind."

We must help the residents of Sutton in their resistance to the construction of a data center campus (“The Kraft Group wants to build a $16 billion data center campus in a small Central Mass. town,” Nov. 11). The campus would drain natural resources, disrupt ecosystems, initiate public health problems, and contribute to the climate crisis.

Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Worcester, is also aware of these certainties and is cosponsoring federal bills to protect us and our land. The PRICE Act (Preventing Rate Inflation in Consumer Energy) would require data centers to generate their own electricity and transition to 100 percent clean energy over time. The Data Center Transparency Act would require reporting on data centers’ effects on air and water quality, energy consumption, and consumer costs. There is a companion bill in the Senate, and we should urge Democratic Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren to cosponsor it.

In pushing for this legislation we help the people of Sutton as well as other citizens around the country who are facing, or will face, this challenge.

At the state level, legislators must study Markey’s recent report, “The EPA’s Data Center Disaster,” on how federal regulators are failing to fulfill their role of protecting the public. Its extensive documentation justifies the resistance we’re seeing in Sutton. These townspeople are not expressing “fear of an unknown, or fear of an uncertainty,” as Republican state Representative Joe McKenna of Sutton suggests. They’re expressing fear of a harsh reality.

The writer is affiliated with the Worcester-area chapter of Climate Hope Affiliates.

I’m not sure why the AI data center issue is so complicated. The concerns are water, air, power, and noise. Engineers are trained to address these concerns, and there is plenty of money involved in these proposed sites to do so.

For example, the data center could be responsible for its own water and electricity, one way or another.

It is imperative that we…

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Boston Globe. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.