A few weeks ago, Gov. JB Pritzker told reporters that negotiators are closer than they’d ever been to a deal with the Bears to stay in Illinois. The Bears are threatening to decamp to a wasteland in Northwest Indiana’s dirty energy and industrial corridor.
As you’ve probably read before, Illinois’ offer is to create a privately funded local sports stadium authority to build and operate a new stadium which would be surrounded by an entertainment complex. The state would still be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in public infrastructure spending for the Bears-owned Arlington Heights site, and nobody knows how much that could be if the Bears decide to stay somewhere in Chicago.
As of this writing, the Bears have not committed to anything. The Legislature and governor, understandably, don’t want to pass a bill and still watch the Bears leave, so until the Bears give the go-ahead nothing will happen.
But other major issues have been vying for attention during the mid-to-late November veto session. One of the major proposals is legislation to put some hardened guardrails around the construction and operation of new data centers.
My associate Isabel Miller and I came up with a question to ask Pritzker last week to see if we could gauge what he thinks about the current data center situation: Is the data center regulation bill just as close to passage this fall as the Bears bill?
I’d heard that the Senate was hoping to hammer it out, but that the House was intending to shift the proposal, along with a new clean energy bill, to a special January "lame duck” session before the new General Assembly is sworn in, for a possible solution.
“I don't know how to measure whether it's just as close,” Pritzker said about the data center bill, and then reverted back to discussing the Bears bill. “I can tell you this: that there's a lot of work that's being done even as we speak on that Bears bill, so I'm very hopeful that in the second week of veto session there might be a vote on it.”
In other words, maybe in January. Maybe.
Data centers are a tricky issue for Democrats because organized labor wants to build more of them and pretty much everyone else in the state doesn’t want anything to do with them, including environmentalists, who worry the companies will try to use new carbon-based energy to operate them.
But the reality is, new gas-powered plants probably wouldn’t be economically feasible as long as those plants must be closed under existing state law by 2040. It takes years and years to build new gas generators these days. By the time a new plant was actually up and running and serving a data center, it would have just a few years to generate revenue before shutting down. That’s not enough time to pay off the debt. And almost nobody sees any way that Illinois will significantly relax its deadline, especially since commercial solar and wind power sources tied to battery storage have become cheaper to build and deploy.
Pritzker has issued a one-year pause on tax breaks for new data centers but that won’t solve anything.
The really big data centers that are making headlines everywhere likely won’t ever be built here. Our state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act has very stiff penalties for storing images of people online without their knowledge or consent. Those data centers are being built as part of the massive artificial intelligence expansion that appears to be in a huge financial bubble right now. It would just be far too costly to fend off the lawsuits to keep those centers open.
Then there are other hugely important data center issues like water usage and driving up existing energy prices.
People are freaked out about these data centers, and it’s only natural. Ever since humans evolved, they’ve guarded their fire and water sources with their lives. They are two basic elements of life.
And now these massive, faceless companies are wanting to snatch up our electricity and water, all while warning everyone who will listen that their technology will likely wipe out humankind.
They’re behaving like monsters and ogres from folk tales handed down from time immemorial. And the public is rightly having none of it.
So, maybe a few weeks after the Democrats likely score major state and national wins by railing against the “forces of evil” might not be a great time to publicly give a billionaire football team a catered deal while walking away from the nation’s chief economic ogres.
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.
