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Near Lake Michigan shore a $15 billion data center prompts a small town reckoning.

With accumulating force and accelerating speed, a new era of electrical generation and power demand is taking shape across the eight states of the Great Lakes basin – and with it come potentially treacherous consequences for the region’s environment and its world-leading supply of clean, fresh water. 

New battery storage, solar and wind plants, and gas-fired installations, joined by reopened nuclear and coal plants, are adding generating capacity to a region that already supplies a third of all electricity in the United States. Electric vehicles, new manufacturing plants, and growing cities are eager to receive the energy, steadily increasing electricity demand.

Not since the 1950s and 1960s have such powerful trends in electrical supply and demand swept across the Great Lakes. Much of the transition is influenced by the federal government, which followed the 2024 election with a two-pronged strategy for development: the Trump administration promoted Biden-era tax incentives and direct grants, then added measures of its own. 

One significant result of these changes is the proliferation of data centers – where servers operate 24/7 inside windowless buildings – to power the artificial intelligence revolution. The eight Great Lakes states have become one of the country’s epicenters for these campuses, which are among the largest industrial sources of energy use and freshwater demand.

Simultaneously, the Trump administration initiated a deluge of changes in environmental law, regulation, budgets, and environmental agency staffing. They amount to a broad erosion of federal protections for the Great Lakes. Though state lawmakers and business executives generally celebrate an industrial transition of historic proportions, little attention is being paid to the potential damage to the environment, especially to the region’s vast reserves of clean, fresh water. 

This is the first article of a new Circle of Blue series, The Great Lakes: Unprotected, that documents how novel rule-making, staff cuts, and dramatic shifts in funding priorities are systematically unraveling a 60-year-old program of safeguards for the region’s rivers, lakes, wetlands, habitat, and drinking water. The government’s neglect sharply increases the region’s vulnerability to water pollution, land degradation, economic disruption and harm to human health.

Local Effects
While the big trends in electricity supply and demand are readily described at the regional level, these changes are experienced with real consequences in communities. A chapter in this unfolding energy and water drama is now taking place on the Lake Michigan shoreline in southeast Wisconsin. 

Port Washington — a town of nearly 13,000 residents a half hour north of Milwaukee — is contending with changes wrought by a $15 billion data center and most clearly seen and felt on county roads, farms, and mom-and-pop businesses.

On a humid Friday afternoon, disgruntled conversation and scrunched-up faces do well to summarize this national narrative. Paul Krauska, the top mechanic at Eddie’s Service, a Port Washington auto repair shop, stands in his garage’s small reception room and synchronizes aggravation with a long-time customer. 

The two men throw their hands up. They shake their heads. They smile disgusted smiles and gaze around the oil-scented room, uncertain of the fate that will befall their homes, the environment, and their town when a 672-acre data center campus, named “Lighthouse,” breaks ground before year’s end. 

Built by Denver-based Vantage Data Centers, Lighthouse will encompass four data center buildings to support the operations of Oracle and OpenAI.

“We were never really told the truth,” Krauska said. “You can’t even fathom the stress that I’m under.”

Beside the two men, barely visible behind stacks of packages and car parts, Brandon Krauska, Paul’s adult son, chuckles as the dialogue follows a familiar cadence, then fizzles into resigned goodbyes and promises of future fish fries. 

“Sometimes, people come in here just to vent,” he said.

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