EVERETT – The politics of data centers are a hot issue right now, so much so that the Snohomish County Council passed a moratorium on siting any on unincorporated land two months ago even though no such data centers had actually been proposed in the state’s third largest county.
Snohomish Public Utility District, which supplies electrical power to nearly 380,000 homes and businesses locally, plays a distinct role if a data center is ultimately proposed in Snohomish County or within a city. John Hoffman, Chief Customer Officer at Snohomish PUD, tells EverettPost.com, “there’s so much interest around data centers right now that we have been using it as an opportunity to get out and speak about how we want to be partners in our community.”
Hoffman asserts, “We’re not pro or anti-data center. Our goal is to be pro-local. We need to respect the role our communities play in their public processes, and if they decide they want a development to come in, then we will work with that development to figure out how we would supply that power, but it would require investigation.”
Data centers have become the public face of Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer operations. “Hyperscale data centers”, as Hoffman distinguishes the current generation of facilities, “instead of serving a local business, are really serving users nationally or even globally, particularly with the adoption of AI” and the “power that’s required, has really gone up. That’s why we now have data centers that are much larger and you need much more power and water than we’ve ever faced before” to operate them.
Those electricity and water supply requirements for hyperscale data centers were the impetus for the Snohomish County Council’s six-month moratorium, which will expire in late December. It’s been a recurring theme in the public opposition to hyperscale data centers.
In June, the EverettPost.com reported on national public opinion that found 70% Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor.
Message boards like the Reddit/Marysville page were filled with posts by people making broad assumptions of the impacts of hyperscale data centers and what local zoning did or didn’t allow.
Hoffman notes, “Data centers come in all different sizes and shapes. One thing that’s confusing for customers, because we’ve had local data centers for sometime—a business will have a server room and telecommunication equipment and they will put that in their own data center (local office). The ones that are making news right now,” he explains, are “what the industry refers to as hyperscale data centers.”
The distinction, Hoffman says, comes down to capacity and computing power bandwidth. Existing, small scale data centers involve IT experts who hook up a company’s computer network with shared computer drives for 5, 10, 100 or 1000 co-workers. Hyperscale data centers are using exponentially more computer power to crunch data via AI. There’s a reason why hyperscale data centers are called server farms and ordinary ones are called server rooms. The acreage disparity is voluminous.
“It’s important for people to recognize that AI, in particular, uses significantly more computing power to answer a question than your historic (browser) search engine,” Hoffman describes, to execute a basic computer search versus a complex set of directions for a computer to scrutinize massive volumes of data and re-order that data into a prioritized list of responses to produce a large document or computer operation. ”So, as people are moving to artificial intelligence, it is increasing the needs for that computing bandwidth.”
Snohomish County could be a desirable spot to locate and build a data center, but not as obviously desirable as Eastern Washington currently is.
Addressing the public concerns about where data centers are built and the power or water required to operate them has generated numerous complaints and questions from the public about how that will impact the local community from things like sufficient water supply to environmental protection to the cost of the monthly electrical bill for existing customers.
Because of those concerns, Hoffman says the PUD created a presentation to address some of these questions to provide accurate answers about what hyperscale data centers would mean in Snohomish County. The presentation was recently delivered at a Snohomish County Tomorrow event with local elected and civic leaders. “The presentation was really focused around what we see as facing Snohomish County over the next few years, which is that we do have a healthy, growing community with increased energy demands. And we also are trying to maintain reliable, clean, and affordable utilities,” he says about that PUD focus.
Balancing all those factors—and the public concerns—are the current hot button issue with AI and data centers compared to merely maintaining the status quo. “I think it’s been one of the challenging questions that we’ve gotten, because obviously there’s a lot that a local government (city or county) needs to consider in this process. Where we (the PUD) fit in, is that we want to partner with local government on advising them of the (PUD) impacts of the specific development,” and regarding data centers, Hoffman defines them as large load customers. Large load referring to large electricity consumption the data center owners want to access.
To handle such large load customers, Hoffman says Snohomish PUD already has stringent review policies in place. “One thing that is a little different about our area is that we use a process called a System Impact Study”
It’s an engineering analysis used by the PUD to evaluate power availability and determine the infrastructure updates needed before connecting a new or expanding customer—such as a large industrial load or generator to the electrical grid.
The SIS identifies specific impacts on local wires, transformers, and substations to ensure system reliability and prevent voltage drops. Review typically takes 3 to 8 months to complete, depending on project complexity, with a minimum $10,000 study fee that scales upward in price with the scope of the proposed facility.
That serves as an important check-and-balance on requests for any local, hyperscale data centers. “We actually don’t let new developments onto the system until they have already paid for, and we have already built, the necessary infrastructure to support them,” Hoffman accounts. “And in that way, we don’t have to worry that” existing customers are “going to have a less reliable service or more expensive service. The companies that they (i.e. Snohomish County, City of Everett or City of Marysville) might be wanting to allow to come in are going to have to carry the risk and costs of their own development.”
It’s what the PUD calls “growth pays for growth,” it’s designed to work like a guardrail on the road to electricity delivery.
“Before the service is provided,” Hoffman says about the electricity needs of a data center, “we’ve already studied its impact. We’ve already identified its cost, and we would have already built out the infrastructure because we’re not going to shift our cost or risk reliable service onto our existing households and small businesses.”
The Chief Customer Service officer adds, “We’ve put all of this online for customers to see, but it’s also why we’re trying to get out and spread the word because it really is to ensure that existing customers don’t fund or take on the risk of a new, large customer. We really do want to protect our customers from speculative development. We do that by requiring any mitigation be paid for and done up front.”
One reason data center demand would be drastically different in Snohomish County versus a central Washington county like Grant or Douglas is excess power supply. Hoffman says Snohomish PUD only generates about “6% of our own power, and we buy the rest from either local generation, or from the Bonneville Power Administration,” which operates most of the hydro-electric dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. That means the PUD “would have to go out and secure power supply for any large, hyperscale data center that wanted to come in. And that’s just an extra step that they wouldn’t have to take in another municipality,” Hoffman says about those jurisdictions in central Washington.
The website DataCenterMap.com, which touts itself as the most comprehensive database of such facilities, counts 27 data centers in the Quincy, Wash. area and 15 more in the Wenatachee area. Snohomish County has one, a Ziply Fiber Optic facility near Paine Field, but the Ziply facility’s power draw is only 1.1 MW, well below the Snohomish PUD threshold of 2.5 MW to be considered a large load customer.
“Particularly with some of our eastern Washington partners for example, Grant County and Chelan (County) have gotten a lot of requests,” for hyperscale data centers, Hoffmans says. “And part of that is because they produce excess power. If you are a data center wanting to build, going to utility providers that already have excess power and are selling that power on the open market is a quick way to get set up (and operating),” Hoffman reminds, adding that conversely, Snohomish PUD, “doesn’t have excess power that we’re selling on the open market.”
Grant (County) PUD posted within the last week their customer electricity rates remain low as more large load data centers have sprung up there. Grant PUD wrote on their Facebook page, “Despite significant growth in data centers over the past two decades, Grant PUD residential electric rates have remained well below state and national averages. Learn how Grant PUD’s rates compare and why local customers continue to benefit from some of the lowest electric rates in the region,” linking the information for readers and ratepayers to see for themselves.
In a response to the comments thread, Grant County PUD added, “Chelan and Douglas PUDs have lower rates than Grant PUD primarily because they have a greater opportunity to subsidize rates below cost. They are able to have more opportunities to sell the output from their dams onto the wholesale market. Grant PUD has requirements through our federal license to make power surplus to our needs available at cost to regional utilities. Now that we are growing our overall load beyond what we are entitled to receive from Wanapum and Priest Rapids dams, we have a plan to ensure that our core customers – residential, ag, and small business – continue to have priority access to our low-cost hydropower.”
That priority is what Hoffman is including in the messaging that Snohomish PUD is sharing now with customers and the broader public. “The existing customer is always the first priority,” he tells EverettPost.com. “So, when we talk about things like power supply or the capacity and our substations, that new development has to pay for itself before it can be connected.”
Grant PUD released a statement to EverettPost.com saying, their residential electric rates in the past 20 years have increased 55% from 4.12 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) to 6.4 cents. If Grant PUD’s 2006 rate had simply increased with inflation (Consumer Price Index), it would be approximately 6.8 cents per kWh today, which places the rate increase lower than inflation as more data centers have been built.
By comparison, Washington state’s average residential electric rate increased from 7.28 cents per kWh in 2006 to 14.95 cents per kWh in 2026, an increase of approximately 105%. The U.S. average residential rate increased from 10.40 cents per kWh to 18.44 cents per kWh, an increase of approximately 77%. Grant PUD’s statement to EverettPost.com, concludes, by nearly every comparison, Grant PUD customers have continued to benefit from electricity rates that remain well below state and national averages, primarily because of the social benefit that data center customers and other large power-using customers in Grant County pay as part of their rates.
To compare where Snohomish PUD falls on the power generation versus consumption scale, consider these stats: full daily power load for the entire Snohomish PUD grid is 791 megawatts. Peak load in the entire PUD usage was maxing out at 1.6 GW. Compared to the largest single campus data center in America right now–the Meta Data Center in Altoona, Iowa–it’s 1.4 gigawatts just for that building–an astounding 560 times larger than Snohomish PUD’s current threshold (2.5 GW) for a large load customer.
The city of Everett reports to EverettPost.com, “We do not have moratorium for data centers in our industrial zones, but we have an important tool to give a complete picture about potential impacts of siting one in Everett. Under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA), any environmental impacts of a major data facility would be analyzed and disclosed prior to siting decisions. We would learn about any impacts like pollution, noise, resource consumption, or construction impacts.”
For more information on Snohomish PUD large load policies and how that relates to hyperscale data centers, click here.