Illustration by ajijchan - Getty Images
Solar and wind renewable energy illustration - Getty Images
One of the facilities making some people really upset is the immense campus Vantage Data Centers is building for tech giants Oracle and OpenAI, along I-43 north of Port Washington. The planned price tag for what's known as Lighthouse is $15 billion. Workers using bulldozers, construction cranes, hundreds of dump trucks and other equipment are well on their way to turning 672 acres of mostly farmland into four single-story buildings housing many computer servers, switches, routers and other gear.
Amanda Mueller lives in the Town of Port Washington, just a half mile from the construction site. Mueller says one of the worst parts of being nearby is dust that contains a lime stabilizer. “It turns into a paste when it gets wet. It clings to everything, including your heating unit and air conditioner. It recirculates inside your house. You cannot get away from it,” Mueller says.
Mueller also has many other concerns, including construction noise, more paved surfaces or rooftops eventually causing a local heat island, and the effect on local wildlife, particularly migrating bird populations along Lake Michigan.
She's also aware of the huge amount of electricity eventually needed to operate Lighthouse, drawing from the electrical grid that powers homes and businesses across Wisconsin.
Energy Off the Grid?
While Mueller leans toward more use of nuclear power if the project is completed, Vantage promises that 70 percent of the campus' electricity will “originate from zero-emission energy resources, including solar, wind and battery storage.” The company also claims the “remaining energy required will be matched with renewable energy purchases.”
In a written statement, Vantage says its “preference is always to use grid power when it is available.” The firm says “a microgrid would only be needed if grid power is not available.”
What is this thing called a microgrid, that Vantage seems to say is unnecessary at Port Washington? One definition is a local energy system that can produce, store and distribute electricity independently from the grid, if needed, powering a nearby institution.
Just down the road in Chicago, the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) operates a campus-wide microgrid that uses rooftop solar, a wind turbine, natural gas turbines and battery storage to provide power. That's especially important in a city that has seen many outages and has aging electrical infrastructure.
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Wisconsin has a handful of microgrids at institutions. Most notably at the Gordon Bubolz Nature Center in Appleton, the Village of Boaz in Western Wisconsin, a Gundersen health care complex near La Crosse and on the lands of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.
UWM’s Microgrid Center
UW-Milwaukee is working on ways to expand the use of microgrids, through research at its Center for Sustainable Electrical Energy Systems, located at a UWM building near 1st Street and Capitol Drive.
Outside, center director Rob Cuzner shows off a half-dozen rows of solar panels—that team with natural gas-powered generators, a battery storage unit and an inverter (to convert the solar energy to usable current (AC) power.) “That's a core microgrid right there,” Cuzner says.
At a lab inside, there are big gray electrical panels, and computers that form a nerve center for the microgrid. Ph.D. student Kevin Monahan says he and his colleagues are trying to improve the reliability of a microgrid when a massive storm knocks down power lines. “When those things happen, especially at critical facilities like a water treatment plant or military base, there's stuff that we want to stay working,” he says.
Cuzner sees potential in using microgrids at some data centers. He says when a center “is doing all the computations, it's actually pulling a lot of power off of the grid. Then there are times when it's not. It's just kind of pulsing. Grids are not really built to handle that kind of power profile.”
He adds that the demand surges can be compared to the risk of suddenly plugging in a lot of appliances into a home electrical outlet. He maintains a microgrid can add to grid capacity and offset some of that irregular demand. Plus, he says the use of coal or natural gas at utility power plants can be reduced, cutting carbon emissions released into the air.
Hard to Build and Costly
But Cuzner's colleague, UWM research scientist Ali Moghassemi, while supporting microgrids, acknowledges they can be complex to build and integrate. “You have to plan for different weather conditions. You have to plan for the area you can install the PV (solar) panels, to get the most efficient power. It's also complicated to coordinate with the local utility, because the load (demand) is changing,” Moghassemi says.
Cuzner says there's also a sizable financial cost to build a microgrid.
Still, Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Wisconsin, says with data centers helping fuel forecasts of major growth in electricity demand in the state, it's time to “level the playing field” on power generation and lift up things like microgrids. “Give customers choices they don't often think they have in a monopoly system,” Content says.
He cautions that the Port Washington project appears to be too big to run strictly on a microgrid. But all-microgrid data centers may be catching on elsewhere. A data center campus in Ohio is promising to generate all of its electricity through a large, dedicated microgrid.
Cassie Steiner, of the Sierra Club-Wisconsin Chapter, says “microgrids can play an important role in the clean energy transition—not just for data centers, but for the electrical grid in general.” She says microgrids can reduce “the distance power would need to travel on transmission lines.”
Far From Reality?
Meanwhile, Steiner is questioning Vantage's promise to use 70 percent renewables at the Lighthouse project at Port Washington, calling it “far off base from reality.”
The Sierra Club and Midwest Environmental Advocates have filed a lawsuit, challenging state permits the Wisconsin DNR has granted for the Lighthouse campus.
One more supporter of microgrids is Prof. Giri Venkataramanan, of the UW-Madison Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Wisconsin Energy Institute. He urges politicians, developers, tech companies and the public to “figure it out” over how to power data centers and how many centers are needed.
Venkataramanan says, “We're sort of in a bind in that there's endless public appetite for using all these tools,” such as smartphones, laptop computers, and cloud storage (saving digital data on remote servers accessed via the internet.) “I mean, people want to know, ‘Where is the nearest Starbucks?’ Alexa (Amazon's voice assistant) doesn't know. It has to access the database.”
