Let’s hope Rhode Island’s plan to handle a fast-approaching tidal wave of data center projects doesn’t result in the same annihilation of green space caused by a stampede of ground-mounted solar arrays during the twenty-tens.

Data centers are primed to be the next energy-related development threat to Rhode Island’s forestland.

In Smithfield, a developer and manager of utility-scale solar projects wants to build a data center on several hundred acres of woodland behind Fidelity Investment’s corporate office park off Douglas Pike and across the street from Bryant University.

Ryan Palumbo, vice president of Warwick-based Revity Energy, and John Branca, who owns the property where the data center is proposed, appeared March 17 before the Smithfield Town Council in advance of a March 19 Planning Board meeting.

During the council meeting, Palumbo said the plan is to build a business park — an antiquated development concept from the 1950s that just won’t go away, at least in Rhode Island — with a data center as the anchor tenant.

The Smithfield Planning Board has since supported a council recommendation that proposes a ban on data centers.

The bulk of Revity Energy’s development portfolio is ground-mounted solar arrays built into green space. The solar developer is now pushing the General Assembly to offer a 30-year tax incentive to bring massive, energy-intensive data centers to the state.

Perhaps Rhode Island should provide tax incentives to property owners who don’t want to maul their land and to developers who want to reuse already-damaged properties.

Revity Energy, though, has an ally in Sen. Louis DiPalma, D-Middletown, who works at Raytheon. He has sponsored two bills (S2346 and S2776) that the developer supports. They have been held for further study.

Proponents of the bills, tax deals, and data center development offer the same tired argument: a multimillion/billion-dollar industry will provide jobs and boost the local economy; they just need some taxpayer support, some corporate welfare, and some trees killed.

Sen. Sam Bell, D-Providence, as The Boston Globe reported, offered a reasoned response to the insulting ask: “I think it would be insane to give a tax break to a lucrative project that would drive up our electricity rates even further.”

While developers look for public handouts, they conveniently ignore the fact data centers can place substantial strain on local land and communities, such as environmental and public health impacts, the conversion of farmland and forests into industrial sites, and, as Bell noted, higher utility bills.

This data center development boom has been likened to a gold rush. Economies around the world are racing to attract investment in digital infrastructure without understanding or considering the full impact.

A surge of new data centers is reshaping local power grids, water systems, and the landscape, according to the World Resources Institute. This rapid expansion is often happening with limited public information about the long-term impacts new data centers could bring, including rampant water use.

A World Economic Forum analysis found that extreme heat, drought, and other climate crisis impacts could drive annual costs up at data centers globally by $81 billion by 2035 and rising to $168 billion by 2065. The analysis also suggests that annual climate-driven costs could reach the equivalent of 9.5% of total data center asset value by 2055 under a high-emissions scenario. Total cumulative losses could reach $3.3 trillion over the same time period, with extreme heat accounting for more than two-thirds of the impact, followed by drought and water stress.

U.S. lawmakers across the country aren’t just opening the door for these energy-sucking monsters. They’re actively luring them in, with tax breaks and other incentives, eager to lay claim to new municipal revenues and a piece of the explosive growth surrounding artificial intelligence, according to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

“That may sound hyperbolic, but data centers truly are resource-ravenous,” according to the Cambridge, Mass.-based organization. “Even a mid-sized data center consumes as much water as a small town, while larger ones require up to 5 million gallons of water every day — as much as a city of 50,000 people.”

Data centers are the physical infrastructure of the internet. They house servers, run software, store data, network equipment, and support systems that keep digital services operating. They first emerged in the mid-20th century and proliferated during the 1990s alongside the rise of the internet.

As the world rapidly digitizes, the need for data centers increases. From streaming movies and online shopping to financial transactions, consumers and businesses rely heavily on this largely hidden infrastructure.

Today’s data center expansion is unfolding at a much larger scale and faster pace, largely because of an explosion in largely unregulated AI and cryptocurrency. It’s fueled by private investment, state tax incentives, and regime directives aimed at fast-tracking permitting. Global data center capacity is expected to almost triple by 2030.

Life-destroying corporations such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into new data centers without taking a moment a consider the ramifications. They will chose profit over people and planet every time.

As for the Smithfield business park/data center idea, it’s also more of the same narrow-minded, profit-at-all-cost thinking: clear-cut green space to lay concrete and asphalt, while leaving underutilized and vacant gray space to pollute local waters and exacerbate flooding. Gray equals green — and gold, silver, and Bitcoin.

The proposal has, rightfully, raised local debate regarding environmental impacts and energy consumption.

The U.S. AI boom — the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists considers it a toxic tech bubble that will burst — and the expansion of data centers it requires is largely powered by dirty fossil fuels, which means more climate and public health degradation. Food & Water Watch has noted data center expansion is extending the lives of old natural gas (methane) and coal-fired power plants and driving new methane power development.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit has also estimated that by 2028 the water needs of U.S. data centers for cooling could be as high as the indoor water needs of 18.5 million households.

Rhode Island’s green-space energy rush began in earnest in March 2017, when then-Gov. Gina Raimondo signed an executive order that encouraged the state to attain 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2020. The not-well-thought-out order increased the number of renewable energy applications being filed in cities and towns that hadn’t yet adopted regulations that adequately addressed the impacts of the fast-growing industry.

Renewable energy is vital, but siting it properly is paramount. You may be against offshore wind, but the development process from the beginning has been far more rigorous compared to land-based solar. The development process for data centers in Rhode Island needs to be just as exhaustive.

Many of the projects the Raimondo renewable energy EO spawned were ground-mounted solar arrays. The ill-considered executive order made no mention of where to site these projects, which resulted in the combined clear-cutting of tens of thousands of trees.

It’s more profitable for developers to bulldoze trees than reuse already-marred space. The state did little to nothing to redirect solar development to landfills, brownfields, and other developed areas.

Instead, the Statehouse and state agencies left overwhelmed municipal officials — many of the part-time variety, especially in rural towns where most of the green-space development occurred — and volunteer board members to confront utility-scale energy development without a blueprint or a safety net.

To be fair, Rhode Island was hardly alone in being unprepared for the solar stampede.

In the three-state Narragansett Bay Region, 70 of the 113 municipalities in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut that are in the bay’s greater watershed host ground-mounted solar development that covers 3,979 acres of what was green space across 350 solar arrays, according to mapping done two years ago by the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program.

Hopefully, Rhode Island has the political will to actually plan for the latest explosion of energy-related development. History doesn’t provide much hope.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.