||| FROM ELISABETH ROBSON |||
It’s time the citizens of this county, and of Washington State more broadly, start pushing back hard against Washington State’s tax incentives to data centers and other electricity-intensive industries.
These incentives include sales and use tax exemptions for eligible data centers on purchases of server equipment and power infrastructure, as well as labor and services for installation, for large data centers (over 100,000 square feet) in either rural or urban areas. In addition, AI companies may benefit from general tax incentives applicable to high-technology industries, like the high technology business and operations (B&O) tax credit “designed to promote growth and innovation in high-tech industries,” including software development and electronic device manufacturing.
Both the Seattle Times and OPALCO have made claims that we face rising risk of blackouts as the strain on the grid increases:
“Our existing hydro system is pretty much tapped out,” said Randall Hardy, an energy consultant and former administrator of Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that owns Washington’s largest dam. “So you’ve got a dilemma of how you’ll meet this additional load from data centers with clean resources or, frankly, with any resources.” — Seattle Times, July 28, 2024
According to Data Center Map, there are 114 data centers in Washington State, using a total of 6,737,832 square feet and 1,375 megawatts. One common electricity-intensive industry setting up shop in Washington State is Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies, including AI developed by Washington State-based companies Amazon and Microsoft.
Along with a huge amount of electricity (a single average data center consumes the equivalent of heating 50,000 homes yearly), data centers require massive amounts of materials for the centers themselves, the cooling systems, and the RAM, CPUs, drive boards, motherboards, wiring, and more that make up each server. According to a report on AI and the environment published by the Civilization Research Institute, one kilogram of electronic board used in data servers requires 2.6 tons of mining rock waste. They write:
“About 965 thousand metric tons of mining rock waste was produced just for the GPUs (about 10,000 NVIDIA A100s) used in OpenAI’s custom-built supercomputer to train GPT-3. This is mostly due to just three elements—indium, gold, dysprosium, and copper—and would plausibly be another magnitude greater if all other components (motherboards, CPUs, network cables, etc.) were included.”
This material must come from somewhere and it comes from mines all over the world, including mines where child slaves are picking rocks from the ground by hand, and mines where people are being kicked out of their homes and off their land with force. Are we citizens of Washington okay with that?
A December 2024 article in The Guardian states that there is a 10-20% chance that AI will lead to human extinction within three decades. Geoffrey Hinton, quoted in the article, says “My worry is that the invisible hand is not going to keep us safe. So just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not going to be sufficient to make sure they develop it safely.”
In a June 3, 2025 article in The Guardian, author Laura Bates describes how “AI is already devastating the lives of women and girls, right now” via the development of tools that allows people (men) to use AI create deep fake pornography from real people (including a teacher who used AI to do this to his students), and AI sex bots in virtual spaces and websites that users can interact with, and much more. Bates writes:
“For as little as $5 a month, users can access a ‘brothel’ staffed by girls below the age of 15, described on the site as a “world without feminism”. Or they can ‘chat’ with a range of characters, including Olivia, a 13-year-old girl with pigtails wearing a hospital gown, or Reiko, ‘your clumsy older sister’ who is described as “constantly having sexual accidents with her younger brother”.
I could go on about the many other nefarious uses of AI.
So my question is this: why are Washington State citizens allowing our state government to incentivize AI data centers to come to the state, threaten the stability of the Pacific Northwest Grid, and threaten our communities by developing tools that require massive amounts of energy and materials that are devastating to the environment, and do so much harm to all of us?
Because of AI and other electricity-hungry industries that our state is helping to set up shop here, we are now faced with the potential for blackouts? The knock-on effect of all this is that OPALCO is trying to pave our county with solar panels and stick one to four 747-sized machines in Rosario Strait. Are we really okay with this?
How does this make sense?
We must push back against our state government on this issue. We–the community and the environment–are paying a terrible price for these industries. It’s time to stop the madness.
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I agree almost entirely with Elisabeth Robson. The vast electricity consumption of data centers is a subject I wrote about last year in the SEATTLE TIMES, as republished here in the Orcasonian: https://theorcasonian.com/the-ai-power-struggle-data-centers-are-in-a-desperate-search-for-energy/
At the end of that article I wrote that electricity is the Achilles Heel of these data centers. But until now I didn’t realize the vast materials consumption that goes into manufacturing AI-capable microprocessors, which also uses a lot of electricity, too.
And I agree entirely that we have to stop subsidizing the data-center industry with tax breaks — money now sorely needed by the state government. But when I raised the issue with our representative Alex Ramel last year, his knee-jerk reply was, “Do you want to see the data centers go to Idaho?”
Fortunately, Governor Ferguson is taking another look at this question, having empaneled a Department of Revenue Task Force to look into it and report back by December. Concerned citizens might send him their comments.
Yes, please, let’s move future data centers to Idaho. We can’t afford to keep subsidizing them, as Elisabeth and Michael have pointed out. Just FYI, my sister lives in Idaho Falls, and her home electrical rate is $0.0715 per kwh, about half what we pay OPALCO for ours.
The question of the supply chain for the materials used to produce semiconductors is complex and probably should not be entangled with the cost of power in our state, in particular as most of the Nvidia and other AI chips are made in Taiwan and other countries in and around Asia, not the USA. I’m not suggesting that this isn’t an issue worth considering, but instead–it’s a separate issue from the data center in Washington issues.
Thank you, Elisabeth Robson, for your comprehensive research on this issue. I don’t know whether your accounting of “data centers” includes the number of bitcoin mines in Washington state. It’s apparently difficult to pin down the exact number because they’re, well…crypto; but they certainly have considerable negative impacts on many resources in addition to power consumption https://earthjustice.org/feature/cryptomining-bitcoin-state-bills-legislation.
I think it is important to scale some of these numbers to the level of our own residential energy demand; i.e., how much electricity are these data centers stealing from us? Just to unpack the numbers you’ve provided:
6,737,832 square feet of data centers in Washington State = 155 square miles of floor area; and
1,375 megawatts could potentially power approximately 1,375,000 homes, based on the general rule of thumb of 1,000 homes per MW. That’s almost 100 San Juan Counties.
Given these numbers and the impact of the AI industry on the northwest power grid, it makes sense to focus efforts on energy conservation at a regional scale, focusing on industrial use and legislated tax incentives in these states rather than on the relatively miniscule potential of alternative generation to power the push to rural electrification. If we are looking at the potential of rolling blackouts in the near future as OPALCO warns, this is the message that we should send to our coop representatives and our state legislators.
Others have made a persuasive case that our local OPALCO Board has been captured by management and is not looking out for the interests of the CoOp member/owners
OPALCO is committed to providing reliable power to our member-owners — it’s our core mission.
That mission is becoming increasingly difficult as regional electricity demand continues to rise, aging coal plants are decommissioned (a transition we support), and our submarine cables to the mainland approach capacity limits.
We welcome all members to get involved and help shape our path forward. In the coming months, we’ll be conducting a membership-wide survey focused on local renewable energy generation. Your voice matters — please take part.
Krista,
What is OPALCO doing to campaign with the governor and our state representatives and senator to reverse these tax incentives for data centers, and do something to prevent crypto mines in Washington?
This looks like a much more fruitful source of the electricity we need than pushing for these environmentally costly “alternative energy” projects OPALCO is putting so much energy into pushing. It would be a much better way of following OPALCO’s core mission without wrecking our local ecosystems.
OPALCO has no data centers in our service center but they are a large indirect concern. We’ve been actively engaged for years with the Governor’s Office, state legislators, and energy stakeholders to sound the alarm: demand is outpacing supply in the Northwest.
But we cannot wait for Olympia to act. That’s why OPALCO is focusing heavily on developing local, clean generation—like solar arrays and battery storage right here in San Juan County. These projects reduce our dependence on the mainland grid, protect us from outages, and put energy resilience in local hands.