* Gov. JB Pritzker sat down for a wide-ranging interview with WVIK’s Robin Johnson. Here are his comments about data centers…

We can’t continue to have data centers coming here using our water, using our power and increasing people’s utility rates. So, my solution to that is they should pay for it. They should bring their own power. They should have closed loop recycled water systems, and we should require that for new data centers. Now, the legislature didn’t get to pass what’s called the Power Act, where that would take place

And so just after the end of the legislative session, I suspended any tax credits that would otherwise go to a data center, because we’ve got to take a pause here and make sure the legislature is going to pass something that’s going to deal with the problems, water, power, and noise, you know, that’s been a problem in some areas too.

Now I will say that if we could figure those things out - I’m not saying that they have figured it out and that we’re done with it - but if we could figure it out, and I think we could, the result is kind of two positive things that can occur.

One is lowering people’s property taxes, because those data centers, even though they don’t employ a whole lot of people every day and every year, they do, by the way, allow lots of construction jobs that take place, but that’s only while you’re building the facility. But they pay a lot of the property taxes, and we’ve seen counties where property taxes have gone down as a result of these data centers moving in. Again, I’m not saying that we should do it without all the other regulations we just talked about, but, that’s one thing.

The other is that these data centers should be contributors to the community. These are big companies, these are wealthy companies, and they should be contributors to the well-being of the people that they’re neighbors to. And I don’t think they understand that yet, and we’ve got to make that clear to them.

So, those are a couple examples, anyway, of what we ought to be doing with data centers. But we just can’t have them coming here. We have water, we have power in this state. They want to come here. I know that, they want to come here, but we don’t want them if they’re going to take advantage of us.

Please pardon any transcription errors. Thanks.

* Related…

* CNI | Here are the Illinois data centers on track for more than $650M in tax credits: Illinois committed an estimated $666.6 million in tax credits to data center projects through 2025, according to an annual Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity report. The agreement, which spans periods up to 20 years, were inked before Gov. JB Pritzker directed the department to pause processing new data center incentives beginning Wednesday.

* Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | Invenergy cancels wind leases for Wisconsin gas plants: As part of a deal with the Trump administration, a national energy developer will end offshore wind projects and redirect some of the money to its natural gas portfolio, which includes two new plants in Wisconsin to power hyperscale data centers. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced on June 16 it will refund $765 million to Chicago-based developer Invenergy in exchange for “voluntarily” terminating four offshore wind leases. Invenergy agreed to redirect the money toward the development of natural gas plants in Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri, as well as geothermal projects in the western U.S.