A pair of presentations on data center proposals showed two plans with a lot of similarities, including some important questions that remain unanswered.

A proposal in Forward Township calls for a 1-million-square-foot data center with a closed loop water system for cooling and a 300-megawatt power facility on a 274-acre former farm property.

Another proposal in Scrubgrass Township, Venango County, calls for an up to 1.3-gigawatt data center of an as-yet-undetermined physical size. The site would also include a closed-loop water system for cooling. A 550-megawatt natural gas power plant is being considered, but may not be in the final plan. The complex would sit on a 300-acre property which formerly hosted a waste coal plant.

While both proposals still leave unique specifications up in the air — physical data center size in the case of Scrubgrass Township and energy usage in the case of Forward Township — the projects, on the surface, seem to have more in common than not.

The most concerning similarities regard information not revealed to the public. Neither proposal has a specific client for usage of the facility. Neither provides information on project impact on the power grid, though potential figures for the Scrubgrass facility should raise concerns. Neither proposal gives a realistic estimate for potential job creation beyond the construction phase.

The Scrubgrass proposal is estimating a center using up to 1.3 gigawatts of power, about the same as the largest end-to-end-process steel plants. The proposed power plant would generate less than half what is required. To see the issue, one need only look at increases in electric bills where data centers draw power from the electric grid.

In the case of the Forward Township proposal, we can only estimate power usage. According to C & C Technology Group, a business advisory group, data centers use between 150 and 300 watts per square foot. Based on that, a 1-million-square-foot facility would use roughly 150 to 300 megawatts of power, or about the equivalent of two to four of the largest automobile plants. A 300 megawatt power plant should make it largely neutral for electric grid impact.

The questions of post-construction jobs and who the clients for these facilities end up being are linked. A Brookings Institution data analysis of job figures for 1,500 existing centers released this year shows a big gap between the number of people employed by different types of data centers.

Hyperscale data centers owned and operated by companies such as Google usually incorporate network operations on site. Those facilities see an eventual increase in employment in the data processing sector of about 56%. On-site operations also create an increase in employment in the telecommunications sector, eventually reaching about 43%.

Analysis of employment impacts for colocation data centers — those for which the owner leases space and capacity to a tenant — show increases in data processing sector employment eventually reaching only about 18%. In the telecommunications sector, it shows an eventual decrease in employment of about 21%.

Overall, according to industry news company Quartz, data centers of 100 megawatts or higher employ about 20 to 30 people per 100 megawatts. For the Scrubgrass facility, that equates to between 260 and 390 full-time employees, a far cry from the 600 the developer cites. For Forward Township, the facility would employ an estimated 30 to 90 employees.

All of those things are vitally important when deciding whether the benefits of the projects outweigh the cost. Both residents and elected officials should be leery of allowing either project to move forward without hard answers on the question remaining and a realistic evaluation of what they mean in real terms.

— JP