Opinion: The push for more data centers, more housing and more impacts
As I write this, there are two competing bills in the Legislature regarding data centers. One promotes them by providing massive tax breaks, while the other tries to address at least some of the impacts. This conflict exposes the underlying weaknesses of our way of providing infrastructure to serve new development and our failure to use basic economics to make development more self-regulating. The underlying problem that we face is the unwillingness to fully acknowledge and quantify the impacts of more development, and then to charge new development the costs of mitigating those impacts. For example, last year the PUC gave permission to Xcel to pursue massive new investments in renewable energy, including wind, solar and battery storage (and a small gas plant, presumably for additional backup), so as not to miss out on the federal tax credits. Allegedly, two-thirds of this is needed for data centers, with only a small portion because of...