KINGSTON – It’s not every day you see a bus dressed up like a pig—but that day came on Tuesday at the Seed Song Farm in Kingston, New York.
That’s when the ‘Energy Hog’ bus rolled into town as part of its statewide tour to urge New Yorkers to support a crackdown on AI data centers and other energy intensive infrastructure.
The minibus — festooned with a pink snout, pink ears and a squiggly tail – was met by a rally of energy, climate and environmental advocates, local legislators and members of the New York Public Research Group (NYPIRG).
They say that AI data centers are “hogging” the energy grid and leaving residents “squealing” from skyrocketing utility bills.
“We are urging the Governor and New York State’s leaders to uphold New York’s landmark climate law, rein in extractive AI data centers and crypto mining facilities and to protect New Yorkers from rising utility costs,” said Eric Wood, senior environmental program coordinator for NYPIRG. “We are not going to sacrifice our right to clean air, clean water and a healthy environment to the rights of the tech industry and wealthy billionaires.”
Supporters wore pig ears and chanted, “Implement the climate law! Regulate energy hogs!”
“If we keep adding new data centers, which are big users of energy –energy hogs – to our system before we make a transition away from oil and gas and to truly renewable sources, we’re just going to be using more expensive and unstable sources of energy,” says Dr. Kathleen Nolan, President of the New York State Chapter of the Physicians for social responsibility and Ulster County Legislator for the 22nd District. “We need to make a transition and not be building more onto a system that is already stressed. And if we don’t have enough power to run every data center that everybody wants to build, then maybe we need to look at the permitting process and decide where we want them, how many of them we want and how big they should be.”
Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger urged leaders in Albany to pass and sign into law two bills that would pause new data center permits until necessary regulatory guardrails are in place to protect communities from energy-sucking data facilities.
“These AI data centers create very few jobs but use absolutely unsustainable amounts of energy and will drive up costs for everyone, which is why communities across the country are really rallying against these projects coming to their communities,” said Metzger.
The two bills call for a three-year moratorium on certain data center permits in New York.
They are currently in the early committee review stage and are not yet scheduled for a vote.
New York has over 130 data centers in operation with two in the Hudson Valley.
One center is in Orangeburg. The other is in Poughkeepsie.
The “Energy Hog” bus began its tour in Buffalo last week and made its way to Syracuse and Albany.
The next stop for the “Hog” is City Hall in Manhattan with a finale in the Finger Lakes at a Bitcoin mining facility in Dresden.
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