With accumulating force and accelerating speed, a new era of electrical generation and power demand is taking shape across the eight states of the Great Lakes basin – and with it come potentially treacherous consequences for the region’s environment and its world-leading supply of clean, fresh water.
New battery storage, solar and wind plants, and gas-fired installations, joined by reopened nuclear and coal plants, are adding generating capacity to a region that already supplies a third of all electricity in the United States. Electric vehicles, new manufacturing plants, and growing cities are eager to receive the energy, steadily increasing electricity demand.
Not since the 1950s and 1960s have such powerful trends in electrical supply and demand swept across the Great Lakes. Much of the transition is influenced by the federal government, which followed the 2024 election with a two-pronged strategy for development: the Trump administration promoted Biden-era tax incentives and direct grants, then added measures of its own.
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One significant result of these changes is the proliferation of data centers – where servers operate 24/7 inside windowless buildings – to power the artificial intelligence revolution. The eight Great Lakes states have become one of the country’s epicenters for these campuses, which are among the largest industrial sources of energy use and freshwater demand.
Simultaneously, the Trump administration initiated a deluge of changes in environmental law, regulation, budgets, and environmental agency staffing. They amount to a broad erosion of federal protections for the Great Lakes. Though state lawmakers and business executives generally celebrate an industrial transition of historic proportions, little attention is being paid to the potential damage to the environment, especially to the region’s vast reserves of clean, fresh water.
This is the first article of a new Circle of Blue series, The Great Lakes: Unprotected, that documents how novel rule-making, staff cuts, and dramatic shifts in funding priorities are systematically unraveling a 60-year-old program of safeguards for the region’s rivers, lakes, wetlands, habitat, and drinking water. The government’s neglect sharply increases the region’s vulnerability to water pollution, land degradation, economic disruption and harm to human health.
Local Effects
While the big trends in electricity supply and demand are readily described at the regional level, these changes are experienced with real consequences in communities. A chapter in this unfolding energy and water drama is now taking place on the Lake Michigan shoreline in southeast Wisconsin.
Port Washington — a town of nearly 13,000 residents a half hour north of Milwaukee — is contending with changes wrought by a $15 billion data center and most clearly seen and felt on county roads, farms, and mom-and-pop businesses.
On a humid Friday afternoon, disgruntled conversation and scrunched-up faces do well to summarize this national narrative. Paul Krauska, the top mechanic at Eddie’s Service, a Port Washington auto repair shop, stands in his garage’s small reception room and synchronizes aggravation with a long-time customer.
The two men throw their hands up. They shake their heads. They smile disgusted smiles and gaze around the oil-scented room, uncertain of the fate that will befall their homes, the environment, and their town when a 672-acre data center campus, named “Lighthouse,” breaks ground before year’s end.
Built by Denver-based Vantage Data Centers, Lighthouse will encompass four data center buildings to support the operations of Oracle and OpenAI.
“We were never really told the truth,” Krauska said. “You can’t even fathom the stress that I’m under.”
Beside the two men, barely visible behind stacks of packages and car parts, Brandon Krauska, Paul’s adult son, chuckles as the dialogue follows a familiar cadence, then fizzles into resigned goodbyes and promises of future fish fries.
“Sometimes, people come in here just to vent,” he said.
The Extent of Industry
There’s good reason to be nervous. Data centers require immense amounts of power. Last year, data center campuses across the country consumed 186 terawatt-hours of electricity, a figure equivalent to the annual power demands of Pakistan. By the decade’s end, the demand is projected to more than double, exceeding one-tenth or more of America’s total consumption.
The surging requirements are being met by a variety of renewable and non-renewable sources, and by fuels from previous eras – coal, gas, and nuclear – that the Trump administration is busy trying to revive.
A nuclear plant that closed in Michigan, and two more scheduled for closure in Wisconsin and Minnesota, have received permits to continue operating for years. Illinois, Indiana, and New York have recently passed legislation to ramp up nuclear development on Great Lakes shores in coming years. Lease extensions have also been granted to aging coal facilities in Michigan and Wisconsin, backed by an executive order to increase domestic production.
Simultaneously, a federal commitment to lessen the costs of data center construction, supported doubly with local tax breaks, has provided real financial incentive for campuses to continue their breakneck build-out. Few places in the nation are more alluring than Great Lakes states, where ample land and water are available.
Led by Illinois (243 data centers), Ohio (192), and New York (142), the entire region is now home to 935 campuses. This number is poised to grow, as winning the AI race is increasingly considered essential for military dominance, scientific advancement, and gaining command of the global economy.
Data center construction has certainly garnered attention. Resistance has escalated, with some success. In Augusta Township, Michigan, a 2026 ballot initiative, successfully organized by local residents, aims to stop the construction of a proposed 822-acre campus. Community opposition in Caledonia, Wisconsin, forced Microsoft to change plans and look for a new home earlier this month. In the Chicago suburbs, the town of Aurora has issued a moratorium on approving data center permits, with neighboring towns expected to consider following suit.
The marked advance of data centers into small towns is changing the industry’s financial strategy. Last week, industry leader OpenAI, valued at $130 billion, announced that after several years operating partly as a non-profit entity, it had completed a total shift to a for-profit business. The news coincided with Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, which owns a 27 percent stake in OpenAI, suddenly announcing that the climate crisis should no longer be humanity’s greatest concern.
But just like every other major change in technology and production practices that have occurred in other industries (pesticides and genetic engineering in agriculture, radioactive fuel in nuclear plants, the transition from wind to coal and oil for transportation), data center expansion carries with it potentially significant risks, especially for Great Lakes water.
Sweeping headlines were made this summer when Bluefield Research, a market research firm, projected that data center campuses may withdraw as much as 150 billion gallons of water across the country over the next five years.
Aware of their thirsty public perception, some new data centers, and the officials courting them, are striving to reduce on-site water usage. But achieving this feat requires more energy to power the water conservation systems. Producing that power with nuclear, coal, or natural gas, will indirectly increase demand for water and strain transmission grids. In 2023, the indirect water usage from data center power needs totaled 211 billion gallons, a number expected to grow as another 130 gigawatts of campuses come online by 2030.
The Port Washington Experience
All these details influence the data center conversation in and near Port Washington. A few miles up the road, at Drews True Value Hardware, venting about the data center is all Susan Waldhuetter and her co-workers can muster these days.
Her own home, located less than a mile from the future campus, features a small garden and quiet pond. A 30-year resident of Belgium, Wisconsin, Waldhuetter worries about the center’s impacts on her well water, local wildlife, and the noise and traffic that will follow its construction.
“What you read about the proliferation of data centers everywhere is that they’re just bulldozing their way in, and that’s what they did in Port Washington,” Waldhuetter said, sitting on one pond-side chair and looking across at the other empty seat. “I’m glad my husband isn’t alive to see this,” she said.
And at the intersection of Dixie Road and County Road LL, where Vantage plans to complete the second of its two-phase development, dairy farmer Bill Karrels laments the hard choice he’s been left with: to sell the 19 acres of land that have been in his family for 171 years, or endure construction next-door for the next 24 months, including the razing of a small neighboring woodland.
“I’m under no illusions that the area isn’t going to change. It’s not going to stay in agriculture forever and ever,” Karrels said. “But I think this is a poor idea, just because of the impact it’s going to have. I don’t think people realize how much power and water this is going to suck.”
Lake Living Redefined
While Port Washington serves as a microcosm of the new frontier of energy and water, one important figure sees Lighthouse as a beacon of opportunity.
“People don’t understand the delta in between where we are today, and where we will be,” said Ted Neitzke, the city’s mayor. “They can’t see it. They tend not to ask questions. They tend to make accusations. And then they look for evidence of their own narratives.”
Sitting behind his desk at city hall, a modest building set back 30 feet from the Lake Michigan shore, Neitzke describes Vantage’s Lighthouse campus, which he recruited to the northern edge of Port Washington, less than a mile from the lake, as a symbol of progress, much like the town’s new flag.
Its orange sky, he says, embodies optimism for the day ahead. Opportunity is epitomized by a stitched golden sun. And the thick stripe of blue water, the mayor concludes, looking out at the Great Lake through his office window, is the city’s most precious natural resource.
“People will start to see that this is the cleanest form of industrial investment we can get,” he said. “Literally the cleanest.”
But convincing residents has been a difficult task. One reason is uncertainty about how much water the project will use.
On paper, Lighthouse appears to be a thirsty development.
The town will allow Vantage daily access to 1.2 million gallons of the municipal water supply, which is drawn directly from the lake. Extrapolated over a year, the consumption of more than 400 million gallons would make it one of the country’s most water-intensive data centers, among those with public numbers.
But Neitzke and Vantage maintain this figure is misleading. That volume, both said, would be drawn only in the event of an emergency, such as a fire. In practice, the center’s peak daily usage will be 54 times less than their contracted allowance: 22,000 gallons, equivalent to the needs of 65 Wisconsin homes.
“They claim the data center is only going to use the same amount of water as 65 homes,” Karrels said. “I’d like to see that in writing.”
These projections do live on Vantage presentation slides and town FAQ documents, but this water-saving relationship appears otherwise to be built on trust. In the finalized development agreement between Vantage and Port Washington, no numeric caps for water usage are set. The only established figure is the $175 million sum that the company has agreed to pay the town through 2034 for water and sewer infrastructure upgrades serving Lighthouse.
New Technology for Water Conservation
The mayor’s confidence in the site’s sustainability derives from Vantage’s closed-loop cooling system, a method that has been shown to reduce data centers’ overall freshwater usage by up to 70 percent. At other Vantage campuses, this setup has proved effective. According to the company’s most recent self-reported figures, the technology helped to limit the annual water usage of its seven data centers operating in water-stressed locations to a combined 27.5 million gallons.
The Lighthouse campus will be larger than these seven sites combined. Once all four of its data centers are fully built, the site’s closed-loop system will circulate 11.8 million gallons of water, a Vantage spokesperson told Circle of Blue.
“Closed-loop systems use less water, but more energy,” said Amy Barrilleaux, the communications director at Clean Wisconsin. “That’s where things get a little more scientific.”
That’s because saving water could actually increase water use. The fully built Lighthouse campus will require 1.3 gigawatts of power, equivalent to the needs of more than 1 million American homes. “In terms of energy usage, this data center is going to be the biggest city in Wisconsin by far,” Barrilleaux said.
Along with a planned Microsoft campus in nearby Mt. Pleasant, the two sites will use more energy than all the state’s homes combined.
The extra power is visible through city hall’s windows: We Energies’ mammoth natural gas-powered electrical generating station, draped in a web of power lines. Vantage is working with the utility to bring Lighthouse online. So far, powering the campus portends to be an ambitious effort with uncertain specifications.
Mark Freeman, Vantage’s vice president of global marketing, told Circle of Blue that 70 percent of Lighthouse’s required 1.3 gigawatts will come from “zero emission clean energy resources,” though the company could not yet specify the mix of sources.
Vantage also couldn’t provide details on how its 30 percent of non-renewable energy needs – 390 megawatts – would be met. The vague language, Barrilleaux said, leaves the door open to using nuclear energy over other options such as solar and wind. “We really need to understand what ‘clean’ means,” she said.
“Vantage prefers to power our campuses using grid power,” Freeman said. “When grid power is not available, we have used other sources in place.” Vantage said it plans to build at least 15 solar, wind, and battery power facilities, which will together generate 2 gigawatts of power, some of which will help power Lighthouse directly.
Orders for the breakneck build-out of energy networks continue to come directly from the nation’s capital. In late October, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to change permitting and rulemaking procedures to “significantly reduce” the amount of time and oversight required to bring data centers onto the grid.
At city hall, Mayor Neitzke pushes a map of the Lighthouse campus across his desk and points at the residences near the data center’s future site. “I grew up with this guy. Those new homes up in the corner, some of those men and women and families are the parents of my friends,” he said. “These neighbors here, lifetime friends. The men and women who developed all this are my son’s and daughter’s friends.”
Then he points several miles south, within Port Washington city limits.
“But I’ve lived here my whole life. That wasn’t an easy decision. I didn’t enjoy it,” he said. “I lost friends, and that’s not fun. People I loved viewed me in a new way and were unwilling to sit down and have a conversation about it.”
Still, Neitzke remains optimistic that the business decision he made will be beneficial for Port Washington in the long run. He speaks of the on-site green space that he hopes will mitigate the impacts of farm runoff and overflowing creeks. He forecasts most residents will see their properties rise in value. He estimates that $121 million in revenue will be generated each year for the town, investable immediately into schools and other city projects.
And he remains confident that the water footprint for which he is responsible will remain altogether negligible, backstopped by Vantage’s latest technology.
“They’re going to consume a tremendous amount of energy at first,” Neitzke said. “But once the closed-loop system is charged, it runs just like a radiator in a car.“
Back at Eddie’s Service auto shop, a subtle mist fills Paul Krauska’s blue eyes. Though it’s just before closing time, the mechanic has no plans of starting his weekend. Instead, he prepares for a late night ahead, eager to complete as much business as possible.
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He wipes his hands on a rag and describes his family’s home. When he first bought the property in 2008, it sat on the intersection of County Road P and Highway P — perfect, Brandon always thought, for his parents Paul and Pamela.
Some financial setbacks delayed construction, and their forever home wasn’t built until 2017. Today, its floors are now outfitted with wheelchair-accessible infrastructure for Brandon, who suffered a stroke in 2021 and moved back in with his parents.
But after several neighbors accepted offers allowing Vantage to annex their land, the Krauskas faced little choice but to follow suit or else tolerate a massive, windowless neighbor.
Now, they are jumping through permitting hoops to put their customized home on wheels and transport it to the town of Random Lake, roughly nine miles away in Sheboygan County. It is a complicated task with no guarantee of success.
“I worked hard for everything I have,” he said. “It’s mind-boggling that people think they can take whatever they want. We don’t know the future of the water, the runoff, and the contamination to the land. You’re ruining a beautiful town.”
This article first appeared on Circle of Blue and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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