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Maine treads lightly amid AI data center expansion
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has worked to dismiss the growing body of research showing that the artificial intelligence boom in the U.S. is driving up electricity bills for everyday Americans.
Leading the administration’s defense of energy-hungry data centers is Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior and the chairman of President Donald Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council.
“Newsflash: There is no correlation between data centers growing in states and higher electricity prices,” Burgum declared — falsely — in an interview with Fox News last week, going on to point the finger at states moving toward renewable energy.
In a separate interview on Fox & Friends a few days later, Burgum invoked Maine to defend his position.
“Let’s just take a look at the data, if you want to talk about data centers,” he said. “The highest electricity prices in this country are places like Hawaii and Maine. There’s no data center activity going there.”
Maine’s rising energy costs are largely tied to volatile natural gas prices and cleanup costs from devastating storms in recent years. They have nothing to do with the build-out, or lack thereof, of data centers, according to Maine Public Advocate Heather Sanborn.
“To date, there has been very little data center development activity in Maine, and nothing related to data centers has had any impact on Maine’s electricity prices yet,” she wrote in an email to The Maine Monitor.
But the risk of data centers driving up energy costs is one of several concerns Mainers have raised as AI project proposals have surfaced here. In a Dec. 8 letter to members of Congress, dozens of environmental organizations, including three Maine nonprofits, called for a national moratorium on the construction of new data centers.
“The rapid expansion of data centers across the United States, driven by the generative artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto boom, presents one of the biggest environmental and social threats of our generation,” reads the letter, which was signed by Defend Our Health, Physicians for Social Responsibility Maine and the Alliance of Maine Health Professionals for Climate Action.
Emily Carey Perez de Alejo, executive director of Defend Our Health, told The Maine Monitor that her group signed the letter because data centers have been built across the country faster than people have been able to understand their emissions and energy and water use, or their effect on electricity prices and human health.
“You’ve got places around the country where they’ve had these centers built where the energy bills have spiked, the drinking water taps are running dry and the air emissions coming out of these facilities because they are burning all sorts of fossil fuels to run the generators, for both the power on the servers and the power on the cooling systems, it’s really contaminating communities pretty significantly,” she said. “We just need to make sure we’re protecting Mainers because we’ve got enough lessons from across the country already. We should not ignore them.”
Maine is currently home to just eight small data centers, according to Data Center Map, an industry database. While plans for Maine’s first large-scale AI data center at the former Loring Air Force Base are moving forward, other proposals have been cancelled or met with fierce opposition.
Most recently, on Tuesday, the Lewiston city council unanimously voted down a proposed $300 million, 24-megawatt data center inside the historic Bates Mill Complex. During the meeting, council members said they fielded an outpouring of public opposition and that many of their questions had gone unaddressed.
And several Lewiston residents testified against the proposed project, citing potential environmental impacts, a 90 percent tax break for the developer and few guarantees about how the city stood to benefit.
Councilor Joshua Nagine said at the meeting that while he thinks the proposal was a good one, the public process was “flawed.”
“There’s no window in which to get any community buy-in,” he said. “And some of the concerns that have been brought forward, I don’t have answers for.”
Sanborn noted that while the proposed project in Lewiston and the one moving forward at the former Loring Air Force Base are small compared to data centers elsewhere in the country, and designed to be sited in areas with existing electrical infrastructure, they are not without risks.
She said it’s worth thinking about who would ultimately bear the costs if development of the facilities led to costly grid upgrades, or if the companies behind them went bankrupt in a few years.
However carefully Maine moves forward in the AI space, Sanborn warns that the industry’s growth throughout New England could impact Maine through the state’s participation in the ISO New England wholesale electricity market.
“Energy and capacity market costs are likely to be driven upward as a result of data center development anywhere in the region,” Sanborn said. “Regional transmission costs run the risk of being driven upward to meet anticipated data center development — even if those data centers never materialize. Consumer advocates throughout the region are working together to ensure that ISO New England’s market rules are properly structured to protect consumers from this risk.” |
