MORGAN COUNTY — Ever since news broke that a data center was coming to Morgan County, many residents have expressed concern about how much power the facilities would require.Â
Data centers throughout the country have notoriously demanded high amounts of water and electricity, and residents complained at public meeting after public meeting that an unnamed company — widely reported to be Google — would tap into so many resources.Â
Those complaints will likely only get louder, as reports surfaced last week that AES Indiana, which runs Eagle Valley power plant on Blue Bluff Road, plans to build a new substation on land in the area that’s been recently rezoned for the billion-dollar data center project just east of Monrovia. Documents submitted by AES Indiana to the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) show the planned substation has a load capacity of 1,200 megawatts, which could translate to 9.46 million megawatts a year at 90-percent capacity.Â
If the data center operates near capacity for a year, it would use almost twice the amount of electricity as all AES Indiana customers combined, according to the utility’s federal filing for 2024. Residential use that year was 5.01 million megawatts.
Morgan County’s data center could have three times the capacity of the proposed, but withdrawn, Google data center project in Franklin Township. AES Indiana had planned to build a 400-megawatt substation there, but local opposition led Google to withdraw their plans to build a data center there.Â
MISO documents indicate the substation could be operational by 2027, and it will cost AES Indiana about $68 million, which may get funded by new owners as recent reports indicate that multinational investment company BlackRock is in advanced talks to acquire AES Corp. The potential $38 billion deal is reportedly driven by the increasing electricity demand from data centers needed for artificial intelligence
In addition to electricity, Morgan County’s data center will also require an extraordinary amount of water. Documents filed in a pending case before Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) reveal the data center is expected to use roughly 4 million gallons of water per day, 3 million more gallons than the proposed data center in Franklin Township would have used.Â
