Mega data centers are coming to Minnesota. Their power needs are...
Facebook’s parent company is building Minnesota’s first mega data center in Rosemount to house its fast-growing need for computing muscle. Amazon and Microsoft bought land for large data centers near Xcel Energy’s soon-retiring coal plant in Becker. A Colorado company called Tract has advanced a project in Farmington and is eyeing colossal sites in Rosemount and Cannon Falls. Other companies want to build data centers in Chaska, Faribault, North Mankato, and Hampton. If built, this crop of data centers could demand as much electricity as every home in Minnesota.
Electricity Demand and Environmental Concerns
State and local officials as well as electric utilities are grappling with how to manage this explosive growth while keeping the lights on and complying with laws for a transition to clean power. Lagging power supply on the 15-state regional grid has spurred warnings of blackouts starting this summer. The data centers are already raising concerns about whether they will prolong the burning of fossil fuels for electricity even as Minnesota requires a carbon-free grid by 2040.
“There’s so many different utilities and industries and businesses who have done a lot of work on decarbonization in Minnesota,” said Amelia Vohs, climate program director at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA). “It feels a little bit like this one industry has a real possibility to significantly erode that.”
Benefits and Challenges
Still, many state and local officials welcome the projects, which could shower Minnesota with new carbon-free power infrastructure, construction jobs, tax revenue and, potentially, lower electric bills for everyone. The server farms are critical to services such as medical records, financial transactions, streaming media, navigation apps, email, and remote work.
The rise of artificial intelligence products has accelerated the construction of these centers, massive buildings that house banks of computers using enough electricity to power cities.
“All of that is generating and consuming more and more data than ever before,” said Aaron Tinjum, vice president of energy for the industry trade group Data Center Coalition. “It’s an industry that has really become, effectively, the lifeblood of our modern economy.”
Power Supply and Future Plans
Xcel anticipates supplying data centers with 1,300 megawatts in Minnesota and the Dakotas over the next seven years. Great River Energy, a Maple Grove-based nonprofit, is planning 1,000 megawatts of new demand in a similar time frame. That amount of power demand between Xcel and Great River would be roughly equivalent to Minnesota’s 2.3 million households. Xcel is building one of the nation’s largest solar farms in Sherburne County, a project seen as a landmark for carbon-free progress in Minnesota.
Even before the data center boom, utilities were preparing for higher demand as people switch to electric vehicles and home heating systems. Minnesota in 2024 made it faster to permit and build clean energy. Still, it can take several years to build wind and solar projects and as much as a decade for large transmission lines to carry electricity.
Environmental Impact and Renewable Energy
Google told the PUC in October it’s buying the power from a geothermal plant in Nevada, and the tech industry has purchased a tremendous amount of renewable electricity across the country. Beyond wind and solar, some data center companies are paying to revive nuclear plants such as Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania or investing in emerging technology for smaller reactors.
Tract’s chief energy officer Nat Sahlstrom said in the short term “you’re going to need to have net new gas built” to keep the grid steady, even as tech companies push to add cleaner power. In Becker, Amazon wants to build 250 emergency backup diesel generators capable of producing nearly as much power as Xcel’s Monticello nuclear plant in case of a grid outage.
Conclusion
The spread of data centers brings other challenges. Some use huge quantities of water. People don’t want to live near them. They can be noisy. As the demand for data centers grows in Minnesota, the state faces both opportunities and challenges in meeting the power needs of these facilities while transitioning to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources.
