“Data Centers and bitcoin mines are remaking rural America the same way coal once did. They move into weak regulatory terrain, rewrite the rules in their favor, drain the resources that communities rely on and send the value somewhere else.”

This quote is from a piece in Salon titled “Data centers are West Virginia’s new strip mines: The Mountain State is experiencing a data center boom–and using the old coal playbook” by Sean Carlton. I read the piece recently on Facebook, where it was shared by Tucker United – a group of Tucker County residents and their supporters opposing data center buildout in their breathtaking home. Tucker United describes themselves as “a coalition of Tucker County residents and allies that demand the power to shape our future and protect our community, families, natural resources, and economy.”

“Data centers are the same kind of extraction,” says Carlton, “only this time the corporations are hiding them behind fences, nondisclosure agreements and a lot of glossy PR about ‘upcycling’ coal mines and powering the future.”

“Strip mining used to at least throw a few hundred jobs at a county while it hollowed everything else out,” Carlton continues. “Now, West Virginia is trading away water, land, noise and grid capacity for a workforce small enough to fit inside a school bus.”

According to Noman Bashir, Computing and Climate Impact Fellow at MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) and a postdoc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), “The demand for new data centers cannot be met in a sustainable way. The pace at which companies are building new data centers means the bulk of the electricity to power them must come from fossil fuel-based power plants.”

Power consumption by U.S. data centers is expected to more than double by 2030, according to projections by the Pew Research Center using data from the International Energy Agency’s base case scenario, to 426 terawatt-hours per year. A report earlier this year by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen found that “Residents’ electricity costs in some data center-dense areas have surged over 250% in just five years. At PJM — the world’s largest power market [West Virginia is in PJM] — capacity auction prices spiked 800% in 2024, in part due to data center growth. That same year, consumers across seven PJM states paid $4.3 billion more in electricity costs to cover data centers’ new transmission infrastructure.”

A report by CNBC earlier this month shared findings from a separate watchdog report showing that “PJM’s 65 million consumers will pay a total of $16.6 billion to secure future power supplies needed to meet demand from AI data centers from now until 2027, approximately $255 per person on average.” That’s just from AI-related data centers, not separate data centers for cryptocurrency or cloud computing.

Data centers use massive amounts of water for cooling and create high demand for fracked gas (fracking being a process that causes permanent loss of enormous quantities of water from the water table that can never be made potable again, at least on human timescales). With passage of House Bill 2014 earlier this year in the WV Legislature, municipalities and counties will be deprived of the vast majority of tax revenue data centers in West Virginia generate in their backyards.

Data centers are a driving force behind Governor Patrick Morrisey’s “50 by 50” energy initiative, whereby Morrisey wants West Virginia to produce 50 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, 35 gigawatts more than the 15 gigawatts the state produces today, driven almost exclusively by coal and gas. This initiative is ludicrous on its face regardless of what sources the electricity would come from–which I made clear in comments I offered to the state’s Office of Energy recently–but to focus almost entirely on coal and gas, with a bone thrown to extremely expensive nuclear, is completely asinine.

The focus of energy policy in West Virginia should be twofold: 1) Generation by cleaner, safer, healthier and far cheaper renewables–especially solar, wind and hydro–with multiple storage operations to solve for intermittency; and 2) maximization of energy efficiencies across our built environments (residential, commercial and industrial) and deployment of smart grid technologies and other demand management systems. We need community solar solutions and assistance for households and rental property owners who have suitable properties to help them with the upfront costs of going solar and relying less on the grid or even going off grid with home energy storage options.

Generations of West Virginians sacrificed everything to power civilization and build the modern world. Our people have given enough. We shouldn’t have to continue being the same extraction colony and sacrifice zone we’ve been since June 20, 1863, so delusional bitcoin investors can feel like they’re doing something futuristic and special and so AI can continue becoming the next technological Frankenstein’s monster. Mountaineers deserve better.