ORLANDO, Fla. \u2014 Data centers have existed for decades. Every text message you send, credit card you swipe, show you stream, and prescription you pick up involves a data center.<\/p>\n
However, it\u2019s the hyperscale data centers, more recently being developed to support AI, that are making headlines. In Florida, a large data center is defined as a facility with a peak load of 50 megawatts. For reference, the Nuclear Regulatory Division says one megawatt can power up to 1,000 homes.<\/p>\n
The company HostDime is building a facility on the edge of Eatonville that will have 20 MW of power, nothing compared to the 900-megawatt-and-more facilities that states like Virginia have allowed.<\/p>\n
Wilbert Woods grew up in Eatonville. He says one of the top concerns people have about a data center is their energy bill.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not that high, but now, with this big thing coming in the bill\u2019s gonna go up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Spectrum News 13 reached out to Florida\u2019s major power companies. Florida Power and Light had 30 data centers on its grid by the end of 2025. Fewer than 10 of those facilities have electric demand greater than half a megawatt, with the largest facility having an approximate demand of 25 MW. FPL says it\u2019s adjusted its rate structure so any large data center pays the cost of its energy use.<\/p>\n
Duke Energy says it doesn\u2019t serve any large data centers and is in line with Senate Bill 484, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May, part of which requires large load customers to bear the costs of services.<\/p>\n
Still, data center neighbors worry about the burden on the electric grid. Professor Issa Batarseh teaches electrical and computer engineering at UCF and spent years working on power supplies for data centers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen people demand, or submit requests, that galvanizes every tool available to AI to answer your questions, that\u2019s a huge power pulse that could affect the grid,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
However, Batarseh is confident other fixes are coming.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are pushing for that technology and you will see the press releases coming in,\u201d he said of big tech companies.<\/p>\n
TECfusions founder Simon Tusha owns and operates data centers in Arizona, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
He adapts old industrial sites to build data centers and addresses the power grid issue with his own power generation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe make on-site power, so in the event that there\u2019s a hurricane or whatever, we can export power back into the community,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Batarseh says this is not just a good idea, it\u2019s a necessary solution to the power grid problem posed by large data centers. He said that if data centers can find ways to supply and store that power, it could even provide power to the surrounding community.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not talking enough about it,\u201d said Batarseh. \u201cRenewable energy, especially solar and batteries, can solve the problem within the data center campus. That is really a real solution. The answer is it will not affect the grid, it will support the grid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Neighbors like Woods have other concerns, though. Data centers don\u2019t offer many jobs. There are construction jobs as they\u2019re built, and Tusha says TECfusions employs research and development personnel at their data centers, but Dr. Dan S. Myers at Rollins College says data centers are not a promising job source.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn Amazon warehouse might be a good comparison. Those employ many hundreds of people from a local community,\u201d Myers said. \u201cA data center is not gonna do that. It\u2019s going to be a small number of permanent employees focused on operations.\u201d<\/p>\n
The flip side, he said, is tax revenue.<\/p>\n
\u201cData centers can be very good at generating tax revenue,\u201d Myers said.<\/p>\n
That tax revenue can be the draw for a community to welcome a data center. But for people living nearby, there are other worries.<\/p>\n
\u201cWater is going to be pulled,\u201d said Woods, and he worries that will impact his community\u2019s access to it.<\/p>\n
Water is currently used to cool data centers. Spectrum News 13 reached out to water management districts, and none reported permit applications for a large data center. All say they would have to assess the availability and projected use.<\/p>\n
Myers says a large data center uses about a million gallons a day or more.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to put that in context,\u201d he said. \u201cAn 18-hole golf course in Florida could easily use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day just to irrigate the grass.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he says the problem can lie in the way data centers use water. Agriculture uses a lot of water, but it\u2019s seasonal. Data centers, he says, use that large amount of water every day of the year. The technology around cooling data centers is changing, though.<\/p>\n
\u201cOlder data centers use evaporative cooling,\u201d he said. \u201cYou essentially run the water through the pipes and let it evaporate. This is energy efficient, but when that water evaporates, it\u2019s not going back into the place you drew it from. It\u2019s going back into the atmosphere. Eventually it\u2019ll cycle back into the earth, it\u2019s not being destroyed, but you\u2019re not putting it back in the same place so you can\u2019t draw it back out again immediately. More modern data center designs use close-loop cooling, where you\u2019re running essentially a contained cycle, you\u2019re circulating the same water repeatedly and you\u2019re cooling it down mechanically. That\u2019s better from a water perspective, but you\u2019re using more energy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Power, water, real estate values and more are the concerns that community leaders like Kelly Martinez Semrad hear from their constituents. The commissioner led the proposal for Orange County to temporarily ban data centers while staff research their impact.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see the concerns across the United States and in Florida where people are worried about a data center moving into their community, right next to their home, tanking their property values, sucking up their water, and increasing their utility bills,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
But Tusha says communities that ban the development of data centers will pay the price.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo as data centers become more and more scarce, access to them is going to become more and more scarce,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Eventually, he argues, this will lead to people paying for data center access the same way they pay for cable.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo if you want to access your card, your ChatGPT, you\u2019re going to be charged for it and you\u2019re going to be charged dearly. Because what these people don\u2019t realize is that they\u2019re walking into a trap. You know, the more and more that they block data centers and remove data centers from their communities, their communities become weaker,\u201d Tusha said. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be less economic incentive. There\u2019s going to be less educational opportunities. There\u2019s going to be less vocational opportunities, because employers are going to want to make sure that their staff can be connected to the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Semrad argues that his thought process works both ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust like they can make information scarce, other industries can respond and retaliate in the same fashion,\u201d she said, suggesting data centers and AI companies can be charged more and more for the resources they use. \u201cIf they want to sign up and live next to an AI data center, by all means.\u201d<\/p>\n
Myers suggests, while data centers may continue to take a toll, AI could bring vast benefits to the environment.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo think about transportation logistics, shipping. If you could make all shipping 1% more efficient, the environmental impact of that would far dwarf any data center project,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The same, he says, goes for agriculture. However, that future isn\u2019t promised.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the other hand, maybe AI actually incentivizes us to do even more shipping than we were previously doing,\u201d Myers said. \u201cIn that case, it might even go the other way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, he says, when discussing the impact of data centers, it\u2019s important to consider the impact of the thing they power: artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORLANDO, Fla. \u2014 Data centers have existed for decades. Every text message you send, credit card you swipe,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":410889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[63156,115,1335,139,141,140,143013,835,63157],"class_list":["post-410888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-app-watchdog-investigations","tag-news","tag-orange-county","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-rhian-lowndes","tag-vod","tag-watchdog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}