A dozen environmental groups are warning that powering a massive Microsoft data center in Mount Pleasant with methane gas power plants would push Wisconsin backwards in the quest for clean energy.
In an open letter to Microsoft on Thursday, the groups, including Sierra Club Wisconsin, Clean Wisconsin, and Action for the Climate Emergency, called on the company to power its planned data center with local clean energy.
“Right now, We Energies is planning to meet energy demand for the Microsoft data center by spending billions of dollars to build new methane gas power plants and pipelines. It’s a massive buildout that will push our state’s climate goals out of reach, locking us into 30 more years of fossil fuels at a time when we all know we must rapidly transition to clean energy,” the letter notes.
“It will also harm the same communities who have been suffering with coal plant air pollution and dangerous ozone for decades,” according to the letter.
The data center is one of the l argest facilities of its kind now under construction in the United States. Each center is a collection of thousands of computers connected to the outside world by fiber-optic cables crisscrossing the country and the globe.