South Carolina is becoming a data center hotspot. But the state doesn't know how many are coming.

South Carolina became a destination for data centers in recent years, and more are coming. But the state is not tracking the number setting up shop, which experts find worrying because of the potential impact to electric rates and the state's water resources.

No one is even sure how many are here now.

Most who study data centers in South Carolina — including state officials — point to commercial services that track and market data centers to potential customers: datacenters.com and datacentermap.com. But those sources have wildly different counts and locations for data centers in the Palmetto State.

Datacenters.com lists 16 in South Carolina, most around the Columbia area and the Upstate. The other has 29 data centers, with 15 of those reportedly in the Charleston area. That count has gone up since The Post and Courier began reviewing the site two weeks ago.

And there are public plans for more in South Carolina, including two data centers set to soon invest billions in the Upstate.

That is still far fewer than neighboring states like Georgia and North Carolina, which have nearly 100 or more. Virginia likely leads the nation at 638, according to Datacentermap.

Why so many? These computer farms support technologies that many people use daily, such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence. And they suck up lots of energy from the power grid in the process.

Experts: Tracking, transparency appear lacking

Eddy Moore, decarbonization director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said the projected growth of data centers is "one of the biggest things happening in the energy sector right now" and that the state government should be on top of it.

But a spokesperson for the S.C. Department of Commerce said it is "not aware of a state agency that tracks" the number of data centers already in South Carolina.

The department only tracks the number of data centers that apply for a sales tax exemption because it must certify that a data center's promised investment meets certain criteria — such as jobs produced and wages for employees — before the data center is deemed eligible for the exemption.

So far, the department has certified eight data centers as eligible — the identities and locations of which are "not subject to public disclosure," the spokesperson said in an email.

Google and other technology companies are scrambling to build data centers to meet the growing demands of artificial intelligence, and South Carolina is paying them to move here, despite their huge electricity demand. But no one at the state level is tracking what goes where.

That lack of oversight in South Carolina is a growing concern, said Alys Campaigne, climate initiative leader for the Southern Environmental Law Center. Right now, it appears that the centers are going wherever the zoning allows them. It comes down to "local land-use decisions," she said, meaning the companies only have to deal with those county or city officials.

And that means there is no overview.

"One of the most important things that we're concerned about is having more transparency in the process so that decision-makers can get a handle on what's coming our way and what the impacts are going to be," Campaigne said. "Because if it's just facility by facility, you don't see the impact of the cumulative demand on energy, the cumulative impacts on our water systems."

New data center forecasts likely inaccurate

Data centers operate around the clock and consume large amounts of energy and water. A 200-megawatt hyperscale data center, for instance, would use enough energy to power more than 109,000 homes in Georgia on a peak summer day, according to a report from London Economics International.

They use so much energy that they are expected to require the construction of more power plants across South Carolina, Moore said, which will lead to rate increases for customers.

But forecasting that need is likely overdone, London Economics concluded. There is an incentive for the companies that build them to propose the same facilities in multiple states, or even multiple countries, given the global nature of the industry, the report finds.

There is evidence that many of the data center plans are duplicated efforts: If every data center currently proposed in the U.S. between now and 2030 actually came about, it would require 90 percent of the global supply of computer chips just for those centers, the report concluded. The U.S. currently accounts for less than half of the global demand for chips, and it is unlikely it could greatly boost that given the increasing needs of other countries for the same chips, the report pointed out.

Moore said the state government should be aware of the number of data centers to "make better plans and to protect people from potential costs."

And because much of the growth is merely projected, he said it is important that utilities do not overbuild the infrastructure.

"I think there will be significant load growth. We just don't know whether it will be as much as is projected," Moore said. "If you overbuild the utility infrastructure, and then the load growth isn't as big as projected, that leaves everybody else to pay for it."

Overestimating that need is a real possibility, Campaigne said. As it is in South Carolina, and in many states across the South, "there's a lot of secrecy about who's setting up shop where," she said. "So you'll have companies that are putting in proposals in multiple states. We risk overbuilding infrastructure and our energy grid to serve (centers) that might not actually need that load."

Who pays for data center-related infrastructure?

A spokesperson for Santee Cooper, the state-owned power utility, said in an email that large load customers that consume lots of electricity are proliferating in the Southeast and often require "significant electric infrastructure to support their operations."

To mitigate cost increases for other customers, the utility has instituted an experimental rate in April to collect payment up front for upgrades to its system necessary to power the loads, the spokesperson said.

"Front-loading these payments means the entities causing the expenses will also be the entities paying for the expenses," she said. "The rate also requires large load customers to pay for any incremental production costs, such as new generation resources, that they cause the system to incur."

A spokesperson for Duke Energy, a Charlotte-based publicly traded company that is one of South Carolina's largest electric utilities, said they are executing infrastructure projects across the state and maximizing existing generation resources.

"Duke Energy engages in a robust planning process to ensure we can build the infrastructure needed to meet growing energy needs across all customer segments while also meeting state energy goals, maintaining reliability and keeping costs as low as possible," they said in an email.

They added that Duke "engages in a robust planning process to ensure" it can build the infrastructure needed to meet growing energy needs while "meeting state energy goals, maintaining reliability and keeping costs as low as possible."

The company is also planning on building a new natural gas power plant in Anderson County.

Outside of electricity, there is an impact on water. Google's massive data center in Berkeley County agreed in 2019 not to take groundwater except as a last resort after it first sought to take 1.5 million gallons a day from the aquifer. That data center used 1.8 million gallons a day of water from all sources in 2022, or 662 million gallons that year, The Post and Courier previously reported.

An amendment to a massive overhaul of energy regulation in the state earlier this year in the South Carolina General Assembly would have required all data centers to not only report water usage for the past year, but also anticipated needs for the coming year, Campaigne said. That language was stripped out of the bill in the late stages before it finally passed, she said.