When you read this news story on your phone, you are relying on a data center.

When you use the internet or a streaming service, you are relying on a data center.

When you take pictures with your phone, you are relying on a data center to store them.

And yet, public opinion has rallied against data centers with all the furor of another age’s pitchforks and torches.

About 300 people turned out Aug. 31 to hear a data center expert panel hosted by We Can Lead Change – Fox Valley, Fox Valley Rising Indivisible and the Sierra Club hosted Data Centers: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

There were 100 in person at Elgin Community College’s Siegle Auditorium and 200 on Zoom for almost two hours of presentation and questions.

The panelists were Aurora Sustainability Director Alison Lindburg; Matt Harvey of the Citizens Utility Board; cooling systems expert Don Johnson; and Steve Andersson, attorney and former Illinois state representative.

Putting things into perspective, Lindburg said, Aurora – which has five data centers in operation – put a 180-day moratorium on new data centers while staff worked on requirements to guide developers and protect residents.

“We had an open house and 200 people showed up,” Lindburg said. “On March 24, our new regulations were passed.”

These included conditional use zoning, which requires a public hearing, a water study, energy plan, sound study, day and nighttime noise limits, as well as limits on vibration, energy consumption and water use.

The city’s ordinance also prohibits data centers from establishing nuclear energy and from using evaporating water as a cooling system.

Globally, the data center market is valued at about $400 billion, Lindberg said.

“It will be over $1 trillion in eight years,” Lindburg said.

Municipalities tend to embrace them because they get property and utility taxes from them, she said.

“A 100-megawatt data center – which we have in Aurora – would bring in around $1 million in utility taxes every year. And that is straight to the municipality,” Lindburg said. “That does not take out taxes for schools or anything like that.”

A megawatt is the standard measurement for bulk electricity. One megawatt is 1 million watts.

“Some large data centers can use the equivalent of 5 million gallons of water per day,” Lindberg said. “This would be the water needs of a town of 10,000 or 50,000 people.”

Some data centers use a closed-loop system for cooling. But chemicals in that water prompted the city to set requirements for when they change out the water, she said.

Electric use

For data centers, it isn’t just that they use a lot of power – 80% of it comes from fossil fuels, coal or natural gas, Lindburg said.

“They’re also predicting that the amount of energy that is going to be needed and used by data centers in the next four years is going to double,” Lindburg said. “If we’re trying to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, data centers are going to make that not possible.”

Aurora had a 24% increase in electric costs in 2025 that ComEd said was due to data centers, Lindburg said.

The Illinois Commerce Commission is looking to develop a framework for very large electricity users like data centers, she said.

At the state level, there is Senate Bill 2181, which creates the Illinois Data Center Energy and Water Reporting Act, which would track the resource consumption of data centers across the state.

There also is Senate Bill 4016 and House Bill 5513, also known as the POWER Act – an acronym for Protecting Our Water, Energy and Ratepayers – pending state legislation to make data centers pay their fair share and not put additional electric cost onto consumers, she said.

Capacity charges climb

Matt Harvey of the Citizens Utility Board explained how capacity charges impact utility bills.

Northern Illinois has PJM as its grid for supplying electricity – the largest grid operator in the country. It serves 67 million customers in 13 states, from Chicago to New Jersey.

“The capacity market has the biggest impact on your bill. We don’t just pay for the power that we are using in our homes right now,” Harvey said. “We also pay for energy that we could actually use in the future. That’s what capacity refers to.”

Rates in ComEd territory are 50% higher than in 2024 because of the most recent capacity auctions, he said.

“Not all data centers are equal. Some can be as small as a closet. Some can be massive,” Harvey said. “Those are referred to as hyperscale data centers. They use a ton of energy. In Joliet, an 1800 megawatt center was approved. … The rough approximation is about 1.8 million homes worth of electricity.”

Energy costs should be redirected back to the data centers, he said.

Cooling systems expert Don Johnson said once a data center runs water through its cooling system, it discharges its heat into the water – and then the data system needs to discharge the water.

Rather than releasing into the environment, another way is to discharge heat into air, and then release the heated air.

A 48-megawatt data center proposed for South Elgin would release a column of heated air the size of a football field every hour, Johnson said.

“I would not want to live downwind from one of these facilities,” Johnson said.

A closed-loop cooling system is efficient, Johnson said. A truck brings it from an outside source so it doesn’t draw from local water supplies.

Special use, conditional use

Attorney and former state Rep. Steve Andersson of Geneva said what Aurora is doing is the right way to address data centers.

“Don’t accidentally allow data centers to be permitted – and that’s a possibility,” Andersson said.

Without some preventive action, a data center could look at local zoning, zero in on industrial zoning that allows logistics facilities, Andersson said.

“If you do nothing, it’s quite likely that the data center will look at that and say, ‘We are effectively the same thing.’ They’re not, but they can make that same argument,” Andersson said. “Don’t accidentally allow data centers to be permitted.”

Andersson also recommended special uses and conditional uses in zoning, so a data center would not be permitted as a right.

Annexation, Anderson said, is a powerful tool for control.

“A community can say, ‘Yes, you can come in, but in order to do that, we require you to build a Bears stadium in Arlington Heights,’” Anderson said. “They could. Would it work? No. They’ll go someplace else.”

We Can Lead Change – Fox Valley is sponsoring a Data Center Coalition. More information is available online at www.wecanleadchange.org.