About two dozen south and southwest suburban residents, along with environmental advocates and two Naperville residents, gathered Monday to voice concerns that nearby data centers could lead to higher utility bills, regional power outages, declining air quality and strained water supplies.
These concerns stemmed from data center proposals in Joliet, Minooka, Essex, Coal City and Yorkville that are quickly gaining municipal support.
Several advocates also said they worry data center projects could be proposed in the south suburbs, particularly in lower-income, less populated areas, where plans may move forward with little public awareness.
“I feel like areas that are less populated are going to be heavily targeted because they’re going to be seen to be easy land grabs, and there’s not going to be a lot of people to protest them because they’re a little town, a little suburb,” Laura Nurczyk, of Joliet, treasurer of the Sierra Club Tall Plains Group.
Monday’s event at the Frankfort Public Library included several Sierra Club environmental advocates who sought to educate residents on data centers.
Some residents expressed concern but said they did not understand how these centers could affect them. One Chicago Heights resident said, as a retired painter, he was no expert in data centers and asked about concerns he had seen online, including low frequency vibrations.
Felix Ortiz, one of the environmental panelists, said he was also concerned about these vibrations, citing data published by the Sierra Club showing these frequencies have significant affects on children and adults living within 2 miles.
“It’s kind of like enduring a small shell shock effect to the brain and it does not align well with brain development,” Oritz said.
Nurczyk and Sierra Club advocate Portia Gallegos pointed to a data center proposal in Joliet as an example for fast moving policies.
Gallegos said she went door knocking two weeks ago and residents were not aware of a proposal to build the state’s largest data center in the area.
That proposal will be voted on Monday by the Joliet City Council, a little over a week after it was brought to the Plan Commission. The data center is projected to use 1.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power all the households in Chicago and would sit atop an aging aquifer.
Dallas-based Hillwood Investment Properties and PowerHouse Data Centers, a Virginia-based developer, said the 24-building project could bring jobs, which local unions have publicly supported.
Mark Pruitt, a consultant for the developers, said officials with Commonwealth Edison and Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection, a regional energy transmission organization that comprises 13 states, including Illinois, both reviewed the project and did not have significant concerns.
Gallegos, Ortiz and Nurczyk said they are also concerned data centers could bring utility bill spikes.
Gallegos said developers often do not fully pay transmission costs, which are charges for moving high-voltage electricity from power plants to local distribution systems, often appearing as a dedicated line item on utility bills.
Gallegos said when developers do not take on these costs, that results in significant costs, sometimes in the millions, passed on to customers.
In June 2025, Comed customers saw electric bills rise by roughly $10.60 per month.
A December 2025 analysis by the Illinois Commerce Commission, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and the Illinois Power Agency, reported Illinois could be only five years away from chronic shortages and higher monthly bills due to artificial intelligence sparking a surge in electricity demand.
Ortiz advised residents to educate themselves and their neighbors and mobilize to educate their community on data centers.
He advised residents to research the proposal and company. He also said residents are best able to communicate concerns with their own communities, as they know the people and politics.
He said when developers try to push these proposals quickly, a goal could be to get the municipality to vote against the plan or delay action, allowing residents time to push for regulation policies.
“You need to be able to figure out, who are the people we need to be having conversations with, because these are the people that ultimately decide what’s going to happen,” Ortiz said.
Sarah Baugh, a Naperville resident who organized against a data center there, said Joliet and the south and southwest suburbs are completely different. The Joliet proposal is much larger, and she said the Joliet area can often be overlooked.
“I feel like it’s different in the sense that we got lucky, and I think we were loud enough, but because of some of the political shifting pieces, there were reasons for people to support us,” she said.
Data center proposals across the state have stirred debates among environmentalists, unions, suburban officials and residents.
Artificial intelligence companies recently threatened to shun Illinois and build their most advanced data centers in Wisconsin and Indiana if the state doesn’t dilute its privacy law, the toughest in the country.
awright@chicagotribune.com
