Q: There’s a lot of talk here about the possibility of data centers coming here. What’s your view on those?
Pritzker: I think you know that I’ve been pushing, and did push, in fact, to have some regulations put in place. So that I think on several fronts we would demand that data center operators pay for their own power, making sure that they’re either bringing power with them or they’re paying rates that would make sure that no one in the area is paying a higher rate than they would otherwise. So that’s on electricity, and of course we need to produce more electricity, so whether it’s solar fields or other kinds of maybe a small modular nuclear device, that that’s something we should be thinking about requiring of data center providers.
Second, is of course we need to make sure that they’re recycling water that they’re using, so that they’re not, you know, taking water out of the local community, you know. We’re, I think, our state is well known to be one that has fresh water more than almost any other state. We, we have about 20% of the world’s fresh water that’s either on the shores of the state or in the rivers or underneath. Aquifers, we also are 80% of the US is fresh water. We need to guard that, and we need to make sure that people are paying their utility bills aren’t paying for the utilities that are being used by those data centers.
And then, lastly, I think locals, people in the local community, should have more say about the siting of where those data centers go, because unless they’re, you know, incredibly well built, they produce a lot of noise, they’re unsightly sometimes, and so we just want to make sure that we’re dealing with all that.
That was not something that some years ago, when Illinois was not a destination, that we had to worry about very much, because we just didn’t have enough data centers to mean that that was going to be a problem. Now, as you’re seeing with AI data centers and others, and the fact that we’re in a PJM and MISO territories, where other states are using our electricity, we’ve got to make sure that we’re kind of battening down the hatches and protecting our consumers and our residents. […]
I’m not opposed to local governments deciding that that’s what they want to do, that the local residents decide we don’t want any, that’s okay. I think there are, you know, trade-offs, but I’m saying if we had regulations that actually protected the local community, I think you’d probably have fewer people saying that they don’t want it, and some saying, like, hey, they’re paying a whole lot of property taxes to reduce our property taxes in a local area, but I think it’s up to a local community to decide that.
- Screwtape - Tuesday, Jun 23, 26 @ 9:08 am:
Tough issue because the industry is so used to getting what they want that they never really saw the need to make, or win, any arguments. But now the public has seized onto the argument against them and are winning it handily. Some of it is panic, some of it isn’t.
Datacenters aren’t all the same, and unfortunately we are in a situation now where people are so hyper-aware of them that you have folks taking weird night time videos of DC’s that have been around for 15 years and posting them online like it’s Area 51, when a lot of those facilities are nothing at all like the AI training facilities, which is like comparing any light industrial land use facility to the death star.
There is room for regulation, obviously. But at the same time making Illinois less competitive just drives them to build on the exact same power grid in different states, where it’ll have the same effect, still increase our prices, and leave us nowhere in the ability to regulate. Good luck waiting on a federal fix.
- Steven Simpson-Black - Tuesday, Jun 23, 26 @ 9:32 am:
Communities that would have done a good job with regulating the data centers are likely to block them altogether, and communities that have no good regulatory frameworks will probably override the disorganized, emotional appeals of people who don’t want them built anywhere. The result will be shoddy data centers in a lot of places - with a few exceptions. I can imagine quite a few places in Illinois where a jurisdiction approving one of these is just on the other side of a municipal or county line from a group of folks who will have their property values ruined because their homes were on the wrong side of that line. I’ll marry another issue into this - the governor’s housing bill should have reformed regional planning and included this issue with it. Imagine living in a place like Cherry Valley and having the city of Rockford approve a data center just inside its territorial jurisdiction (to its benefit) while you live with the effects of it. That’s just one example.
- RNUG - Tuesday, Jun 23, 26 @ 9:59 am:
JB sounding more like a Presidential candidate.
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I’m for them, unless the people are against them.
- RNUG - Tuesday, Jun 23, 26 @ 10:02 am:
JB does make a good point about the fresh water. I’ve been saying for years that water supply was going to be THE future limiting resource.
Heck, locally I was in favor of building the ling proposed Hunter Lake even though the current and expected demand projections are questionable.