Hyperscale data centers typically require a lot of land, power and water to function, making rural Ohio ideal for developers. But now, they're eying urban areas in Northeast Ohio.
Earlier this month, Cleveland denied a permit for what would've been the city's first hyperscale data center. Though smaller data centers in the city already exist, residents and city council members are concerned about the effects on Cleveland's aging infrastructure.
精东影业鈥檚 Abbey Marshall spoke with Jonathan Steirer of the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve University about infrastructure demands of those data centers in an urban environment.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
STEIRER: Any type of large organization 鈥� a university, a research university, like Case [Western Reserve University], a large corporation, hospitals 鈥� they have some type of digital computer infrastructure on site that could be considered like a small scale data center. But that's... managed pretty traditionally; it's in an air-conditioned room where you can kind of handle it with normal building and environmental controls. And then as you get bigger, that's where things get a little bit more complex.
MARSHALL: What you're describing is a longtime coexistence with smaller scale data centers. So now moving into these hyperscale data centers, why are we seeing more and more of these pop up, and we're traditionally seeing these in rural areas, right?
STEIRER: The reason you see them in rural areas is typically because land is cheaper. They need a lot of land. They're very big. Or, the other big factors that impact location of some of these large facilities are access to things like natural gas pipelines, access to transmission infrastructure 鈥� so just the power lines 鈥� and tax incentives.
MARSHALL: So obviously Cleveland is a city where there is a lot of vacant land. We're in a post-industrial city. Can you talk about why a developer would want to come here?
STEIRER: The cost of land is a huge factor. I think an interesting challenge in an urban environment like Cleveland is the transmission infrastructure. Is our grid realistically able to accommodate this type of load demand being added to it? And I think a lot of people would say that there's going to need to be some upgrades.
At the same time, even if data centers didn't exist and this load wasn't being added to the grid, we have a lot transmission upgrade needs. And so this growing load demand on top of that is really where rate payers are starting to see these increasing energy costs.
And when you face the uncertainties of grid reliability, what a lot of these data centers are doing is looking to what we call "behind the meter" generation. "Behind the meter" generation is what energy can you just produce on site that you're not pulling from the grid, you're just producing it for yourself to consume on site. That could be renewables, but realistically that tends to be things like gas turbines, which is why access to like natural gas pipelines is, it tends to be really critical in the siting of these facilities.
MARSHALL: A lot of my colleagues have found in their reporting that rural areas are targeted not only because of the massive amounts of land, but the sparse population: fewer people to push back on these proposals. What are we seeing in urban areas?
STEIRER: I do think that, for sure, population density and the potential for pushback does play into this. When you can amass large, large swaths of greenfield to develop something like this, there are fewer people around it.
Rural energy systems suffer from similar challenges as urban, which is just, again, the reliability of the infrastructure. And so ... kind of both are susceptible to the same threats.
I would also say because our grid in the United States is broken into these very large regional transmission organizations, what happens in one region 鈥� even if it's not particularly proximate or geographically proximate to another 鈥� still impacts that other region. So it's almost tough to draw a distinction between urban and rural populations entirely because they share the same grid.
MARSHALL: Looking ahead, this particular data center was denied. What would need to happen in Cleveland to make it a place that these developments would succeed?
STEIRER: There's a lot of creative ways you could try to integrate these with infrastructure. Could Downtown Cleveland suck heat out of a large data center for district heating purposes? That would be really interesting. But that would add some overall efficiency into the system. There's a lot of considerations, I think, that go into it when you want to locate this near a population center. But trying to integrate it with infrastructure would be the one way to try to harness these as some type of larger asset.
