Environment Georgia’s director offers testimony to Special House Committee

Jennette Gayer, Environment Georgia’s state director, was invited to offer testimony to the Georgia House of Representative’s Special Committee on Resource Management. In short we highlighted three major challenges that data centers pose to Georgia’s natural resources:

1. New and existing data centers use tremendous amounts of water for cooling, often pulling more water from a river than a small or medium sized Georgia city. They also use water indirectly at the nuclear, coal or gas power plants that provide electricity to power the data center. What impact will water hungry data centers have on our rivers is a huge concern.
2. Data center growth is driving huge demand for new electricity in Georgia. Georgia Power will likely meet those needs by keeping coal plants past their announced retirement dates and building new gas or oil fired power plants. Environment Georgia’s past research has found that more than 7.6 million Georgians lived in regions that suffered more than two months in a year of elevated levels of air pollution. More polluting power plants could worsen air quality and contribute to climate change. Data centers also install diesel generators for back-up power. These generators could have serious impacts on the noise and air pollution and community is exposed to.
3. Data centers take up a lot of space, one proposed data center is three times the size of the Mall of Georgia. These large facilities will replace forests and farmlands with rooftop and parking lot which will have an impact on wildlife habitat, water run-off and more.

Download a copy of our presentation or watch the full committee meeting here.