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State senator warns of data‑center energy and water strain, outlines bills to limit water use and require community benefit agreements
Summary
State Senator Rosemary Baer told Farmington Hills council members that hyperscale data centers pose significant local risks from energy and water demand and described introduced legislation to cap water use, require community benefit agreements and protect residents from rate increases and infrastructure cost‑shifting.
State Senator Rosemary Baer briefed the Farmington Hills City Council on concerns she said arise from the rapid growth of hyperscale data centers, including very large energy draws and potential impacts on local water supplies, and outlined a set of bills she has introduced to regulate those effects.
Baer told the council that hyperscale sites can reach capacities measured in gigawatts and use water‑intensive cooling methods. She said one early proposal she reviewed would have used an evaporation cooling method that could consume "5,000,000 gallons a day," and described limits on water use as a central focus of her legislation. "We have introduced some data center regulation for water...Our requirements are flat out a hard limit on water, which no other state has done," she said.
Baer said legislation underway would also seek to prevent utilities from shifting infrastructure costs or rate increases to residential customers when data centers require major grid upgrades. "The last request from DTE...they just got approved a big huge rate increase and the very next day they proposed another rate increase that they need to do because of data centers. That we have to make illegal," she said.
The senator urged municipalities to update zoning and ordinance language to address data‑center proposals and recommended using community benefit agreements (CBAs) to extract local commitments when projects move forward. She cited an example of a Michigan municipality that anticipates a substantial revenue boost and has negotiated a CBA that the community supports.
Council members asked about the legislative prospects; Baer said the bills were newly introduced and had not yet received hearings, and that staff are conducting "lunch and learn" outreach to lawmakers over the summer ahead of fall legislative work. Several council members expressed support for CBAs as a way to secure local benefits.
Baer also emphasized protecting water and electric service for residents first, saying municipalities should ensure data‑center demands do not compromise household service during outages. She offered handouts and invited further questions from the council.
