When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?(theconversation.com) |
When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?(theconversation.com) |
China has something of the same problem. The cheap power sources are in the northwest, and the big loads are in the southeast. So China has long million-volt UHV DC lines.
Getting power from the areas with high renewable energy density over to the population centers is a good goal to have.
This is still quite debatable, but so much less so than the implied accusation that they would somehow sell out their privileges as subcontractors for the data centers themselves.
Transmission lines are pretty harmless when considering things that could be built instead. Zero emissions, silent, no illumination, etc.
Mostly silent. High voltage transmission lines may have a low-frequency hum. You have to stand directly under them to hear it though.
Transmission lines emit EMF which seem pretty harmless unless you're a pollinator or migratory bird. Maybe the home owners are just making a fuss so they can get a better payout to improve the amenities in the bunkers that comprise their subterranean community of concrete beneath the barren badlands of the over-world. At the very least, they should ensure respirators and gaussmeters for able-bodied coal miner minors.
Debatable. Some studies found this:
https://emfradar.com/articles/power-lines-childhood-leukemia
Then some other studies mostly invalidated that.
Though, this isn't strictly imminent domain... Just people being assholes.
As for the title, I would go further than you do. This is not a misleading title. It is a lying title. I'm usually a pretty big believer in Scott Alexander's Bounded Distrust [0] concept for the media where they very rarely actually, technically lie. This title (although not the article itself), in my opinion crosses that line.
Power lines to a private DC seem to miss on both counts.
You're giving a blank check to use it as long as it's infrastructure, and as any simple rule, it's prone to get abused way beyond it's primary goal. IMHO the issue is nuance and balance, we should accept that whether it's applicable is an "it depends" matter.
Keeping it too simple and black and white means companies can now strategically place data centers and get the local government to seize all the land leading to it, and vice versa, local govs can nudge companies to target specific places to seize wherever they want. Especially as the plans aren't required to come to fruition.
Farmers don’t like lines because you have to allow for an access road to it and it does not pay anywhere as well as say a cell tower.
Per usual, NIMBYs continually move the goal posts and rely heavily on rhetoric to oppose a project. Data center opposition is providing them with great PR fodder, but they would have opposed these projects regardless. This is why infrastructure is so incredibly expensive in this country.
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2025/11/oregon-regula...
[2] https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2025/10/a-300-mile-po...
That's a practice that exists everywhere. This is an article about a case of expropriation in the Netherlands. The government frequently uses expropriation ("onteigening") to forcibly remove old, small wind turbines owned by private farmers to make room for massive, industrial-scale wind farms. In Dutch, so you'll need to swith on English translation:
https://www.dirkzwager.nl/kennis/artikelen/afdeling-bestuurs...
that said, i think i lean to it’s absolutely not ok to use eminent domain when the receivers of the benefits of the taken property are primarily one private industry and its owners.
i’d probably more often be ok with it if the benefits were mostly limited to being widely distributed to the people of that locality/region.
even then i go back and forth but i know for sure that plays a major part in how i see it.
In general the problem is the power company, having received a large new customer and therefore a lot of new revenue, who wants to stuff it in their pocket instead of using it to upgrade the infrastructure to meet the new demand.
https://fortune.com/2026/07/19/data-center-eminent-domain-pu...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/when-can-a-power-compan...
https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/policy/data-center-eminent...
Last one appears to be generated using AI, with no attribution to the original author
The current system we live in is unsustainable and on the verge of breaking. We're headed towards something far worse than 1929, and there's nothing we can do to stop this train.
I started to believe this when snapshot had their IPO value at something like 5 Exxons or 24 General Motors, but was primed for this belief working on energy and carbon credit derivative markets during the early 2010s, an experience that made me start believing it is all a fucking casino.
Now, I just amuse myself watching the insanity.
https://theconversation.com/when-can-a-power-company-take-yo...
We also have the Stargate UK data center that the Starmer government trumpeted before it was exposed as a glorified PR stunt without any substance. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/04/openai-ap...
Or we could build a power line.
It would help if the power grid was public property, thou. It would help if the power grid was build so the majority of citizens profit. It would help if the power grid was build for someone else than big tech.
Meanwhile building railroads is impossible. Could we convince AI companies to build their datacenters on trains? USA would have in a few years the largest train network in the world.
probably not short trading, but investigating leveraging positions may be worth it.
That being said, there is a lot of actual buildouts happening right now. The question is how much of the planned future capacity will actually get developed.
Kevin O’Leary also published pictures of him shedding tears while buying an Audemars Piguet watch, which should be brought up and mocked every time he’s mentioned.
So don’t worry, there is already probably a nationwide video surveillance system out there, even without Kevin
Conversely I see heaps of already in progress data center builds and upgrades tacking AI on as the purpose as just PR to sell colo.
The East coast of the US has similar trade winds.
Also, transmission towers are usually the best lightning rods for miles in a given location, and it is fucking unsettling to live close to them during storms. Not to mention they are an eye sore.
Does it make more sense to
a) put up your TV and gaming console on the east side, and have an electrician run another power line across the room (they can install five plugs there too so you can keep the lamp and even charge your phone, which is nice), or
b) simply put up your TV and console on the west side?
The world is a lot more complicated than "datacenter bad". I don't think datacenters are a good justification for HVDC transmission. HVDC transmission justifies itself because even if you could magically transport the biggest consumers to where the power is generated, we still need to transport power all the way across the country. HVDC is the most efficient way to do that bar none.
The reality of the situation is that our power grid is a century out of date and needs an overhaul for the realities of renewable energy. Not installing HVDC transmission lines is simply not an option if we want the whole country to stop using local coal and gas plants.
In my last place, there were no ethernet ports, and there was no shot that my landlord would install any. Coaxial wasn’t correctly wired up either. So my two options were to either move my setup into the kitchen, or to run an Ethernet cord up into my room.
I chose the second option to not monopolize the dining room table. It wasn’t pretty but my roommates were happier with some painters tape on the walls than my computer being in the kitchen.
I think a similar thing can be said for people who live in remote areas, it is about compromise. In this example it’s low internet speeds, traveling to get groceries if you live in a food desert, or paying more for utilities.
People prefer what they prefer. And if their preferences are worth their cost of the compromises, then they are going to go with their preferences.
It’s unreasonable to expect someone to move / abandon their preferences because they may not make sense to others on paper.
With things like video, photo, audio, and liturgical surveilance, the data is largely out in the open (or simply purchased from their hosting platforms, leading to social media and adtech companies like Facebook and Google being defense contractors by nature) and does not need to be decrypted (in most cases) - rather, it needs to be correlated. This is a great task for machine learning because that's what the field has largely been engineered to do for the last 60 years, but it relies so, so, so heavily on having data to both train on and use in its practice. Storage of all data is the perfect end-goal of a surveilance state. Storage requires data centers. Data centers of this calibre are effectively black sites in that they are nigh impenetrable in both practical and legal senses, and I'd wager many data centers host actual digital black sites simply due to their ubiquity as means of doing so coupled with the necessity of the hardware and facilities they provide that are needed for doing so.
Theres really nothing that will ever be publicly available that would say "this data center has a hundred thousand SOTA GPUs in it that are doing gait recognition on every camera in every airport in the world in real time" versus "this data center is a bunch of tape machines that store everything ever recorded from every facsimilie of Room 641A[1]".
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now%2C_decrypt_later
You can see this in the long time intervals specified for Declassification of classified documents.
"Executive Order 13526 establishes the mechanisms for most declassifications, within the laws passed by Congress.[1] The originating agency assigns a declassification date, by default 25 years. After 25 years, declassification review is automatic with nine narrow exceptions that allow information to remain as classified. At 50 years, there are two exceptions, and classifications beyond 75 years require special permission."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification#United_States
"Decrypt Later" should generalized to "Use Later", many recordings are useful without decryption, just from the metadata you can establish who, when communicated. Identification of relations between persons, building of social graphs, is the basic of intelligence work. Much of this relationship analysis can be done just from metadata.
One example of such analysis is the NSA Co-Travel Analytics
"CO-TRAVELER does not simply collect location information. It creates a portrait of travel times and people who crossed paths, revealing our physical interactions and relationships. The cell site information goes beyond email and phone calls and ordinary telephony data, allowing the U.S. government to know who we are with in-person and where. This is information that would be impossible to collect using traditional law enforcement methods. "
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/meet-co-traveler-nsas-...
https://www.eff.org/files/2013/12/11/20131210-wapo-cotravele...
Even if a camera supports 4k 60fps video, the 'edge AI' can downscale the input to 224x224 2fps and use a small network.
Often the 'edge AI' just needs to detect humans/cars/pets and trigger saving some footage to an SD card/turning on a light. It's not the end of the world if it misses some things or raises false alarms sometimes.
And if you buy a Reolink on Amazon expecting it to be able to recognise a face from 20 yards away, you'll be disappointed.
Also, have you considered AI being necessary to fill in for missing surveillance footage if the cameras are failing (the ruling class)? E.g. the whole Epstein (PR) disaster could have been avoided if the cameras could have been kept running and the footage post-processed in time.
The nature of the easement can make a big difference. Oftentimes the power lines will be colocated with gas pipelines which tend to impose stricter requirements on land owners. It's a lot easier to do things like excavate when you can see what you aren't supposed to hit.
People with neurodiverse conditions are not sensitive to power lines. Hard to believe we’re seeing this type of claim on Hacker News.
Modern high voltage DC transmission lines also don’t have 60Hz emissions because they’re DC.
Anyway, the land where these transmission lines are built usually isn’t running through high population density areas. They’re not slapping a HV transmission line right in the middle of a residential corridor if they can avoid it. It’s going through farm land and empty space if at all possible. It’s a hundred times easier to build the towers in those locations instead of near population centers.
as for them causing leukemia i'd not consider that realistic
Many of them probably are. Individual EMF concerns are often debunked. It is possible but unlikely that all of them are categorically complete nonsense. But let's put them aside for a moment. There are real, known consequences of living next to a data center as implemented.
Coil whine from transformers, in audible and infrasound movement of air, has real known effects, as well as suspected poorly studied effects, on the human head & ear.
The fact that we're just allowing a data center that says "I'm out of power, let me use more", to run four extraordinarily loud, dirty airplane jet turbines at the middle of their property for power generation on an improvised basis. And then when we look at their operation in aerial photos, we see 36 jet turbines.
Any and all non-closed-loop cooling systems are an issue, especially when they pull from potable water or operate in dryland droughts. The ratio of wattage consumed vs water consumed should be instructive here.
The amount of money that is going into these things is obscene, and when they choose to involve local officials it is essentially buying out your local-level democracy wholesale. Total lack of regulation. Town council meeting videos where all of your supposed representatives are under NDA; Extremely blatant corruption that the state doesn't want to touch. Races to the bottom.
These things are designed to run basically as lights-off factories, with little to no local labor involved. While there may be some initial investment in facilities, that will dwindle. When they are simultaneously not paying taxes via assorted individual arrangements, and raising electrical rates, there's very little to recommend them to locals.
We have established no general rules as far as buffers. Large-scale construction in general tends to kill rural watersheds & aquifers in close proximity. The sound issue is real, the EMF issues may have some limited credibility, and well-water is often tragedy of the commons, all of which might be totally mitigated by a half mile or whatever of forest buffer mandated around a data center zoning.
I remember the original issue with these is they were spraying some kind agent orange like chemical to keep growth down under the lines and people were getting cancer from it 50 years ago.
In fact, a huge portion of the sentimental press stores over eminent domain are attempts by homeowners not to cancel the project, but to increase the payouts. Often the homeowners would be quite sad to see the project cancelled, they just want to milk the settlement via litigation.
I own the land that I do because I value it more than any other buyer/current bidder. (If that weren’t true, I’d sell it to the higher bidder.)
If, instead of bidding an attractive price for my land like an ordinary buyer, you win a court case or political process that says you can force me to sell my land at a “fair market value”, that previous point establishes that I’m being forced to take a loss, as I am being forced to accept a price lower than my reservation price.
At the same time, eminent domain must exist in order to let continuous projects like power lines and highways be built. I just think that 150% or 200% of what is currently called “fair market value” is a better reference price than 100% of it.
The taking of land against the owner’s will should come at a premium, but that premium should be capped rather than unbounded.
The problem with not having eminent domain is that without it, for any project of sufficient size you'll end up with ~100+ land owners who each individually have veto power over the entire project. If 99 of them freely agree to sell, but 1 is really stubborn and refuses to sell at any price, the project is dead.
There's also a prisoner's dilemma problem. Maybe it's not a big deal paying one stubborn guy 100x fair market value for his property to allow the project to continue. But if enough people think they can get 100x what their property is worth if they just hold out a bit longer, that also kills the project.
Eminent domain solves all this by making it so the project only has to to clear a few bars the government has set for it, rather than the many bars ~100 individual landowners set for it. But in the process it also erodes property rights and kills the built-in protections the free market has to ensure such transactions are fair.
A 1.5x or 2x multiplier on the fair market value would help with that a lot and help ensure eminent domain is only used in cases where it's strictly needed.
Or alternately, I sort of like the idea of letting the landowners elect someone to represent them in negotiations with the project developer, and then having a chance to vote yes/no on the final cash offer. Then the final price would still be set by a market of sorts, but there'd be no prisoner's dilemma or individual spoilers. Not 100% sure if that would work better or not though; it is a bit more complicated and there are still some issues with it.
Some states do require above FMV for condemnation, e.g. 120%. After Kelo in the early 2000s, almost every state passed significant eminent domain reform.
The leukemia is bullshit, though. The numbers are too small to make any kind of definitive statement, or to properly compensate for things like socioeconomic factors - plenty of other potential causes on the rural farms and poor urban neighborhoods where we usually build power lines, after all.
This seems like the thing where people use the phrase "there is no evidence of" to imply that something has been disproven when what it actually means is that we don't know enough to say one way or the other.
Where I live pretty much every piece of land has some sort of easement on it: for water, power, or something else. Seems weird to me if we can insist that now everything needs to be frozen and no more infrastructure upgrades.
The last house I lived in had an easement along the back property line. I built my fence on the easement knowing full well they would tear it up if they needed to access anything. I live in a denser town now where the power comes from the street to my house, wraps around my house, then lines to the next building over. I guess I should tell those people in the other building to figure out a different way to get power.
[1] Also feels a bit like the arguments against wind power.
But no, we don't seize rights and access to privately owned land for houses, offices, commercial buildings or factories unless there is overwhelming public benefit. I can't just say I want to build a factory and force access and utilities across my neighbours without their permission or an extraordinary process to prove that I'm going to provide massive local benefit (or national security).
If my factory wants to compete on an already contested resource (water, power), I should have to go further to show that I'm going to be a net benefit in my area.
As things stand, datacentres provide very an extraordinarily low employment density. They don't produce food. They consume an extraordinary amount of energy making it more expensive. And they money they generate concentrates wealth to billionaires. If you want your powerlines prove you're going to be beneficial. Start with a solar+batterty farm. You can surge from the network, and sell on slow days. Guarantee free power and network for locals. Integrate heat pumps to heat local homes in winter.
I've wandered off the topic of forcing permanent access to others land into broader planning, but it's all related.
Ever since Kelo v New London we do.
> overwhelming public benefit.
This is just an appeal to authority that is predicated on the broad willful ignorance that the mean reader here will have toward how this particular sausage is made.
Read the proceedings. Half the time it's bullshit like "gravel pit or office park development wants an easement through undeveloped/agricultural/industrial parcels XYZ to build a road because that means they can exit closer to the highway which saves a bunch of money. They'd pay the land owner because at the end of the day it's money either way, they just think they can convince the state to stomp the land owner cheaper than they can pay off the land owner.
"All your base are belong to us" => Billionaires of USA
When that happens rename the nation to Corporate States of America as well.
If we do want to soak the rich, can we do it in a progressive, targeted way (such as taxes) and not in a NIMBY way where we just say no one can build or improve anything?
I don't disagree with your sentiment, but as someone who manages infrastructure which is literally on the opposite side of the planet (from me) RTT is long enough to be objectively horrible for anything interactive like typing over SSH. At least 250ms capital to capital for Europe to Oceania + last mile latency makes 300ms a more realistic minimum + actual processing time + client side rendering and it really starts to feel like a half second from the full human perspective... Under ideal conditions.
Playing from eu on us servers is not playable
>A ping goes around the whole world before your pressed key is visible on the screen.
It's not just AI. Video streaming or game streaming both depend on close proximity to the end user, alone because the data volume would completely overwhelm backhaul links... that's why Youtube, Netflix and a lot of CDNs all have colo facilities close to major population centers and their regionally dominant ISPs.
It can be significantly cheaper to pay colo fees at an ISP' s data center than to pay interconnection fees for bulk transfers.
That's a straw man for this discussion. Yes, there will be a need to place some DCs close to users, but most of them could be located closer to energy production, attached to a backbone network, and the vast majority of customers would not suffer any degradation of service from it.
I think that unwitting land owners should not be subsidizing the AI grifters...
I know a thing or two about rf, emf and electricity in general and I don’t see why or how these hv wires would cause cancer, or if they did why would it be specifically leukaemia.
I’m fully aware though that before we knew about nuclear radiation people would have had similar thoughts about some random rare earth metal causing cancer if you’re not even touching it. So point is, I’ll wait for the proof before I’m convinced, or attempt to convince others.
I’ve also anecdotally noticed that people are concerned about many things where there is like very marginal evidence that maybe this is slightly bad for you but then regularly engage in very well known risky behaviour like eating big macs or driving cars. I might be speaking from personal experience.
Probably the same theory for how a microwave cooks food.
> I’ve also anecdotally noticed that people are concerned about many things where there is like very marginal evidence that maybe this is slightly bad for you but then regularly engage in very well known risky behaviour like eating big macs or driving cars.
Eating junk food has the countervailing benefit that they like the taste. There is very little personal benefit to having a high voltage line in your yard, and people respond especially poorly to things that have a personal risk with no personal benefit.
The actual change to look at isn't really the heating, but rather that RF has been known to increase glucose metabolism in affected cells. My own theory is that if that is true, you're essentially increasing cell aging and oxidative stress with the increased metabolism. Who knows if it's true. The effect seems small and the exposures need to be longterm.
At 60 hz? I think that’s a bit low for microwaving.
To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the leukemia claim just as likely.
(I personally doubt there is a significant risk, but if there is, these powerline easements would be quite risky to the residents in terms of ongoing/continuous exposure.)