A data center is coming to town.
Negotiate like you know the numbers.
Free tools for communities facing data center development: impact calculators, negotiation playbooks, health evidence, and the documents to bring to your next hearing — all sourced.
The trajectory
U.S. data-center electricity demand, actual and projected — TWh per year, with the equivalent number of average U.S. homes powered and the share of all U.S. electricity.
At the high end, that is the electricity of roughly 40% of all U.S. households (~132 million) going to data centers by 2030.
Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2024 U.S. Data Center Energy Usage Report (Dec 2024). 2028–2030 range reflects low/high AI-adoption scenarios; electricity shares are the report’s own figures. Homes equivalence uses the EIA average U.S. household consumption of 10,500 kWh/year; household count per U.S. Census.
What you get
Action pack
A personalized PDF: impact numbers, meeting strategy, CBA targets, a 2-minute speech, and ready-to-send letters.
Flyer + petition
A one-page hand-out with your community's numbers, in English and Spanish, with a sign-up sheet.
Campaign site
A complete one-page website with your numbers baked in — free to host, no coding needed.
All generated in the free GridWatch toolkit — no signup required.
Communities that organized, won
- Loudoun County, VA (Multiple) — Declined abatements and taxed data centers instead: the FY2027 budget puts them at roughly $1.3B — about 45% of all county tax revenue — on ~4% of commercial parcels. The benchmark for what a jurisdiction with market power can simply refuse to give away Source 1 · verified 2026-08-05
- Groton, CT (Multiple) — A hard size cap, not a cheque: data center buildings limited to 12,500 sq ft in the zoning adopted June 2023, after a one-year moratorium. Hyperscale campuses run 150,000–350,000 sq ft, so the cap excludes them by geometry rather than by argument Source 1 · Source 2 · verified 2026-08-05
- Los Lunas, NM (Meta) — A water agreement with terms: the March 2025 village agreement with Greater Kudu LLC (Meta's filing entity) guarantees up to 3M gallons/day but suspends supply in a declared Stage 3 water emergency. Meta also funds eight Rio Grande watershed restoration projects, ~172M gallons/year Source 1 · Source 2 · verified 2026-08-05
- Morrow County, OR (Amazon (AWS)) — Fees in lieu of taxes, negotiated in the open: ~$40M over 15 years across five new data centers in exchange for enterprise-zone abatements worth an estimated $1B (2023). Cited here as a benchmark of what a payment-in-lieu deal looks like — including how much is forgone to get it Source 1 · verified 2026-08-05
- The Dalles, OR (Google) — Infrastructure money, but no cap — the cautionary benchmark. Google paid ~$28.5M toward city water treatment and storage and donated 3.88M gallons/day of water rights, yet nothing limited its own draw, which reached ~40% of city supply by 2025. Ask for the volume limit in writing, not just the capital contribution Source 1 · Source 2 · verified 2026-08-05
Every one of these happened before final approval. Timing is the leverage.