OPPD receives more requests for energy from data centers

OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - The cloud. The internet. These meta-physical things we can't really put our finger on. But data centers. Data centers are physical locations that help power and store large amounts of information.

Omaha has become an attractive place for companies to set up data centers.

OPPD has received 14 requests this year from customers for more than one megawatt of electricity. They've also gotten 19 written requests from data centers.

One megawatt can power nearly 800 homes every year, based on how much power the average home uses.

Creighton Professor Ryan Wishart is an environmental sociologist and calls for transparency as more data centers pop up.

"If you compare the size of these data centers to the equivalent number of residential households you get a picture for how important policy and institutions are in meeting our climate justice goals and reducing the existing sources of pollution that we have," said Wishart.

There are currently about a dozen centers in Omaha, according to datacentermap.com. In Council Bluffs, there's Google's data center. Meta has one in Papillion.

With more potentially coming, economist Ernie Goss says it could put stress on the system.

"Who gets the electricity? Is it the residential customers, commercial customers, or industrial customers? If you have excessive demands you could envision, potentially, outages," said Goss.

In response, OPPD said: "We work diligently to accommodate such requests whenever possible while balancing the need for reliable, affordable and environmentally sensitive service for our current customers...Reliability for our customers is paramount."