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WaPo: In the shadows of Arizona's data center boom, thousands live without power
WaPo - (archive: https://archive.ph/2ahdX ) In the shadows of Arizona’s data center boom, thousands live without power
As data centers drain America’s power grids, a fierce battle is being waged for electricity. On Navajo Nation land, many are on the losing end.
By Pranshu Verma
Today at 5:00 a.m. EST
CAMERON, Ariz. — Living on one of the largest swaths of land in America without electric power, Thomasina Nez’s entire life is a scramble to complete basic tasks.
To take a hot shower, she must wait for buckets of water to come to a boil on a small propane stove outside her wood-framed roundhouse. To make meals, she relies mostly on canned goods because unrefrigerated produce rots quickly in the Arizona heat. It’s a struggle to stay warm at night, because she refuses to use her coal-powered heater after its fumes killed her two dogs.
A fierce battle for electric power is being waged across the nation, and Nez is one of thousands of people who have wound up on the losing end. Amid a boom in data centers, the energy-intensive warehouses that run supercomputers for Big Tech companies, Arizona is racing to increase electricity production. In February, the state utility board approved an 8 percent rate hike to bolster power infrastructure throughout the state, where data centers are popping up faster than almost anywhere in the United States. But it rejected a plan to bring electricity to parts of the Navajo Nation land, concluding that electric customers should not be asked to foot the nearly $4 million bill.
“We’ve been without [power] for quite a long time,” said Nez, who lives separately from her teenage children so they have electricity to complete their schoolwork. Tech companies “already have it,” she said, “and for them to get more power, it’s kind of not right.”
Nicole Garcia, a spokeswoman for Arizona’s utility board the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), said it did not approve the Navajo aid provision because of “concerns about how the funds would be used,” adding that customers are not “responsible for extending electricity to all tribal areas of the state.”
/snip
As data centers drain America’s power grids, a fierce battle is being waged for electricity. On Navajo Nation land, many are on the losing end.
By Pranshu Verma
Today at 5:00 a.m. EST
CAMERON, Ariz. — Living on one of the largest swaths of land in America without electric power, Thomasina Nez’s entire life is a scramble to complete basic tasks.
To take a hot shower, she must wait for buckets of water to come to a boil on a small propane stove outside her wood-framed roundhouse. To make meals, she relies mostly on canned goods because unrefrigerated produce rots quickly in the Arizona heat. It’s a struggle to stay warm at night, because she refuses to use her coal-powered heater after its fumes killed her two dogs.
A fierce battle for electric power is being waged across the nation, and Nez is one of thousands of people who have wound up on the losing end. Amid a boom in data centers, the energy-intensive warehouses that run supercomputers for Big Tech companies, Arizona is racing to increase electricity production. In February, the state utility board approved an 8 percent rate hike to bolster power infrastructure throughout the state, where data centers are popping up faster than almost anywhere in the United States. But it rejected a plan to bring electricity to parts of the Navajo Nation land, concluding that electric customers should not be asked to foot the nearly $4 million bill.
“We’ve been without [power] for quite a long time,” said Nez, who lives separately from her teenage children so they have electricity to complete their schoolwork. Tech companies “already have it,” she said, “and for them to get more power, it’s kind of not right.”
Nicole Garcia, a spokeswoman for Arizona’s utility board the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), said it did not approve the Navajo aid provision because of “concerns about how the funds would be used,” adding that customers are not “responsible for extending electricity to all tribal areas of the state.”
/snip
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