Brockovich vs the Data Centres: What US Towns Are Winning — and What UK Communities Should Demand

When Erin Brockovich put out a call this spring asking people to report data centres in their communities, her website crashed twice on the first day. Within a month she had roughly 4,000 submissions. By September the map tracked more than 9,000 complaints from all 50 US states — and Brockovich, who spent three decades fighting the chromium contamination that made Hinkley, California famous, said she had come “full circle”.

She told Jon Favreau’s Offline podcast (3 October) that the most common complaint was not water or noise. It was that nobody had told residents anything: projects approved before the community heard, officials bound by non-disclosure agreements, and zoning rules rewritten by the developers themselves. That is a story US towns are now doing something about — and one UK councils should read closely.

What the Map Actually Found

The numbers grew fast. Brockovich Data Center Reporting launched in April 2026 and drew about 3,862 reports across 49 states by late May, according to Forbes. By September the Washington Times and others reported more than 9,000 complaints from every state, with Texas, Ohio and Virginia leading. Brockovich says the map now has submissions from about 20 countries — her own claim, not an independently audited figure.

Transparency topped the list. The recurring theme, in her telling, was not a single pollutant but a process: permits signed, land rezoned and NDAs agreed before anyone was asked. She says freedom-of-information requests showed some agreements were signed in 2021 and 2022.

Her read, not established fact. Brockovich describes the opposition as a fight about where and how facilities are built, not whether technology should exist. “This is our land. This is our water. This is our future,” she told the podcast. Treat that as the source’s framing.

The NDA Problem — and the First Cracks

The industry is already retreating from secrecy. In January 2026 Microsoft launched a “Community-First AI Infrastructure Plan” and pledged to stop requiring NDAs from local governments in the US, and to work through existing agreements worldwide. Amazon has since said it no longer uses NDAs with government partners for data-centre projects. Critics — including Wisconsin Watch and open-government advocates — welcomed the move but noted it was voluntary and came after years of local fights.

Developers writing the rules. Brockovich says communities, including one in Florida, reported that developers were drafting and redrafting the zoning ordinances and utility filings their own projects would be judged against. If true, that is a conflict of interest that any planning system — UK included — should be able to catch.

Water, Power and the ‘Water–Electricity Paradox’

Closed-loop cooling is not a free pass. Brockovich argues that switching a facility from on-site evaporative cooling to “closed loop” water recycling can simply move the water demand off-site, because the electricity that powers and cools the site has to be generated somewhere — and generation, especially thermal plants, uses water too. She calls this the “water–electricity paradox” and says it pits UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 (water) against Goal 7 (energy). The engineering argument is real and contested; readers should treat the framing as hers.

The electricity figure checks out. The podcast’s claim that US data centres could consume nearly 12% of US electricity within four years is supported: the US Department of Energy’s 2024 report and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put the upper estimate at about 12% of US electricity by 2028, depending on how fast AI capacity is built.

Who pays is a regulatory choice. Brockovich’s central point — echoed by campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic — is that grid upgrades and new generation need not land on ordinary bills. Utilities can be required to charge the operator the full incremental cost. She says some residents have sent her before-and-after bills up 200–400%; those are individual reports, not an audited average.

What US Communities Are Winning

Elections are the sharpest tool. In Festus, Missouri — the town the podcast garbles as “Bestus” — four city council members were voted out in April 2026 after advancing a roughly $6 billion data-centre project, according to Newsweek, Broadband Breakfast and local station KSDK.

Moratoriums are spreading. The podcast said “600-plus” local areas had looked at pauses or bans and that “10 states” were weighing oversight. Both figures are conservative. Trackers such as Electric Choice count more than 650 moratoriums or restrictions across 44 states and at least 300 municipalities that have halted approvals, with legislation introduced in 16 states. New York became the first state to impose one: in July 2026 Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order 62, pausing state environmental permits for hyperscale sites of 50MW or more for up to a year. That is an executive order, not a statute.

Benefits exist — but only if negotiated. Loudoun County, Virginia, home to the world’s largest concentration of data centres, drew about $1.2 billion from them in the 2026 fiscal year — roughly 39% of its budget. That has funded 36 new schools and about $1 billion of road improvements over 15 years, and helped keep property taxes low. Even there, residents are now pushing back on the pace of the buildout. The lesson is the same on both continents: revenue is a negotiating outcome, not a gift.

Polling is bipartisan. The podcast’s claim that majorities of Democrats, independents and Republicans share concerns is consistent with 2026 polling on siting, cost and water use — and it is why the industry’s Washington DC party, “Data After Dark” at the PubKey bar on 26 September, attacked the backlash as “bipartisan psychosis” rather than engaging with it.

What This Means for the UK

Same problems, different paperwork. UK councils do not sign NDAs with developers, but the underlying issues recur: applications fast-tracked at officer level, water use in already-stressed catchments, grid connection queues, and community-benefit offers that arrive after the principle of development is settled. The UK campaigns already covered on this site — 1,600 objections to a 600MW scheme at Auchtertool and the march on Holyrood demanding a moratorium — are the same fight in a different system.

The US gives UK communities a template. Demand the figures before permission, insist the operator pays for its own grid connection, set buffer distances and noise limits in policy, use freedom-of-information rules to expose what was agreed, and coordinate across council boundaries so one authority cannot be played off against another.

What Communities Should Do

1. Demand transparency before approval. No confidential conditions, no undisclosed deals. Ask for the water source, the withdrawal volume, the consumption figure and the wastewater plan in the application itself.
2. Make the operator pay its own way. Press the regulator and network operator to charge the full incremental cost of generation, transmission and substation upgrades to the developer — not to household bills.
3. Set the rules, don’t inherit them. Get buffer distances, noise limits, generator emissions caps and water-use conditions written into the local plan before any application lands, so developers cannot draft them.
4. Ask about backup power. A data centre’s diesel generators can number in the hundreds or thousands; ask how many, how often they test, and what they emit. In Northern Virginia the Sierra Club counted about 10,500 backup generators across data centres.
5. Use the paperwork. Freedom-of-information and environmental-information requests on agreements, meetings and permits have broken open several US cases. Do the same here.
6. Coordinate beyond your boundary. Water catchments, grid capacity and airsheds do not stop at the council line. Town-level action needs county- and region-level allies.
7. Insist on monitoring after consent. Approval is not the end. Require published water, noise and emissions data for the life of the site.
8. Vote on it. Festus showed that planning decisions become electoral ones. Tell candidates where you stand before the ballot, not after.

What’s Next

New York’s executive-order moratorium is the first real test of whether US states will turn emergency action into law rather than rely on voluntary corporate pledges. Voters in dozens of localities are due to decide data-centre ballot measures in November 2026. Separately, the EPA has proposed weakening public-notice requirements for the “minor source” air permits that cover thousands of data-centre generators — a fight to watch because it decides how much communities get to know.

In the UK, the question is whether councils and devolved governments move from case-by-case opposition to codified rules: water and power disclosure, cost allocation and siting standards. Microsoft’s NDA retreat shows the industry will shift when pressure is sustained. Brockovich’s argument is that pressure works best when it is backed by a demand for facts — and that is a playbook UK communities can copy immediately.

This article is based on the Offline with Jon Favreau interview with Erin Brockovich (3 October 2026) and data from Brockovich Data Center Reporting, the US Department of Energy / Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, PolitiFact, The Washington Times, The Guardian, Broadband Breakfast, Loudoun County, Microsoft and the Sierra Club. Figures attributed to the podcast are its own claims; where they could be checked, they were verified and corrected. See also our earlier coverage of the Equinix diesel spill in New Jersey. Data Centre Truth is an independent watchdog on the real cost of the cloud.