“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

It is not often we get a brand new policy topic upon which to ponder.

When we do it can be fun to sit back and watch how groups and coalitions form around the issue, especially before Democrats and Republicans can figure out what side the party should take.

Data center construction has fit that category as political figures try to reckon if they should be for data centers or be against data centers or look for the nearest fire escape whenever someone asks about data centers.

Only in the past year have the puzzle pieces been sorted well enough for the issue to fall into partisan camps, though still not completely uniformly. Republican candidates at the statewide level tend to support building data centers while Democrats tend to remain skeptical.

Alabama gubernatorial candidates Tommy Tuberville and Doug Jones have both taken positions on data centers, but both candidates’ ideas on the issue are awkward.

Tuberville has come out in full-throated support of data center expansion in Alabama. He says if Alabama, and the U.S. in general, reject housing data centers then tech companies will place them in China, leaving Americans’ personal information and cybersecurity more exposed to the Chinese government.

Still, opponents of data centers point out that after being constructed they do not create many jobs. They essentially serve as warehouses for computer servers. Additionally, data centers require tremendous amounts of energy to operate as well as a significant amount of water to cool the equipment.

Tuberville addresses the first issue by saying the Alabama Legislature should end the practice of allowing data center builders to receive job-creation tax incentives, according to AL.com’s Ruth Serven Smith’s reporting.

The Legislature did take a step in that direction earlier this year by placing some tighter limitations on the incentives data centers receive but did not ban incentives altogether.

Tuberville’s position gets tougher to defend when it comes to the massive amounts of energy sucked up by data centers.

He says the data center owners should pay for all increased energy usage costs and the infrastructure required to provide that energy and adds that Alabama Power should maintain its current freeze of energy rates.

That covers everything except from where additional energy comes, a big hole in Tuberville’s logic.

For example, property owners in northern Baldwin County pitched a fit over the state’s Public Service Commission approving a massive solar panel farm to help power a massive new Montgomery data center, leading to a bipartisan group of state legislators from that area to make a failed attempt to install a one-year moratorium on solar farms in the state.

Jones, unlike Tuberville, has taken a generally negative tone toward data centers.

He apparently appreciated the Baldwin County approach and adopted the idea of installing a one-year moratorium – not on solar farms but on constructing new data centers – to study their effects on communities and to create effective guidelines for building them.

What will studying data center impacts for a year tell us? Probably not much more than we already know. Jones’ position just kicks the can down the road while sounding like he would take decisive actions.

So where do we go from here? The most obvious action is to end tax incentives for data center construction, as Tuberville suggests. This is one of those rarest of instances where deep-pocketed corporations need us more than we need them.

Anywhere a data center is proposed across the country often kicks over a hornet’s nest of protest from local residents. If a tech corporation simply finds a location willing to take a data center, that should be reward enough without offering incentives on top of it.

The other piece should be a law requiring transparency combined with better public notification for when local or state governmental bodies are considering these projects.

Many property owners in Baldwin County found out the PSC approved the solar panel farm after it already happened. Residents must be made aware of plans for data center construction as well as large-scale energy production projects, like power plants or solar panel farms, far in advance of construction.

This is especially important in rural areas where local governments have little to no authority in zoning decisions to stop companies from buying land to do as they please with it.

Just be thankful the political parties are finally starting to take sides on data centers. How were we supposed to know what to think when the parties would not tell us?