Yonder Radio Special Report – Power Dynamics: The Rural Data Center Boom

Filed 1h ago · Via Daily Yonder · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Hot Swing

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Dylan Drummond, Son of the Sea · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Yonder Radio's special report, Power Dynamics: The Rural Data Center Boom, examines how the data center construction wave is landing disproportionately in rural communities, with two-thirds of new facilities going to rural places per Pew Research Center figures cited in the report.

The show covers the resource strain, competing land and water demands, and economic promises made to small towns, featuring economist Michael J. Hicks weighing expectations against reality, organizer Saul Levin on grassroots opposition, and attorneys from the Southern Environmental Law Center on developer-community relations.

The report also notes a $1.1 billion hit to public media from recent Congressional cuts, which the piece says falls hardest on rural broadcasters already squeezed by consolidation.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A data center shows up promising jobs and tax revenue, and the town finds out later it mostly wanted the water and the power lines. That gap between the pitch and the payoff is worth a whole radio hour, and probably more than one. Whoever ends up deciding what a small town's water table is worth ought to at least live near it.

Source: Read the original at Daily Yonder → Scored: Hot Swing · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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