Donna Collins lives about 20 miles from where Meta’s biggest data center is being built, in a house her family has lived in for five generations. Construction has thrown the small agricultural community in North Louisiana into the spotlight as a high-profile example of how the infrastructure behind generative AI could impact nearby residents.
For Collins, this place is “a little piece of heaven.” “It’s all I’ve ever known as a home. It’s quiet. It’s rural. It is beautiful,” she says. “We can’t imagine the changes that are coming.”
The region was particularly hard-hit by the recent cold snap that knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Frigid temperatures raise electricity rates — as well as questions about how ready power grids will be for future disasters while straining under growing pressure from data centers. Louisiana has built back time and again from storm after storm, but now community members and advocates want assurances that energy-hungry data centers won’t add to the costs.
“We can’t imagine the changes that are coming.”
“We’re very nervous,” Collins says. “When the wind blows, electricity goes out here in a lot of these remote areas. We live in an area where electricity is kind of uncertain as is.”
The recent “icepocalypse,” as Collins described, arrived with a January 24th winter storm. The storm was only the start — forecasters had warned that persistent freezing temperatures would allow ice to build up on trees and energy infrastructure across a large part of the US east of the Rockies. The weight of that ice can bring power lines crashing down or snarl them with falling branches.
By February 5th, local utility Entergy Louisiana said that it had finished restoring power to almost 130,000 customers affected. Collins says her home, which is served by an electric cooperative, lost power for four days. She also owns a property she uses as an Airbnb, served by Entergy, which lost power for a few days.
Meta might be Entergy’s most controversial new customer in the area. The utility is building three new gas plants to supply enough electricity for Meta’s $27 billion AI data center in Richland Parish. The facility is expected to use three times as much electricity annually as the city of New Orleans. Meta’s data center and two of the gas plants are under construction, with the data center slated to be completed in 2030. It’s too soon for them to have had an impact on the power grid during this storm.
But consumer advocates are concerned about whether residents could get stuck with higher bills as a result of rising electricity demand and new infrastructure being built for Meta, and they are already pushing for stronger protections. Gas prices spiked as wells froze up while the cold snap increased demand for the fuel used in heating and electricity. In the coming months, those increased costs are likely to show up on residents’s utility bills. Advocates are worried that the price spike could be even higher as more energy-hungry data centers used for generative AI connect to the grid.
“In a world where those three new gas power plants [serving Meta] are online, that would be further upward pressure on the cost of gas and therefore on the cost of both home heating and the cost of electricity on the larger market,” Logan Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy (AAE), tells The Verge.
Entergy didn’t respond to requests for comment. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Ashley Settle said, “We worked closely with Entergy to provide additional protection for customers, which projects that the electricity payments for the Richland Parish Data Center will cut both grid upgrade customer costs and storm charges by about 10%, resulting in $650 million in customer savings over 15 years.”
But while Meta has agreed to pay for 15 years of the capital costs of the three new power plants, Burke says that’s an incomplete picture. There are more costs associated with upgrading transmission lines, for example, and Burke is still concerned about increased demand for gas and electricity raising utility bills for other customers.
Earlier this month, Burke’s organization and the Union of Concerned Scientists also filed a response to a grid stability analysis Entergy conducted, alleging it “fails to adequately assess the reliability risks of serving the data center.” Specifically, they’re calling on the utility to redo the analysis to more thoroughly assess what would happen to the grid if there were to be a large disturbance like a transmission line or power plant going down, as the state has already seen happen during major storms.
“People in North Louisiana are already facing a lot of outages, and there’s this new [project] that is being rushed through the process, not adequately studied in terms of impact on the grid,” says Paul Arbaje, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It could potentially cause even more disruptions and cause even more harm if we don’t take this seriously enough.”
Across the US, local opposition to other data center projects — often driven by concerns about how much electricity and water they would use — have led to delays and cancellations. In North Louisiana, Collins says residents are worried about property costs, taxes, and rents going up, too.
Meta’s moving into a community where the landscape has been defined by farmland for generations. Collins hopes the company follows through on pledges to support local vocational training and hiring as local farmers find it harder to make a living. She has a nephew who’s a farmer who now works at the Meta construction site.
“I’m not against progress,” she says. “But, you know… those of us that have lived here our whole lives have to be concerned about our water supply, our electricity cost, our property values and taxes. All of those are big concerns because we’re going to pay the price.”
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