Wisconsin Farmers Union Hosts Local Data Center Forum

The Wisconsin Farmers Union hosted a forum for Chippewa Valley residents on data center development this week.

The event at Market on River in Chippewa Falls on Tuesday night sought to provide residents with the information and tools they need to protect themselves against the potential negative impacts of the increasingly common facilities. Blaine Halverson, an organizer from the Menomonie area, shared how the City of Menomonie needed to add more specific language to its zoning code to halt a data center project last year.

“And what they will do is if it says processing facility, they will use that,” he said. “If it says warehousing facility they will use that, if it says light industrial they will use that. Storage, they will use that. So all of those words need to be cleared up. I’m talking about physical storage of physical material goods or whatever. And you need to get a data center definition in there.”

While updating zoning codes was a successful approach for Menomonie, smaller municipalities do not always have the same level of control over their zoning regulations and may need a different approach. Some communities have pursued a moratorium on data center development, essentially hitting pause on any data center project until they can learn more information and implement reasonable protections.

Director of Conservation and Stewardship for the Wisconsin Farmers Union Tara Greiman also noted that artificial intelligence can be useful, so the conversation can’t only be about stopping data center development entirely.

“We can say, ok well there’s all these concerns let’s just not have data centers right,” she said. “At the same time, there are industries that are trying to cure cancer using large language learning models. At the same time, I have people who are sending me their arguments against data centers in long documents using ChatGPT. These are technologies that people are using. And so if we see that there is some use for this, we’re going to have to have a conversation beyond just no, nuh-uh, never, right? We have to have a conversation of how do we do this, when do we do this, why do we do this.”

Water and energy use, noise, and potential pollution are among the most common concerns Chippewa Valley residents are raising regarding proposed data center facilities in the region.