The lies are always audacious for these ginormous gimmes to super-rich and powerful companies.
Meta is building the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere on a sprawling site in rural Northeastern Louisiana.
The state offered billions of dollars in tax breaks to win the project, and the local utility will supply three new power plants.
Data centers have become a major economic development battleground for many states, even though they provide relatively few jobs and consume massive amounts of resources.
[...]
Louisiana was one of the few states that could deliver a site as large as Meta needed — the equivalent of about 1,700 football fields. The state had already purchased most of the land, in rural Richland Parish, back in 2006 in hopes of luring an automotive plant that never materialized. As for the energy — the Meta site will use roughly twice as much electricity as the city of New Orleans on a peak day — local utility Entergy said it could deliver.
[Entergy] is seeking regulatory approval to build not one, but three gas-fired power plants at the site, at a cost of more than $3 billion. [...] Last June, only six months after taking office, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law a 20-year sales tax exemption for data centers built before 2029. The fact that the state was courting Meta at the time was not disclosed.
[...]
A recent CNBC investigation found that in just the past five years, 16 states have handed out nearly $6 billion in similar sales tax breaks, and that is just the ones that have been disclosed. More often, the amounts are either undisclosed, or, as appears to be the case in Louisiana, officials don’t know the exact cost yet. An analysis by the state’s Legislative Fiscal Office in May said the incentive could cost the state “tens of millions of dollars or more each year, possibly through (fiscal year) 2059.”
[...]
The energy equation in state with spotty grid track record. [...] The Louisiana Public Service Commission is considering the utility’s proposal to build three new power plants. But a citizen’s group, Alliance for Affordable Energy, is warning that the project could compromise the state’s power grid and increase electricity rates statewide.
“While they’re building new power plants, they’re also adding a huge consumer of electricity,” said Jackson Voss, Climate Policy Coordinator for the group. “Which means we’re all still facing the same vulnerabilities that we were before, but now with a huge new data center added on.”
