The grassroots group’s main goal is “to stop the rezoning” of about 1,077 acres of mostly farmland on both sides of Grand River Avenue in the township, Breanne Greene, an organizer with Livingston County Residents for Responsible Development (LCRRD), said.
Around 150 people gathered in the auditorium of Howell High School Wednesday evening, Dec. 3, to hear four panelists speak about potential risks and other topics related to large-scale data centers to power artificial intelligence and other computing technologies.
The panel discussion was held in advance of a Howell Township Board of Trustees meeting set for Monday, Dec. 8. The township board could vote whether to rezone land on the condition it is only used for the data center.
While township officials recently voted to put a “moratorium” in place to pause for six months any consideration or approval of data center proposals, the pause does not stop the township board from voting on whether it’s appropriate to rezone the land for research and technology uses.
However, if the township board decides to approve rezoning that land, no site plans can be approved for the data center itself until the moratorium expires or is lifted. The township and Livingston County planning commissions both recommended the board deny the rezoning.
“There’s a lot of information coming out from the developer, the landowner, the utilities, but there’s not a lot of other information that’s easily accessible to the community,” Greene said.
“There are a lot of reasons why people are against this,” she said. “It’s bad for our water and our energy. I’m concerned about the aquifer, the noise.”
Panelist Gwen Klenke, a program coordinator with FracTracker Alliance, told attendees Wednesday evening that data centers “used to be less big of a deal.”
“The data processing that they were doing took a lot less energy, a lot less computational power,” Klenke said.
“So, how did they get to a point where they’re using so much energy? This has largely been attributed to the rise in AI, especially generative AI,” she said.
How much electricity the data center needs has not been publicly disclosed. In general, hyperscale data centers need energy often measured in gigawatts. It could be comparable to the amount of electricity needed to power a city.
Among other topics, Klenke also spoke about how DTE Energy will need to add more power to the grid to accommodate all the data centers it plans to electrify. She argued that infrastructure costs could lead to rate increases for customers.
That’s despite DTE’s argument to state regulators with the Michigan Public Service Commission that the 1.4-gigawatt demand a data center project backed by tech giants OpenAI and Oracle in Saline Township will actually decrease costs for residential ratepayers by spreading the fixed costs of running the grid over greater electric sales.
DTE’s claim that data centers won’t raise rates “doesn’t make sense to me,” Ben Green, another panelist and an assistant professor of information and public policy at the University of Michigan, said.
Training and deploying generative AI models “requires a huge amount of energy,” said Green, who co-wrote “What happens when data centers come to town?” It’s a report that data center opponents in multiple Michigan communities have been handing out.
“Already we have started to see many regions (across the country) realizing that the huge spike in electricity demand from data centers is straining the grid, and this is only going to get worse as the growth of data centers increases based on the projected and planned investments,” he said.
He also talked about how data centers can require massive amounts of water for cooling computer servers, among other topics. How much water is needed depends on the type of cooling system a data center uses.
Developers of the Howell Township data center have promised water-efficient cooling systems that would recycle water through the system before discharge, according to HowellDataCenter.com, a website set up by the Van Gilder farming family, which owns the majority of the land.
Andrea Pierce, a panelist and policy director with the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, talked about how an influx of data centers and energy use would “blow away any chances that we have to stop the climate crisis or to slow it down.”
Pierce is also concerned about the implications of AI and security.
“Everywhere we go, we’re being recorded. Alexa is recording us now, you know, Siri, they’re all watching us, and recording us,” she said. “I want to say, we didn’t ask or consent for AI or for the data centers. We did not ask for this. One day, I woke up. My phone was updated. My computers updated. Now I’ve got AI. I don’t want AI,” she said.
She also shared concerns about water usage, the potential for chemicals to get into groundwater, and negative impacts of constant vibration on human health and the migration patterns of wildlife, among other topics.
Panelist Prescott Balch, a retired technology developer who wrote software that ran in data centers, drove from Caledonia, Wisconsin to participate in the discussion.
“I am, on paper, the last person you expect to have concerns about building more data centers, but I do,” Balch said.
He questioned what would happen if hyperscale data centers become obsolete.
“If all of you remember the dot com boom, we did exactly this. The Internet came along. It was a technology trigger, and up the path we go overbuilding everything,” he said.
“So, are we in an AI bubble?” he asked.
“Technology will relentlessly innovate, and at some point, the data center is too expensive to upgrade, and it has to get converted to some other use,” he said. “The data center goes obsolete, and you’ve got a million, two million, three million square feet of very purpose-built data center space,” he said.
The Howell Township land in question is located north and south of Grand River Avenue. It is south of Marr Road and north of Warner Road, and east of Owosso Road and west of Fleming Road. The firm is also eyeing adjacent land in neighboring Handy Township.
The rezoning was requested by developer Randee LLC through its consulting firm Stantec Consulting Michigan.
While the developers have not publicly identified Meta, township Trustee Bob Wilson confirmed in November that Meta is backing the project.
The development team and property owner Ryan Van Gilder have only said it is a U.S.-founded and based Fortune 100 technology company.
Interested residents will get a chance to learn more about the project from the perspective of the data center development team at a drop-in information fair from 4-7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 4 , at Cleary Commons on the campus of Cleary University, 3725 Cleary Drive in Howell.
Representatives from DTE Energy, which would power the data center, the local water authority, Operating Engineers Local 324, and Livingston County’s drain commission and IT department are expected to set up tables at that event.
Want more Ann Arbor-area news? Bookmark the local Ann Arbor news page.
©2025 Advance Local Media LLC, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
