PA Environment Digest Blog: What The A.I. Data Center & Energy Summit Missed: It’s Deja Vu - False Promises, Dirty Power - Our People And Communities Deserve Respect

On July 22, a panel of energy experts gathered to provide a consumer-first, clean energy perspective following the A.I. Data Center and Energy Summit held at Carnegie Mellon University on July 15.

Speakers highlighted the Summit's failure to focus on clean renewable energy-- an essential part of the solution to meet rising electric grid demand and costs generated by A.I. and data centers.

There was also no mention of the impact on consumer electric bills.

Here are the remarks of Joanne Kilgour, Executive Director of the Ohio River Valley Institute, commenting on the serious issues raised by the rush to develop A.I. data centers and the huge power generation facilities needed to run them.

Deja Vu All Over Again

The conversation around data centers that's taking place in Pennsylvania right now feels familiar.

It feels like the same conversations that were happening nearly two decades ago about the promises of transformative prosperity that the shale gas boom would bring.

It also feels like the same conversations that were happening shortly thereafter with the rollout of a vision for a shale gas-fueled petrochemical renaissance, and more recently, the conversations around a natural gas-based hydrogen and related carbon capture infrastructure.

So we've been down this road before, and by now we have enough experience to know that even seemingly immense investment figures often bear little relationship to job growth and other measures of prosperity for our local communities such as jobs, income and population.

Very automated, highly capital-intensive projects of the kind announced at the A.I. Energy Summit can soak up investments of this scale like a sponge and leave next to nothing to surrounding communities and the region.

We know that because we've seen it happen multiple times in just the past 20 years.

According to an ongoing analysis by the Levin School at Cleveland State University, the natural gas industry has invested an even greater amount-- $108 billion-- almost all of it in a small eight county region of eastern Ohio.

So that's about more than $300,000 for every man, woman, and child in that region.

Yet those eight gas producing counties, far from seeing job growth, have seen employment and population decline, and they actually have fewer jobs today than they did before the gas boom began.

Similarly, Pennsylvania's major gas producing counties, which probably received even larger investments from industry, saw either little job growth and experienced net losses.

The reason the economic outcomes are minuscule compared to investments is that some industries are highly capital-intensive and have little need for workers.

Consequently, after initial construction, little of the investment made in facilities and little of the revenue they generate actually lands in our local economies.

So there's little economic benefit.

Major Burdens On Communities

Meanwhile, the industries often impose a major pollution and quality of life burden, which the communities then must shoulder.

Plus, in the case of data centers, as Jeaneen [Zappa, Executive Director of the Keystone Energy Efficiency Alliance] has mentioned, we know that they're already responsible for causing electric bills in our region as some project to rise by $9 billion in the next year alone.

And we can't just focus on hype and capital. We need to consider public interest and public cost.

Let's look at the Shell petrochemical complex in Beaver County, for example, which was once seen as the biggest economic prize of the Marcellus and Utica natural gas boom.

That project, which by itself commanded $14 billion in investment, briefly spiked employment in its construction phase, which was followed by a precipitous drop-off in jobs leaving Beaver County with fewer jobs today than at any other time in the century, an even worse outcome than that experienced by most other Western Pennsylvania counties over the same time period.

Not only has this mega project failed to deliver on its economic promise to the state and region, but it has been fraught with environmental violations, impacting the local community and causing significant stress to those living in proximity to the facility.

Community members across the region are now faced with these new fossil fuel-based A.I. data center projects in their backyards, and are deeply concerned about the impacts of this development on their quality of life and on the climate, concerns that have received very little, if any, attention from our state and national leaders.

And their concerns are valid, to say nothing of the noise, water, and other localized impacts.

While data centers range greatly in size and energy demand, a hyper-scale A.I. specialized data center can demand more than 100 megawatts of electricity.

According to our research, a 100 megawatt data center, assuming it operates at 70% max capacity over a year, will use 613,200 megawatts of electricity.

Producing that much electricity from natural gas will consume over 4.4 billion cubic feet of gas.

This would emit roughly 275,000 metric tons of carbon, which is equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 60,000 typical passenger cars.

Some companies are proposing campuses of multiple connected data centers that have more than one gigawatt of capacity.

For the impact of a one gigawatt campus, multiply everything I just mentioned by a factor of 10, and you get 6.1 million megawatts of electricity per year-- 560,000 homes that otherwise could be powered by that level of generation, 2.75 million tons of CO2 [carbon dioxide] and 600,000 cars.

False Promises, Dirty Power, Rising Electric Bills

The A.I. Summit brought national attention to Pittsburgh and framed Pennsylvania as a future leader in A.I. and energy.

But that future, if it's built on false promises, dirty power, and rising bills, is not the win we need and will not deliver on a more prosperous future for the region.

There is a real risk that prioritizing and rushing into the overdevelopment of fossil fuel dependent A.I. infrastructure and data centers is not an opportunity for Pennsylvanians, but a distraction.

It could create artificial demand for new [natural] gas [power] plants and lock in decades more pollution and high rates.

There's a difference between rushing to get things done and doing the right thing.

Pennsylvanians, our communities, and our economy deserve the right thing done well.

Communities Deserve Respect

I think it's really important to recognize community members where these facilities might be sited as real stakeholders with beneficial information and valid concerns.

There's a concerning trend to prevent public input and to curtail the kind of processes that we have had in the past to provide public input into decision-making.

And I think it's very important that we think about how we can actually protect and elevate the voice of impacted community members in these conversations because they do have really valid concerns and are going to be the people who are most directly impacted by both the short-term and long-term effects of these facilities.

So I do hope that there's an effort to take seriously respect and build in the opportunity for significant public input and to make changes based on that.

A lot of times, we have public input processes that end at input and don't result in any actual decision-making changes or even process changes.

And I think it's important that we take this very seriously and get back to a point where we respect the way that people feel about the place that they live, and want to bring that as an equally important voice into the conversation, both about planning wholesale for how the state is going to approach this issue and also at the individual project level.

We are starting to see local communities start to organize where they're faced with potential data center build out.

And I think certainly one of the tools that communities have is local zoning, where zoning is afforded to them.

And I do think that that is a really critical and important tool.

And for communities that may be in areas that don't have zoning or don't have robust zoning, engaging with local elected officials at this stage is really important.

So just opening up a dialogue, having a conversation about what we can learn from places in Virginia, Georgia, and other areas that have been kind of ahead of where we are in this build out and really take their lessons to heart and start to open those dialogues with our local leaders, because that I think is where the conversation needs to start.

And hopefully, those local leaders can help elevate the concerns of their community members to the state, regional, and even national level.

Click Here for a video of the full briefing.

What The Energy Summit Missed:

-- What The A.I. Data Center & Energy Summit Missed: Exploding Electricity Demand Already Raising Prices - Ratepayers Need Protection; No Longer An ‘All Of The Above’ Energy Strategy [PaEN]

-- What The A.I. Data Center & Energy Summit Missed: It’s Deja Vu - False Promises, Dirty Power - Our People And Communities Deserve Respect [PaEN]

Resource Links: PA Energy & A.I. Summit

-- List Of More Than $90 Billion In Energy, A.I. Data Center Investments, Commitments Or Plans Announced At The PA Energy & Innovation Summit [PaEN]

-- NewsClips - PA Energy & A.I. Summit Pittsburgh July 15, 2025

-- PA Republican Lawmakers Rush To Introduce Bills To Give New Tax Breaks, Waive Regulations, Environmental Standards For A.I. Data Centers Already Flocking Into Pennsylvania And Locking Up PA Power [PaEN]

-- EPA Is 'Clearing The Regulatory Path For America To Dominate The Global A.I. Revolution' [PaEN]

-- Kleinman Center For Energy Policy: What Wasn’t Discussed At Pennsylvania’s Energy & A.I. Summit - By John Quigley, Senior Fellow

-- Rise Of The Machines: Senate, House Members Express Concern That Demand For Power To Run Computers Is Impacting The Price And Availability Of Electricity For ‘Ordinary People’ [5.12.25]