alt Hacker News> This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year.
You are not wrong, but the whole issue is a bit silly: there should be legal ways for data centres (and other commercial operations) to just send a few million dollars a year to whichever community they need to convince; instead of having to dress it up as free heating.
Replies
the datacenter doesn't have a few million dollars to spare.
The heat is waste heat. If it cannot be recovered as a profitable source of energy, the datacenter won't be able to pay that few million dollars.
But paying the money is less resource efficient than using the waste heat for a productive use. As a general rule we should probably insensitvise good use of resources that benefit the general population.
That means is called property taxes. Datacenters pay a lot of them, and in Loudon county specifically residential property taxes have fallen as a result.