Data centers spark debate across Chicagoland: 'It was like there was a helicopter on our roof'

CHICAGO - Just like property taxes, you can add data centers to the list of hot button issues getting people stirred up.

Like it or not, the digital reality is they are here to stay.

In a Fox Chicago special report, Bret Buganski takes a look at how some towns in Chicagoland are dealing with data centers.

What we know:

From Hobart to Naperville, to Lisle to Aurora to Yorkville, data centers are on city council agendas across the area and residents are showing up in big numbers to let their local leaders know how they feel about data centers being built in their town.

"Most people look at the data centers as this imminent threat to the environment and to their livability of cities and in small communities," said Dr. Tommy Zakrzewski.

Zakrzewski is an adjunct environmental engineering professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He’s also known as a building scientist who works with hyperscale data centers to help them minimize their impact on the environment.

"I believe that there's just this misunderstanding or not enough information to really understand what the purpose of these data centers are and how they connect to the community and the offerings that they give us in terms of our digital lives these days," Zakrzewski said.

He says one misunderstanding is this: whenever you click or swipe, or stream, that information is usually being stored in the cloud. And the cloud isn’t where you probably think it is.

"What most people don't understand is that that data center is the cloud. The cloud is something that we use to describe that data center. It's sort of like a metaphor for the internet," Zakrzewski said.

Laura Evans lives in Aurora near a data center.

"When I saw again what was happening in Naperville, I'm like, you know, I think they need to know more about what it's like to live with it," she said. "So my idea was to either just go and just listen, and then I thought, well, maybe I'll talk too. And let them know what my experience is."

Evans knows first hand what it’s like to live next to a data center. In 2017, the city of Aurora approved CyrusOne's plans to build one on Diehl Road near I-88, and about a thousand feet from her backyard.

"I can hear the fans running right now. It sounds like constant traffic, but it's the fans running," she said. "We've noticed that around six o'clock, they all dump. And we're noticing it gets louder when everyone's updating."

Evans says she and her husband didn’t hear the noise from the nearby data center until a few years ago.

"It was just this weird humming. And he got to the point where he called the city, our alderman, and the alderman came out, and sometimes you would hear it, sometimes not. And this was kind of going on for a while until April of 25," she said.

That’s when things really got loud.

Dig deeper:

According to CyrusOne's community website, its data center began experiencing a "critical equipment issue" with one of its main power transformers.

"Cyrus had to run their generators three days in a row, 24 hours. It was nonstop noise. And so, that's when everybody's like, so that’s what you're talking about," Evans said. "It was like there was a helicopter on our roof. It was just so noisy. You couldn't go outside without hearing it. You could hear it in the house."

Cyrus’s web page outlines the company's efforts for nearly the last year to not only fix the transformer, but also manage the noise coming from the data center's generators and chillers by installing different noise walls and other noise-reducing features.

It says those extra features are something they are still working on.

"I'm constantly up a couple of times during the night," Evans said. "So sleep has been, you know, not a steady sleep. Definitely don't get a chance to just relax and get away from it. It's something that we constantly hear."

She went to Naperville’s city council meeting on January 20 as they were set to vote on whether or not to approve a data center in their suburb. While many Naperville residents voiced their concerns that night, so did she.

"And the chillers are what’s killer. It’s the fans on the roofs. It’s not the generators," she said at the meeting. "It’s the fans that create that noise."

Rich Janor also spoke at the meeting.

"You’ll hear today, loud and clear, over and over, that your constituents don’t want a data center in this location. Let’s close the book on the data center and let’s close it tonight," he said.

That night, the Naperville City Council voted down Karis Critical’s proposal to build a 200,000 square foot data center with dozens of diesel generators located near Naperville and Warrenville roads and near five residential subdivisions.

What they're saying:

Strong push back from a group of local residents contributed to the council's "no" vote.

Janor and Teresa Belmonte are among them.

"Just the health and safety of our kids. As a parent, in my opinion, your number one responsibility is the health and safety of your child. There's nothing that is above that. As a parent, you're teaching them to read, you're teaching them to be respectful, all the things, but safety is number one. And my own kids being six, nine, and 15, having to go to the park and play basketball, ride their bikes, hang out with their friends in such close proximity to this facility was very concerning," Janor said.

Belmonte added, "We were really blessed to just have really talented neighbors. We had what, 29 physicians in this neighborhood alone that could speak to health concerns, that were experts in their field, engineers, attorneys, you name it, public relations. People all came together and used their talents to really put together what we thought was a thoughtful and professional opposition to the data center."

Despite feeling like a second job at times for the group, Belmonte says focusing on what they could change and showing up in numbers were key to their success.

While Naperville put the brakes on that attempt to build a data center, the Aurora City Council did something similar last fall by approving a temporary stop, or a six-month moratorium on data center construction.

Local perspective:

With the clock set to run out by the end of March, Fox Chicago sat down with Aurora’s director of sustainability, Alison Lindburg, for an update on what they’ve learned so far.

"We're coming up with a definition for data centers and we will have requirements," Lindburg said.

With four large scale data centers already up and running, she says the city is seeing an influx of requests for new ones to be built, and that’s not including the five other data centers already under development in Aurora.

"Aurora didn't actually have a definition in our zoning requirements for data centers. They were being treated as warehouses. So that becomes a problem because we were having some concerns from citizens related to a number of things," Lindburg said.

She says the two biggest complaints they are hearing from residents are higher electric bills and noise.

"We were hearing that vibrations were ongoing at a constant rate, but especially on the days that the diesel generators were running. We were hearing some health concerns, and I would say equivalent to, someone at city council said, equivalent to like having PTSD because it just was constant and nonstop running," Lindburg said.

She also says there’s currently no zoning requirement as to how far away a data center needs to be built from a residential area.

Why you should care:

Dr. Susan Buchanan is an environmental and occupational health doctor at UI Health. She says children and pregnant women should not be exposed to diesel exhaust fumes.

"It's one of the worst types of exposures you can have from burning petroleum products, because diesel engines, when they burn, they emit very small particles, and these small particles can go deep into the airways and cross into the bloodstream and cause all kinds of health problems. The most worrisome is cancer. Diesel exhaust has been rated as a known carcinogen," Buchanan said.

She added, "Children breathe more air per body weight than adults. So, we consider children special, you know, a more uniquely vulnerable population. And during pregnancy, these small particles, we know now they cross the placenta and they affect fetal health. So those are two populations that we are especially concerned about."

When it comes to the noise: "Low level hums for prolonged period of time can cause some hearing loss, but more importantly can cause quality of life issues, mental health issues. Some people who are specifically or especially sensitive, they can certainly have more kinds of anxiety, anxiousness, and just discomfort from a constant low-level noise," Buchanan said.

But not all data centers have diesel generators.

"The market's sort of changing a little bit," Dr. Zakrzewski said. "There are alternative means of utilizing fuels in these generators that's primarily coming out of the United Kingdom, where they're utilizing, this is actually cool, hydro-treated vegetable oil. This is again, utilizing spent oil from cooking and restaurants. And they're able to reduce the emissions by up to 90 percent because we're utilizing a recaptured oil."

And not all diesel generators run the same.

"You have a tier two and a tier three generator, which are, they put off a lot of emissions and a lot of what's called soot. It is a carcinogen that gets released into the atmosphere," said Shawn Craven.

Craven is an elected board representative for Local 17 Heat and Frost Insulators in Tinley Park. His members insulate cooling systems at data centers across the Chicago area.

"Then you have a tier four generator, which, from my understanding, most of the data centers are using tier four generators. They're 90 to 95% more efficient than the tier two or tier three generators as far as putting off the noxious gases and the soot from the diesel exhaust," Craven said. "But are they still loud? Yes, they're still noisy. But not as noisy as the older ones either."

Now, Lisle is getting ready to deal with a similar situation as the village planning and zoning commission is tasked to review plans for a data center proposal in the 700 block of Ogden Avenue at the old Lockformer site.

The commission’s first meeting on this issue was canceled because too many people showed up and overcrowded the building.

Another 127 residents submitted letters ahead of the meeting, all objecting to this proposal.

Once again, just like Aurora and Naperville, the proposed Lisle data center location is across the street from a residential subdivision and a half a mile from a grade school.

Why?

"That's something that I think the public needs to learn about a little bit more, is, there are reasons why these data centers are popping up in certain locations. And it depends on what is that data center doing. The big hyperscalers that we're seeing, the big ones, they're primarily located in remote rural areas. That you'll see a campus of them. And those are the workhorses. Those are the ones that are doing a lot of the AI learning, those big workloads," Dr. Zakrzewski said.

"But the ones that are more closer to communities, most of those are considered edge data centers where the workloads that are happening are workloads that are required to be closer to the end user. Meaning, if I want to stream a show, say on Netflix, it's being streamed by that local data center, not the one that's hundreds or thousands of miles away. Because that compute power, or that access to that information, is closer to the end user. I think people will begin to panic a little bit if their show doesn't stream instantly. And that would happen if that edge data center wasn't in the community."

What's next:

This is the start of our continuing coverage of this topic.

In the coming weeks, we will take an in-depth look at how the data center building boom is affecting your utility bills, the environment, and what’s being done to make data centers more environmentally friendly and more accountable.