Poster #50 - Governing Under Uncertainty: Building Local Government Capacity to Manage Data Center Risks in Minnesota

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

The impact of hyperscale data centers on energy and water resources across is garnering increased attention as developers explore projects in new regions at a rapid pace. Projects are increasingly fraught with community concerns centered on the impacts these projects may have on issues such as electricity prices, demanding that local officials be well-versed in policy areas, like electricity systems, in new ways. Stemming from an engaged research project with municipalities in SE Minnesota and an arm of University of Minnesota Extension, this paper explores how we better prepare local officials to make decisions when faced with uncertainty about data center development and impacts. As an engaged research project, our research was designed to answer practical questions facing local administrators, while contributing to scholarship on how decisions around data centers illustrate how local decision processes occur under uncertainty, and ways in which scholarship and collaboration can fill this gap facing local decision-makers.  Data used in this paper includes over 20 interviews to inform qualitative case studies of data center development, meeting minutes and notes from cross-sector team discussions, and detailed notes from three convenings held over a 6-month period in Southeast Minnesota. We use process analysis to trace emerging ways that local officials are coping with uncertainty on the impacts of data centers and seeking to engage in new areas of policy learning, as well as the shared mechanisms that are emerging for collaborative governance approaches for data centers.  We contribute to the literature on collaborative governance with a focus on the processes and products of learning in early stage, more polycentric processes that center on incorporating future unknown impacts into decision-making. We also contribute to scholarship on decision-making under uncertainty about data centers. Our preliminary findings show that formal collaborative approaches to data center development are not commonplace today, yet there is a strong appetite for peer learning and shared best practices. Collective learning is most effective when energy and water considerations are placed in context of the overall data center decision-making process. Stakeholders are hindered by uncertainty about what is possible with this kind of development, limited access to transparent information, siloes between energy and water, and the know-how required to engage in new processes, such as utility regulatory processes. Ongoing analysis traces the ways in which stakeholders negotiated unknown but anticipated impacts to build confidence about future decision-making by local governments. We propose possible mechanisms to enhance local governance of data center development with a focus on new ways local officials may need to engage in energy decision-making.

Author

• Elise Harrington, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author