Environmental advocates are lining up against a new data center proposal in Delaware, arguing that the project would siphon off electricity and water that local residents and existing businesses already struggle to secure. They point to federal research showing how fast data center demand is climbing nationwide and warn that the state is on track to repeat mistakes seen in other tech hubs. The fight is less about whether digital infrastructure is needed and more about who absorbs the strain when a single project behaves like a heavy industry plant dropped into a small community.
The pushback comes as regulators weigh how to treat massive new power users, from cloud campuses to artificial intelligence clusters. Delaware’s own public service commission has already taken the rare step of pausing some interconnections while it studies special tariffs for large loads, a move that critics say proves the grid is already near its limits. Against that backdrop, experts argue that approving another high‑demand data center without strict conditions would lock the region into years of higher emissions, noisier backup generation, and tighter water supplies.
National data center demand sets the stakes
The most detailed snapshot of what data centers mean for U.S. resources comes from the federally sponsored technical report titled 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report (LBNL‑2001637), produced by the Energy Analysis & Environmental Impacts Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Covering calendar years from 2014 through 2028, the study lays out explicit methodology and presents tabulated estimates of data center electricity use and direct water consumption scenarios, making clear that these facilities now function as a major grid customer rather than a niche load.
The Department of Energy underlined this point in a public summary that cited the LBNL analysis and stated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, treating that figure as a national planning concern rather than a local quirk. In one mid‑range scenario, the LBNL tables show annual data center electricity demand reaching about 698 terawatt‑hours by 2028, with direct cooling water use in that same scenario rising to roughly 2,593 billion liters and a lower‑bound case still using about 97 billion liters, underscoring how power and water demands scale together in the federal projections.
Delaware’s tariff fight reveals grid anxiety
Delaware regulators have already acknowledged that traditional utility rules were not built for this wave of large digital loads. In an official notice, the state’s Division of the Public Advocate explained that the Delaware Public Service Commission opened a docket to design a “large load tariff” and temporarily paused certain interconnections for customers such as data centers, and the same document records that a petition to begin this process was presented on September 3, 2025, signaling that concerns about how to price and manage these projects reached a tipping point well before the current proposal surfaced.
To critics of the new data center, the docket is both a warning sign and an opportunity. The need to pause interconnections suggests that grid planners fear sudden jumps in demand that could ripple into reliability problems or force expensive upgrades. At the same time, a dedicated tariff gives regulators a tool to demand better efficiency, on‑site generation, or demand‑response commitments in exchange for access to the network. Analysts following the case say the key question is whether Delaware will use that new tariff structure to shield existing customers from higher bills and service risks, or whether it will treat the tariff as a simple price tweak while allowing the resource drain to continue.
Water and energy pressures collide
Regional water stress is harder to quantify in Delaware because the state has not published detailed withdrawal projections for the proposed facility, and available sources do not include official modeling of its cooling needs. The LBNL report does provide, however, a national view of how direct water consumption tracks with data center electricity use over time, presenting linked scenarios for both metrics from 2014 to 2028 and showing that every additional megawatt of data center demand carries a parallel water footprint, whether that water is drawn from municipal systems, wells, or nearby rivers.
Energy and water pressures also interact in ways that local debates sometimes overlook. When regional grids strain to serve a new data center, utilities may rely more on fossil‑fueled peaker plants, which in turn can require their own cooling water and add air pollution. The Department of Energy’s decision to commission LBNL’s detailed methodology and then highlight the 4.4% national electricity share in its public summary shows that federal officials view these facilities as a combined resource challenge, not just a matter of keeping the lights on, and environmental groups argue that for a coastal state already wrestling with sea‑level rise and saltwater intrusion, adding a large, constant water‑cooled load without transparent modeling risks amplifying those existing pressures.
Virginia’s diesel permits as a cautionary tale
Opponents of the Delaware plan often point across the state line to Virginia, where data center construction has expanded rapidly and residents now live with the side effects. An official page from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality lists issued air permits for data centers as of November 17, 2025, including permit issuance dates and program types, and those permits cover diesel generators and related air impacts tied to the facilities, confirming that large campuses routinely secure permission to run fleets of backup engines that can emit pollutants whenever grid power falters or maintenance is needed.
To many experts, that permit list reads like a warning label, because it shows how quickly a single sector can accumulate dozens of stationary sources that function in practice like a dispersed fossil plant. Analysts warn that if Delaware approves a new data center without strict limits on diesel runtime or requirements for cleaner backup options, it risks importing the same pattern, and they note that experience in Virginia suggests that even when the primary power supply is relatively clean, the safety net often rests on diesel, leaving communities downwind to bear the cost in noise and emissions unless regulators require projects to minimize generator use and publicly report air impacts from the start.
Fragmented policy could isolate the region
One under‑examined consequence of Delaware’s large‑load tariff debate is how it might ripple across the Northeast if neighboring states respond in kind. The move to open a docket and pause interconnections for big customers such as data centers signals that regulators are willing to treat these projects as a separate class, and observers note that if other commissions copy that model without coordination, the result could be a patchwork of tariffs and interconnection rules that make it harder to plan shared transmission or integrate regional renewable projects, even though the LBNL report’s national framing of data center demand uses consistent electricity and water scenarios across the country.
Energy policy researchers caution that if each state tries to protect its own grid by erecting policy walls instead of collaborating on where data centers should cluster and how they should be supplied, the region could miss chances to spread both benefits and burdens more evenly. Delaware’s petition date of September 3, 2025, marks an early step in that direction, and the pause on interconnections shows that the instinct is already to pull back, yet the Department of Energy’s choice to commission and promote a single, nationwide assessment of data center impacts argues for the opposite: common standards, shared data, and coordinated planning so that each new project becomes part of a managed regional system rather than an isolated drain on local resources.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
