- Tell us a little bit about what your organization does and how that relates to data centers.

- Sure.

So we work on water and energy issues broadly in Illinois.

Over the last decade, we've been involved, in partnership with the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition, on working on climate legislation, focused on decarbonizing Illinois's electric sector.

And so throughout that time, we've become more and more involved with building out renewables and decarbonizing, so setting a glide path to closing our fossil fuel power plants.

So in that, so as we've been working on the energy sector, data centers have sort of emerged as the big new threat, both on energy and water, because of their genuinely unprecedented energy demand.

And with that comes a massive amount of water demand as well.

And so these could have pretty major impacts on our resources.

And to be clear, the big data centers, the ones we're talking about, aren't the ones hosting the internet.

They're not the ones providing the services that we use every day.

It's, really, the workhorses for training AI data sets, are what the biggest of the big AI data centers are, and the ones that are really driving this concern.

We've had data centers for a really long time, decades, right?

And there's data centers in the closet of your office, and then there's slightly bigger ones that are the size of a building, but now, we've got one in Joliet that's the size of Central Park.

And the energy and impacts that scale with that are unique to AI data centers.

So that's kind of the moment that we're in, and how Prairie Rivers Network comes to it as a threat to our water and a threat to our climate.

But it's such a big issue that we need to have comprehensive solutions to data centers overall.