Special Report
Two data centers, a county moratorium, and the same question in every hearing: who pays for the grid these facilities need?
Elk River City Council votes July 6On the evening of June 15, the Elk River City Council chamber filled past its seats. The draw was not a tax levy or a school boundary. It was a proposal to convert a vacant building on Industrial Boulevard into a 33-megawatt data center — a windowless hall of servers that would raise the city utility's total electricity use by more than half.
Sixty miles southwest, in Wright County, commissioners had already hit pause. On May 19 the county board enacted a one-year moratorium on data center applications in its townships, buying time to write rules before the next proposal arrived. And in Monticello, a roughly 550-acre campus code-named "Project Groundhog" is advancing toward an undisclosed tech tenant, an undisclosed power draw, and an estimated multi-billion-dollar build — a project so large the county's moratorium does not even reach it.
The data center boom that reshaped Northern Virginia and stressed the Texas grid has arrived in Minnesota's 6th District. And the fights it has set off turn on a single, stubborn question that no glossy site rendering answers: when a facility this hungry plugs into the grid and the water table, who pays for it?
Two potential projects
The first thing to get right is that the two MN-06 projects are not the same in specifics or scope.
Sherburne County
Wright County
A separate, unaffiliated Scannell Properties proposal near the Bertram Chain of Lakes is also in the area. It is a different development and should not be confused with Monticello Tech. Neither MN-06 project is a cryptocurrency mine — both are general or AI-capable data centers, a distinction that matters below.
What's at stake
Strip away the rhetoric and the data center debate comes down to a handful of contested questions. Here is the honest version of each — the strongest case for the projects, and the strongest case against. We lay the record down; you decide where it lands.
A Brookings analysis of ~770 facilities found counties landing their first large data center saw private employment rise 4–5% over five to six years, with gains in construction and information jobs and modest wage growth — no hit to home prices. Construction employs hundreds for a year or more; the permanent jobs pay from the mid-$50,000s into six figures.
The facilities run on few people — roughly 25–40 per 100 MW. Independent analyses find one permanent job per $13M–$33M invested, far costlier than ordinary development. Brookings warns industry comparisons overstate the effect threefold. When Minnesota rewrote its data center tax law in 2025, it removed job creation as a stated purpose.
Where they cluster, the revenue is enormous. Loudoun County, Virginia now draws close to half its tax revenue from data centers and has cut its residential property tax rate every year for nearly a decade. For a small city, even one facility is a meaningful new line — Elk River estimates up to $800,000 a year.
Those revenues follow large tax breaks. Minnesota's 2025 law created a "large-scale" exemption tier, extended the window from 20 to 35 years, and removed a sunset. Virginia is the warning: its exemption, projected at $1.5M/yr in 2008, cost about $1.94B in a recent year — and the state's auditors found it loses ~52¢ for every dollar abated.
Data centers can be built to flex. A Duke study found that if large loads curtail during the rare peak hours — a fraction of a percent of annual operation — the existing grid could absorb a great deal of new demand with little new generation; in the Midwest grid serving Minnesota, about 15 gigawatts. Tech firms are also among the largest buyers of new wind and solar.
In the mid-Atlantic grid the strain is visible: record capacity prices three auctions running, and the first-ever reliability shortfall — which the grid's own monitor blamed primarily on data center load. The IEA and DOE project U.S. data centers will account for close to half of all growth in national electricity demand through 2030.
An Amazon-commissioned study concluded its data centers fully cover their own electricity costs and leave a surplus for grid upgrades. PG&E has projected large loads could slightly lower average bills by spreading fixed costs. And the viral "267% more" figure was found by PolitiFact to misrepresent its source — wholesale pricing points, not residential bills.
Harvard's Ari Peskoe argues data centers are driving tens of billions in higher wholesale prices and grid spending, generally spread across all ratepayers. The mid-Atlantic grid's monitor found data center load alone drove a 174% — about $9.3 billion — jump in one capacity auction. Utilities sought a record level of rate increases in 2025, more than double the prior year.
Cooling design is the whole ballgame. A closed-loop or direct-to-chip system recirculates a sealed fluid and uses a tiny fraction of an evaporative campus's draw. Elk River's developer says its system would be filled once and disposed of off-site, not drawn continuously from city water. Major operators are moving toward closed-loop and recycled-water designs.
Many existing data centers still use evaporative cooling — millions of gallons a day, concentrated locally. In Monticello, residents cite the Prairie du Chien and Jordan aquifers and a neighborhood where a mobile home park already relies on bottled water. Minnesota's 2025 law added water-permit review above 100 million gallons a year for a reason.
Noise is an engineering problem with engineering answers — setbacks, orientation, acoustic walls, quieter variable-speed fans. Elk River's developer commissioned a noise study, placed servers and cooling at the rear behind sound treatment, and points to roughly 1,000 feet of separation from the nearest home.
Operating data centers have generated sustained complaints elsewhere — a low, constant hum residents in Chandler, Arizona compared to a jet engine that never stops, severe enough the city wrote a data-center noise ordinance. In Elk River, a nearby brewery owner worried a constant hum could cost him the outdoor-seating customers his business depends on.
The federal question
So far this is a local-government story. What makes it a question for a member of Congress runs through the distinction this report has flagged twice: crypto mining versus the kind of data centers proposed here.
Cryptocurrency mining accounts for roughly a third of data centers' global energy use. It creates few lasting jobs, produces no broader digital service, and can switch off in seconds when power gets expensive. AI and cloud data centers — the category the Elk River and Monticello projects fall into — demand continuous, stable power. The two are often lumped together; their energy and economic profiles differ sharply.
That matters because Rep. Tom Emmer, who represents this district and serves as House Majority Whip, has a documented federal record on the energy appetite of data-center-class facilities — specifically on the crypto-mining end.
In February 2024, when a federal agency moved to survey large bitcoin miners about their electricity use, Emmer called the order "an abuse of power."
He argued the miners posed no threat to public safety, cast the energy-data collection as a regressive posture toward energy use, and stressed that crypto miners can curtail their load during peak hours. He has been the House's leading advocate for the cryptocurrency industry.
His federal portfolio sits close to this terrain in another way. Emmer co-chairs the Congressional Crypto Caucus and serves as vice chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee whose jurisdiction explicitly spans digital assets, financial technology, and artificial intelligence — the two industries, crypto and AI, now drawing on the same grid. His legislative work there has centered on crypto market structure: the Securities Clarity Act and the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, both his, folded into the CLARITY Act he cosponsored and championed. On the federal bills aimed at the data-center energy buildout itself — the permitting-reform measures moving through his chamber — MN-06 Watch found none he authored or led.
Emmer's record is about crypto mining — not the general and AI data centers proposed in Elk River and Monticello. No causal line runs from his federal advocacy to those local projects, and this report draws none. What the record shows is a representative who, on whether the public should even measure the electricity appetite of this class of facility, came down on the side of less scrutiny.
And on the projects in his own district — the hearings, the moratorium, the undisclosed tenant drawing power from the same grid his constituents pay into — MN-06 Watch found no public statement from Emmer at all. Not in support, not in opposition. The fights are local, and the formal levers are state and municipal. But the silence is on the record, next to a federal energy posture that is anything but silent.
The rules
If the costs and benefits of a data center depend on the rules, then that's where this story is actually being decided — and Minnesota has moved faster than most states.
Creates a class for electricity users above 100 MW and requires their service agreements to cover the full cost of serving them, avoid shifting costs onto other customers if a facility shrinks or closes, and comply with the state's carbon-free standard.
Built around an "incremental cost test" meant to ensure big customers' payments exceed the costs they impose. Consumer and clean-energy groups largely back it; the Minnesota Attorney General's office has pressed Xcel on what it called an "opaque" forecasting process.
A community generally cannot ban data centers outright; Wright County's board chair warned a flat prohibition would invite a lawsuit the county would lose. A moratorium buys time to write zoning standards. The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy has gone to court over several projects, arguing the environmental reviews used were too thin.
Whether those guardrails hold — whether cost-coverage is enforced, whether disclosure is real, whether the reviews are adequate — is the whole question. A data center built under strong rules and one built under weak ones are different facilities with the same footprint.
What a resident is left with
The vote in Elk River is July 6. The end user in Monticello is still a code name. The county's moratorium clock is running. None of it resolves cleanly, and we do not pretend to know how you should weigh a new revenue line against a constant hum, or a tax base against an aquifer.
Disclosure: The author works professionally in the energy sector and has indirect exposure to Xcel Energy through his employer. The Xcel-related reporting here rests entirely on the public record — PUC filings, the Attorney General's comments, and published reporting — not on any non-public information.
MN-06 Watch uses AI tools to assist with research and editing. Facts are verified against primary sources; editorial judgments are the author's.