Community organizer Alfonso Espino stood near the newest industrial building rising in his north Denver neighborhood, which ranks among the nation’s most polluted zip codes. Now it’s the epicenter of a tense debate over data center expansion in Colorado.
Espino raised his voice over construction noise and a train horn and pointed to 14 shipping-container-sized diesel generators that line the building, just yards from a half-built senior living center. Exhaust from such engines, designed to provide backup power during an outage, is categorized by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as “carcinogenic to humans.” Xcel Energy, which will provide power to the site, projected “large load” customers like data centers will comprise two-thirds of its new electricity demand.
