In partisan times, are data centers the one thing to unite people?

By mid-July, data center rumors in the Southwest Georgia city of Albany demanded attention. That was why city officials scheduled four public sessions on data centers: to clear the air.

“If you have a question, you can come to the mic and we will try to answer the questions that you have,” Albany City Manager Terrell Jacobs told the crowd gathered in the auditorium of Dougherty County Comprehensive High School for the first of the meetings.

Jacobs had already told residents that despite the fact that Albany’s city-owned electrical utility has more power to sell than it has customers, the city sees no data center on the horizon. 

Resident Renee Lynn still wanted to know where a hypothetical data center would go.

“Because I fish the Flint River,” she said of her concerns. “I fish the whole Flint River from Albany to Mitchell County and from Albany and Mitchell County, a proposed data center would affect me. It would affect the fish in the Flint River. It will affect the water levels.”

She paused for applause, then continued.

“One more thing…”

Meanwhile, out in the auditorium lobby, Mitchell County herb farmer Lauren Dorminey organized.

A crowd around her took notes as she listed off dates for important meetings just south of Albany and Dougherty County, in Mitchell County, around a planned 1,500 MW natural gas-fired power plant from which Georgia Power hopes to buy electricity by 2030 — a step needed for Georgia Power’s effort to add nearly 10 gigawatts of power to their portfolio, mostly, they say, for data centers. 

Mitchell County is majority white and leans Republican. Dougherty County is majority Black and leans Democratic.

Dorminey said she has been trying to get people to see past those labels and join her SOWEGA Aquifer Alliance

“I’ve told people, we’re going to have to come together,” she said. “You’re going to have to sit beside people that don’t look like you because we all drink water and we’re all on the same aquifer.”

We live in intensely partisan times. Depending on the poll and the year, there are either slightly more or less either self-avowed Democrats or Republicans in the nation. The partisanship manifests itself in everything from support or opposition for the war in Iran to the opinions in the way local elections should be run.

‘I’ve told people, we’re going to have to come together….You’re going to have to sit beside people that don’t look like you because we all drink water and we’re all on the same aquifer.’

Lauren Dorminey

Enter data centers. In communities where concern over data center development starts to boil, people increasingly are finding ways to look past the usual political labels, as Dorminey said she asks people to do.

“I have to remind them that they are banking on us being ‘red team,’ ‘blue team’ and not coming together over this,” she said.

University of Tennessee sociologist Nikki Luke studies and writes about the intersection of electrical utilities, civil rights and democracy. Her book Electric Lifetakes stock of how those factors interacted over the course of electrifying Atlanta and influenced the creation of both Georgia Power and Georgia’s Public Service Commission.

Luke said she has been watching data centers break political walls across the South.

“A lot of reporting on data centers points to Memphis and the xAI case as the worst example,” Luke said “And that is a data center that’s located in a majority Black community that is already heavily pollution burdened.”

xAI is the company undergirding Elon Musk’s Grok artificial intelligence. Residents in Memphis have won some limited support from the current EPA in stopping Musk from standing up his own on site natural gas fueled electricity generation there. 

Luke said the new thing now is that the data center issue is landing in communities which historically have not been saddled with this kind of environmental burden — often white, Republican and suburban veering into rural or exurban.

“And so even if these are communities that have not seen development in the past and have not faced eminent domain or being forced from their homes, they’re learning from environmental justice communities and from urban communities about how to grapple with what’s happening,” she said.

And that, she said, is where people are finding new political solidarity.

“Absolutely,” she said. “There is crossing racial lines, crossing class lines.”

A week or so after the Albany data center meeting, the product of party-line-crossing is evident at a meeting 150 miles to the north at a meeting of the Monticello City Council.

There, sitting near the front of the public seating, head of the Jasper County Democratic Party Terry Saunders and Mary Patrick, chair of the local Republican Party, listened and live streamed as their neighbors told the council what they think about what many perceive as a fast-moving and suspicious annexation issue.

“I believe there are people that are preparing the way to put together a large enough piece of property that in the future they could turn that into a data center,” Saunders, the Democrat, said before the meeting. 

The owners of a sizable chunk of property out in Jasper County want to get it annexed into the city limits of Jasper’s county seat, Monticello. 

“The thing with the data centers, I’ve been reading about them for over a year,” said Patrick, the Republican. “And the M.O. is kind of — you annex the property and then pretty much you get to do whatever you want.”

An annexation like this was the first step in a contentious data center development in neighboring Monroe County.

And so now local party leaders jointly sign with their party titles the same messages rallying neighbors to city council meetings. These meetings, similar to others elsewhere, have been rowdy. The meeting before this one in late July saw a resident arrested for what was deemed unruly behavior.

‘I think the last time that I actually worked with any of the Republicans was when we had the tornado in the north part of the county in ’23, January of 23.’

Terry Saunders

Terry Saunders said the last time she can remember working with Republicans was after a natural disaster.  

“I think the last time that I actually worked with any of the Republicans was when we had the tornado in the north part of the county in ‘23, January of 23,” she said.

That is to say: the last time people in Jasper County faced what felt, to them, like an existential crisis. Mary Patrick said in times like this, party labels aren’t important.

“I don’t go up to people and say, ‘Are you a Democrat?’ you know?” she said. “And I’ve never had somebody come up and say, ‘Well, are you a Republican?’ And it’s kind of like, if we’re all working because we’re trying to preserve what we have here, then it doesn’t matter, really.”

Sociologist Nikki Luke said she has seen the definition of that shared need for preservation expand in other communities.

“They’re forcing questions that aren’t just about the data centers, but what we want to use our natural resources for, of air and water,” Luke said. “What we think the cost of energy should be, and who should pay for these data centers? And so I do think it’s a really interesting opportunity that asks these broader questions about the energy system.”

Terry Saunders and Mary Patrick said they haven’t gotten that far yet. For now, this is just about the single annexation issue.

“This is Terry as a citizen, Mary as a citizen, working together to try to fight,” Saunders said.

While they haven’t yet killed it outright, they have succeeded in pushing the annexation issue into another month, into the August meeting of the Monticello City Council.

This story comes to The Current GA through a reporting partnership with GPB News, a non-profit newsroom covering the state of Georgia.