| Why the Michigan Policy Paper Does Not Describe What Perry Residents Should Expect
Perry Village, Ohio | May 2026 |
A July 2025 paper titled “What Happens When Data Centers Come to Town?”, authored by Terry Nguyen (BA, Public Policy) and Ben Green (Assistant Professor, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan), has been circulated in the Perry community. The paper was produced in partnership with the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition. It raises concerns about energy use, water consumption, utility rates, job creation, and fossil fuel dependence. Asking these questions is reasonable — and Perry residents are right to want answers.
But before treating this paper as a verdict on the Perry Technology Park, four things are worth understanding. This paper is a general policy advocacy document, not a study of Perry Technology Park. Its analysis is drawn almost entirely from states with very large concentrations of hyperscale data centers. Its conclusions do not follow from rigorous causal analysis, and several of its most alarming claims are directly contradicted by conditions that distinguish Perry from the environments the paper actually studied.
- The Paper’s Own Framing Reveals Its Purpose
The paper opens not with a research question but with a conclusion: data center growth “necessitates targeted policy interventions.” Its recommendations — mandatory energy audits, renewable energy additionality clauses, repeal of tax incentives, and moratoria on new construction — appear in the introduction before any evidence is presented.
This is the structure of a policy advocacy document, not a balanced research study. That does not make all of its observations wrong. But it does mean that the paper is organized to support its predetermined conclusions, and that Perry residents should weigh its claims accordingly.
| Why this matters:
The paper was co-produced with the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, an organization with an active policy agenda against data centers which means the document is advocacy literature — not a neutral assessment of what Perry residents should expect from this specific project. |
- The Electricity and Utility Rate Claims Are Based on Hyperscale Facilities in Concentrated Markets
The paper’s most alarming claims involve data centers dramatically increasing electricity demand and driving up utility rates for residents. These concerns are real in specific contexts — but those contexts are very different from Perry.
The paper draws its examples primarily from Northern Virginia (“Data Center Alley”), where hundreds of hyperscale facilities have clustered in a single corridor and now account for a dominant share of the regional grid’s projected load growth. Virginia’s utility rates have increased, and a portion of that increase is linked to data center infrastructure costs being spread across the Dominion Energy ratepayer base under outdated cost-allocation rules, but utility company investments, capital spending plans, fuel costs and other issues such as regulatory compliance also play an important role in electricity rates. New rate classes in Virginia now protect residential customers and the same is true in Ohio.
Perry Village is not Northern Virginia. The differences are material:
- The Perry Technology Park is a single facility, not a cluster of hundreds. The utility rate pressures documented in Virginia, Georgia, and Michigan arise from cumulative, region-wide issues — not from one project in a small community.
- FirstEnergy (via The Illuminating Company) serves the Perry site and is subject to the jurisdiction of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO), which regulates how infrastructure costs are allocated between customer classes. Ohio has already adopted special rate class frameworks to ensure large loads like data centers pay appropriately for the grid capacity they require, rather than shifting those costs to residential customers. The Perry Technology Park will pay for all of its power costs without shifting expense to residential customers.
- The paper itself concedes that “steady, predictable demand” from a large industrial customer can actually help utilities spread fixed grid costs across more kilowatt-hours, which can hold residential rates down rather than push them up. A single, well-structured project with a large-load tariff agreement can be neutral or net-positive for other ratepayers.
| The bottom line: Utility rate impacts are a legitimate issue for very large, concentrated data center markets. Ohio’s regulatory framework is now specifically designed to prevent cost-shifting of this kind to residential customers. The Perry Technology Park is one facility, and FirstEnergy and the PUCO govern how its grid connection is structured and priced to avoid residential rate increases. |
- The Water Consumption Claims Do Not Describe This Project
The paper states that data centers can use “millions of gallons of water annually” and cites Google’s Council Bluffs, Iowa facility — which uses approximately 980 million gallons per year — as a reference point. This figure is accurate for that facility. It is not relevant to Perry.
The Perry Technology Park has committed to operating within 273,000 gallons per day of water allocation — a figure that covers all uses across the facility, including kitchens, bathrooms, landscape irrigation, fire suppression, and limited cooling. As previously communicated to the community:
- The cooling system is a closed-loop design that recirculates water without evaporating it, in sharp contrast to the open-loop evaporative cooling towers the paper’s examples rely on.
- Perry’s cool northern Ohio climate allows for significant free air cooling for much of the year, further reducing water dependency.
- The project will draw from the existing public water system — not from wells or aquifer extraction.
| The paper’s own cooling section is telling:
The paper acknowledges that “closed-loop” and “direct-to-chip” liquid cooling technologies significantly reduce water consumption compared to evaporative approaches. The Perry project uses exactly this type of modern, water-conserving design. The paper’s alarming water statistics describe a different generation of facilities in different locations using an entirely different technology. |
- The Jobs Analysis Confuses Direct Employment with Total Economic Impact
The paper argues that data centers “create few permanent positions relative to the scale of public subsidy they receive” and that the jobs they do create are “low-wage, term-limited, non-technical positions.” This framing selectively omits the full economic picture.
On direct employment: it is true that operating a data center once built requires fewer workers than a large manufacturing plant. The Perry Technology Park will have 200 jobs at completion which should be viewed as a welcome addition to the region. This is a capital-intensive industry by design. But the paper’s analysis stops there, ignoring:
- Construction employment: multi-year, high-wage trades work for electricians, pipefitters, carpenters, ironworkers, and sheet metal workers — exactly the skilled workforce the region has historically supported.
- Induced and indirect employment: the Ohio Chamber of Commerce’s September 2025 economic impact study found that Ohio’s data center industry supported approximately 95,000 total jobs in 2024 when direct, indirect, and induced effects are counted — on-site workers represent only a fraction of that total.
- Fiscal stabilization: property tax revenue from a capital-intensive facility on the tax rolls reduces pressure on future school levies, emergency services funding, and municipal budgets — exactly the community fiscal stability the paper says it values.
| Ohio’s own data: The Ohio Chamber of Commerce study found that between 2017 and 2024, Ohio’s data center industry generated $5.2 billion in state and local tax revenues — against $2.5 billion in tax incentives provided. That is approximately $2.10 returned for every $1 of incentive extended. Governor DeWine cited these figures when vetoing legislative efforts to eliminate data center tax incentives in 2025. |
- The Fossil Fuel and Renewable Energy Claims Apply to Different Facilities
The paper argues that data centers are “prolonging the operation of fossil fuel plants” and undermining state renewable energy goals. In states with massive hyperscale campuses requiring hundreds of megawatts of new continuous power generation, this concern has substance.
It does not describe the Perry project for two reasons:
- The Perry Technology Park will draw its power from the existing FirstEnergy grid — not from dedicated on-site generation. It will not commission or require a new fossil fuel power plant. The paper’s examples of data centers keeping old plants online are drawn from states where data center clusters have driven aggregate demand increases, but Perry is one facility.
- The project has no gas turbines — the primary on-site fossil fuel generation technology the paper criticizes. Backup generators will be used only during rare grid outages, and will be subject to Ohio EPA air quality permitting before construction begins.
| On the paper’s energy claims:
The paper correctly observes that data centers cannot run solely on intermittent renewables given their uptime requirements. What it does not acknowledge is that large, steady industrial loads — like a data center — are actually ideal customers for baseload renewable energy and emerging nuclear capacity, because they provide the predictable long-term demand that makes those investments economically viable. The Perry project’s energy profile is an asset to the grid, not a liability. |
- The Paper’s Methodology Has Real Limitations Perry Residents Should Understand
Beyond the question of whether the paper’s findings apply to Perry, its analytical approach has several weaknesses that limit how much weight its conclusions should carry:
- Correlation, not causation: The paper documents associations between data center growth and higher electricity rates, but does not isolate data centers as the cause from other concurrent factors — inflation, post-pandemic energy demand recovery, fuel price spikes, and aging grid infrastructure that requires upgrading regardless of data center activity.
- No peer review: This is a policy brief published through a university program, not a peer-reviewed journal article. It has not been subjected to the methodological scrutiny that academic publication requires.
- No site-specific analysis: The paper contains no data about Perry Village, Lake County, FirstEnergy’s rate history, the Champion Farm site, or the specific technology configuration of the proposed project. Its conclusions are drawn from aggregate national trends and a handful of case studies from very different markets.
- Cherry-picked examples: The facilities cited — Google’s Council Bluffs campus, Virginia’s hyperscale corridor, Michigan’s utility disputes — are among the largest and most controversial in the country. They are not representative of what a carefully designed, single-facility project in a small Ohio community looks like.
| The Bottom Line for Perry Residents
Asking questions about electricity costs, water use, jobs, and the environment is completely appropriate. But the Michigan paper is not a study of Perry. It is a general policy advocacy document built on examples from hyperscale data center clusters in states with very different regulatory environments, grid configurations, and facility profiles. Its alarming statistics — on water use, electricity demand, and utility rate impacts — describe facilities and markets that bear little resemblance to what is proposed for the Champion Farm site. The actual protection for Perry residents comes from Ohio’s regulatory process: the PUCO governing how grid connection costs are allocated; First Energy’s contract structure protecting residential rate payers; Ohio EPA’s air quality permitting process; Lake County’s water allocation framework; and the specific, enforceable commitments the Perry Technology Park has made regarding water use and backup power. Perry residents should evaluate the Perry Technology Park on its own terms — using Perry’s own data, Ohio’s own regulatory process, and the specific commitments this project has made — not on the basis of what happened in Northern Virginia or at Google’s Iowa campus. |