Jenna Dooley: You're listening to WNIJ. I'm News Director Jenna Dooley. The state of Illinois is home to a big portion of the data centers up and running in the United States. According to the Data Center Map, it's in the top five on the list among Texas, California and Virginia. These are large, physical homes for massive amounts of data and computing, including crypto mining, AI and cloud services. DeKalb has been a hotbed of data center activity in recent years, and the public will soon be able to weigh in on yet another proposal. I've got WNIJ's environment reporter. Jess, Savage here to catch us up. Jess, it feels like we just sat down to talk about a data center in our listening area.
Jess Savage: Hey, Jenna, yeah, I followed as DeKalb City Council turned down a smaller project back in September, and Meta's 500-acre data center on the southeast side has been up and running for a couple of years. Plus, Yorkville just approved a massive 1000-acre facility earlier this month. DeKalb recently unveiled a proposal for yet another 500-plus-acre data center.
JD: Gotcha, what do we know so far about this proposal?
JS: Yeah, it's still early, so we don't really know very much. What we do know is that the facility, called "Project Vector," is set to be placed south of the Meta data center. The proposal was submitted by a developer called ChicagoWest, which is requesting that the land be rezoned for industrial purposes. It's currently farmland. I checked in with DeKalb city manager Bill Nicklas to see what he could tell me about the project.
"This is an opportunity for us to enjoy both the benefits of this storage, which, if it's done responsibly, can be a big boon to the community. Meta's investment, just so you know, in the last three years, has generated $46 million in tax money to our local taxing bodies, and of that $46 [million], $32 million has gone to the school district. That's just cash."
JD: And Jess, since you're our environment reporter, what do we know about data centers of this size and their water and energy use?
JS: Typically, data centers consume massive amounts of energy. For example, Nicholas says that Meta is waiting to expand their operations until ComEd can provide them with even more electricity, and they use up to 200,000 gallons of water a day for their cooling process. Nicholas says that this proposed data center would be different. He says they won't use water to cool the machinery, but fans instead, and they plan to use natural gas-powered generators for electricity instead of relying on it from ComEd. Dr. Lav Varshney is a professor at Stony Brook University. He used to be a professor at the University of Illinois, and his research actually contributed to lowering the environmental impact of Meta's data center during the construction phase. He says that there's always environmental tradeoffs and projects of this scale.
"You can improve the efficiency of transportation systems in terms of their energy and water requirements. You can look at even agriculture and improve its water requirements by doing very precise precision agriculture. If you look at nearly every industrial and societal sector, there's possibilities for improved efficiency of energy and water, and those might actually counteract some of the requirements for running the AI in the first place for other applications."
JS: Dr. Varshney says communities should take an active role in deciding what's in their best interest.
"So, data centers have interesting impacts on all kinds of things in communities, they can be a source of jobs, at least some number, so they can have economic impact. On the other hand, they can sometimes be disruptive to community strength, because they kind of take up resources that could have gone to other things. And I think it's up to each individual community to think through pluses and minuses of any economic activity, whether it's semiconductor manufacturing or data centers or agriculture or steel mills."
JD: What is next for this proposal?
JS: The Planning and Zoning Commission will be holding a public meeting on December 1 at the DeKalb Public Library and will make a recommendation for the full city council. The public can come to the hearing to share their thoughts, and there's no time limit to how long residents can speak.
JD: Thanks for catching us up, and you'll be following this as it progresses, I'm sure.
JS: Yeah, for sure. Thanks.
