Maine became the first state to pass a ban on new, large data centers on Tuesday.
The bill passed both state houses and now must be signed by Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, before it becomes law.
But Mills previously asked for an exception for a data center project on an old paper mill site, but state legislators rejected it. So, it’s unclear if she will sign the bill.
The measure would block creating new data centers that use more than 20 megawatts of power until fall 2027. It will also create a way to study their effects on the power grid.
How about a data center located in the ocean which uses no shore power and is not connected to land by any cables, either power or data? It uses wave power to generate electricity, and satellite to send/receive, and except for the small “head” which bobs above the water is nearly invisible to anyone looking directly at it.
David Pogue segment frrom CBS Sunday Morning this week.
Years ago I got interested in wave or tidal generation technologies that seemed to me interesting. I showed the stuff to the marine architect who designed and built the Bahia Redonda marina. He was not impressed. Years have gone by and I have never heard of the company promoting the idea.
Maybe Elon’s data centers in space make more sense?
I regularly read David Robert’s substack, which talks a lot about energy and data centers. He had an interview with the great Jigah Shah. I won’t try to summarize, but there are lots of solutions for data centers. Just requires a bit of planning.
We want to start with the fact that data centers are providing us load growth for the first time in 20 years. Load growth is good. When you have load growth, whether it’s from EVs or heat pumps or other things, it allows you to lower electricity bills for everybody. I’m not anti-data centers. I’m anti doing data centers in a dumb way.
