A few years ago, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, set up one of its 17 U.S. data centers in Gallatin, Tennessee, a city about 30 miles northeast of Nashville. The move brought a $1 billion investment to a city with a population of fewer than 50,000 people. 

For many, the data center was a welcome boost to Gallatin’s tax base, but data centers also consume a large amount of electricity. And they seem poised to consume even more. 

Data centers are the brains of the internet. They’re the physical hubs that store all the data needed to keep digital technology running, and they’re popping up in communities that haven’t historically been the tech centers of the country.

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The expansion is also coming at a time when the country’s electrical infrastructure is already being pushed to the limit, in part due to the equipment’s age and in part due to climate change. 

In the Memphis area, controversy began last fall over a solar farm slated for 1,500 acres near Millington. But it wasn’t just any solar farm. 

RWE Renewables planned to generate 150 megawatts of solar power at a farm known as Graceland Solar. That electricity — enough to power 24,000 homes — would be sold to the Tennessee Valley Authority, but the intended customer and user for two-thirds of it was Meta and its Gallatin data center. 

For months, Millington residents showed up en masse to public meetings, and more than 740 people signed a petition against the project. 

“We bought our land because of the character of the neighborhood: the farmland, the trees, the wild animals,” resident Amy Hill told the Shelby County Board of Commissioners in February. “If this project is approved, we will no longer see that.”

Gallatin’s data center, roughly 240 miles away from Memphis, even became the impetus for an overhaul of the city and Shelby County’s rules for large solar farms, including a proposed size limit of one square mile. 

The Shelby County Board of Commissioners initially voted the Graceland Solar farm down in February. But with RWE Renewables already having invested several years and tens of millions of dollars in the project, the Shelby County government agreed to an out-of-court settlement with the company in April. 

The solar farm is moving forward. 

Power up

Electricity consumption is expected to increase 3% annually for the next couple years because of a spike in manufacturing activity and the expansion of electric vehicles, according to the International Energy Agency. 

Artificial intelligence and crypto mining are also driving up demand for more power, but about a third of the growth is also expected to come from data centers.

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Altogether, data centers currently use about 4% of the U.S. electricity supply, and they consume about 2% of the world’s electricity. Data centers could also use twice as much energy by 2026, according to the IEA annual electricity analysis.

Like many other major companies currently building new data centers, Meta has committed to using 100% renewable energy to power them. 

Several of Meta’s data centers, including the one in Gallatin, are connected to the TVA grid, so the company has invested in building more renewable energy across TVA’s seven-state footprint, which includes all of Tennessee. 

Those investments are a way for both Meta and TVA to meet their sustainability goals. But the projects aren’t always near the data centers themselves. 

And RWE’s Graceland Solar project unwittingly became a case study for how Shelby County regulates solar farms on land zoned for agricultural uses. 

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In an email to the Shelby County Land Use Control Board in January, Linda G. Maners Sarinoglu shared her concerns about the solar project planned beside her house. 

“Currently, I have a beautiful view of the farmland where farmers plant their crops,” Sarinoglu wrote. “The neighborhood is a quiet, peaceful, family community. Parents push their babies in strollers and children of all ages ride their bicycles in the quiet country streets. Older citizens ride around in their golf carts visiting neighbors. Families ride horses in the fields and through the neighborhood.”

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When she bought her house, she said she was told that the farmland would remain farmland, and the plans for a commercial solar farm “that will provide no benefit what-so-ever to the community” came as a surprise to her. 

She wasn’t the only resident who was upset. Other neighbors worried about the project’s impact on waterways and property values as well as the visual stain they said it would leave on the area. 

In February, Shelby County Commissioner Britney Thornton sympathized with the residents fearing a development in their neighborhood. As the commissioner representing Orange Mound, she likened it to Liberty Park, which despite having “beautiful renderings ... ended up being a big gray box” she said she drives past every day. 

“There’s nothing that changes the lived reality of having to sit alongside this,” Thornton said. “And I cannot imagine moving by choice to Millington to have everything that made it an attractive move for me taken away.” 

During the monthslong process when the commission was considering the solar-farm proposal, John Zeanah, director of the Memphis and Shelby County Division of Planning and Development, repeatedly said the area’s existing rules were outdated and didn’t account for the growth of industrial-scale solar farms.

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In late April, the commission approved on its second reading a measure that would require solar farms to have a 600-foot setback from residential areas and would limit solar arrays to a one-square-mile site. 

Commissioner Amber Mills, who championed those changes, said the open and level farmland in her northern Shelby County district, which is close to high voltage lines, is what solar companies are looking for.

“This is protecting unincorporated Shelby County that’s got the wide-open land,” she said. “It’s just a little buffer between the homeowners and the solar companies that are coming to Shelby County.”

Catching some sun

RWE pitched Graceland Solar to the community as an investment in power reliability without any public money needed. They also said it would bring more than $25 million in property-tax revenue during the life of the project and create hundreds of jobs.

RWE announced the project in partnership with Meta as part of TVA’s Green Invest program. The initial plan was for RWE to generate 150 megawatts of solar power that would go into TVA’s grid, making more solar energy available for all its customers, including Meta, to purchase.

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Jacques Morrise, who lives a couple miles away from Sarinoglu along the northern border of the Graceland Solar project site, sees it differently from his neighbor. 

“Data centers serve pretty much everyone,” Morrise said. “If you use a cellphone or a computer or a tablet connected to the internet, you depend on data centers.” 

He’s more concerned about record energy demand and avoiding rolling blackouts than the aesthetics of solar panels. In fact, he’s already installed panels at his house. 

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Morrise said. “When I look at an expressway interchange or a very tall building, I see concrete and steel — not a pastoral view. But I know that interchanges improve travel safety and efficiency, and tall buildings use less land to accommodate many people, so there is a functional beauty to those things.” 

Knowing the alternatives to solar panels include coal, gas and nuclear plants — and knowing it helps utilities keep the power on — a sea of solar panels doesn’t seem like blight to him. 

What’s at stake

Energy demand has been relatively flat for a couple decades because appliances became more energy-efficient, offsetting a growing global population. 

In TVA’s most recent five-year plan published in 2019, the utility said electricity demand in its service area grew faster than the nation as a whole because of people and companies moving into its footprint as well as more data centers coming online. When TVA drafted that plan, data centers were one of its four target industries along with advanced manufacturing, transportation manufacturing and food processing.

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Early last year, TVA removed data centers from its list of target industries. 

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that, although data centers’ power loads are going to grow, most of TVA’s increasing energy demand is coming from factory projects and migration into the region. By some estimates, the region’s population will grow more than 20% by 2050.

In the same time period, TVA will need to double, or maybe even triple, the amount of power it can generate to keep up with demand. Last year, it passed a 4.5% rate hike to fund an expansion to do just that. 

The utility plans to build a few thousand megawatts of electric generation over the next five years. That’s the equivalent of adding another Memphis, TVA’s largest customer, to its grid system and then some. 

But generating more power isn’t enough, Brooks said.

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“Time, money and labor resources are finite, and we cannot rely on building capacity alone,” Brooks said. “Therefore, we must have a multi-prong approach that includes building megawatts and reducing consumption through energy efficiency and demand response.” 

In the U.S., the Energy Act of 2020 requires the federal government to conduct studies about how much energy and water data centers use. Tracking this information helps inform energy-efficiency practices, which the IEA said is going to be key to keeping up with the surge. 

If TVA can’t generate enough power, rolling blackouts could become more commonplace. 

“We can avoid rolling blackouts by increasing the amount of electricity available on the TVA grid,” Morrise said. “Solar panels are the most ecologically sound way to do that. So if I saw a field of solar panels next to my house, I would think about how many people will continue to receive essential services when power demand peaks.” 

Reporter Bill Dries contributed to this story.