Landing a data center is worth the environmental tradeoffs, Illinois towns say

The Minooka data center would take up to 340 acres, or slightly more than Chicago’s Grant Park.

It would need 3 million gallons of water a day. That’s a third of all the drinkable water Minooka will be allowed to draw from a $1.54 billion pipeline it’s building with five other towns to access Lake Michigan water through Chicago.

It would need a 700-megawatt supply of electricity, enough for half of Chicago’s households.

For Ric Offerman, Minooka’s mayor, these are inescapable environmental tradeoffs to secure a multibillion-dollar investment from Equinix, Inc., a Redwood City, California-based company that operates 260 data centers in 33 countries. 

Offerman said Equinix could bring hundreds of permanent jobs to the village of 13,000 people 40 miles southwest of Chicago. It could bring in tens of millions in added tax dollars each year, even after an abatement the company is seeking.

And unlike a proposed Canadian National Railway terminal nearby, Offerman said the data center wouldn’t flood Minooka’s central commercial district with hundreds of thousands of diesel trucks each year. He’s in court defending weight limits that  keep trucks off the roads leading to downtown.

Data centers give farm towns such as Minooka standing in the high-flying world of Equinix and its data center partners, which include Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Nvidia. But they’re straining Minooka’s effort to wean itself off underground aquifers that threaten to run dry and jeopardizing the state’s bid to end the burning of fossil fuel in its power plants.

The uncertainties are so great that, months after first proposing the data center to Minooka officials, Matt Baumann of Equinix said he’s not sure it will ever get built. He’s still scrambling to line up electricity and water to break ground next year and complete the project by 2034.

“I would love to not be in limbo right now, trust me,” Baumann, the company’s real estate director for the Americas, said in an interview Wednesday. Still, he described the approval processes he’s encountered in Minooka and the rest of Illinois as “fairly standard.’’

Offerman is a retired history teacher from Channahon Junior High School. He’s running unopposed in the April 1 election for the part-time job of Minooka mayor. At age 80, he’s the village elder as Minooka tries to nail down the Equinix investment and confront painful choices about its future.

“First of all, if somebody wants to sell their property, you can’t stop them. So we’re trying to make this data center something positive,” Offerman said.

“We’re looking at it as something that’s going to be a good generator, tax-wise,” he said. “It’s going to be one of the more positive things that could sit there.”

Displaced and discouraged

Dan and Dee Roberts have been growing corn and soybeans for 59 years on the spot north of town where Equinix wants to build its data center.

They leased the land most recently from the family of Amin Khater. He began purchasing farmland after migrating from Syria in the 1950s and becoming a prominent Joliet doctor. He died in 2018, and his family now has a contract to sell the land to Equinix.

Together, Dan Roberts, his brother Don, and two sons farm several thousand acres that they own or lease in and around Minooka. Don Roberts is married to Ric Offerman’s sister, Lynette.

Dan and Don Roberts live next door to each other in brick ranch houses at the northeast corner of the data center site. In between, there’s a cluster of farm offices, sheds and grain storage bins, the tallest of which rises 130 feet and has a big American flag flying on top.

Dan Roberts found out about the data center in December. He didn’t tell his wife until after Christmas because he didn’t want to ruin her holiday. When he finally told her, Dee Roberts said she spent two weeks crying.

“You can’t buy my memories. You can’t buy my dreams. What we have here, I don’t care how much money we get. I’ll never have a place like this again,” she said.

“I mean, this was barren here, and we built it all ourselves,” Dee Roberts said. “We raised our kids here. I worked in the fields with these guys. I helped build the house. I remember having a single driveway with a garden at the end, and then it just kind of ballooned.”

She acknowledged Equinix can’t force her out. In fact, the company has already told them it’s not interested in paying the Roberts’ initial estimated price for their homes and business structures. Now, she said, they don’t know if they’ll ever get an offer from Equinix or whether they’d accept it if they did.

“There’s a difference between being forced out and being in a place where you really don’t want to be anymore,” Dee Roberts said.

From their front window, the Roberts can see the planned route of the Lake Michigan pipeline, plus the future site of an 80-acre solar farm.

Out their back window, they often see steam rising from a Vistra Corp. natural gas power plant just a few hundred yards away.

They can also see fields covered with brown dirt and corn stalk remnants from last year’s harvest. The fields stretch uninterrupted for a mile and a half south to the I-80 freeway.