Sangamon County’s average residential electricity bill has increased by more than 52% in the past five years when comparing seasonal data, according to a database constructed by Heatmap News and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s nearly 15% more than Cook County, and almost 10% more than the state, experienced over the same time frame.
Despite utility costs soaring over the past five years, grid operators keep approving more data centers. Utility providers, such as Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative, claim the projects will lower rates for others even in light of the larger amount of power needed to run them.
In April, the Sangamon County Board approved a conditional permitted use to allow zoning for CyrusOne to construct a data center on 280 acres of agriculturally zoned land, just 15 days after tabling the proposal following hours of public comment mostly opposing the project.
Treg Caruthers and his family farm are about three-quarters of a mile north of the planned data center site. The Caruthers family has farmed in Waverly for more than 175 years – the street they live on, Caruthers Road, is named after them.
“It doesn’t seem like they really even considered the cattle, or anything like that, that are around here,” Caruthers said of the decision to approve the data center.
The family farms cattle for beef and currently has more than 80 cows that stay in Waverly during the fall and winter. Caruthers expressed concern for what the hyperscale data center’s various unstudied environmental effects might do to his cattle.
Mary Willis, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health, told IT she would not be surprised if studies on animals reveal more information about data centers.
“The first study that really linked tracking to adverse health outcomes was on horse or cattle,” said Willis, who previously studied fracking. “That’s how we kind of figured out that there was even something going on here, and so I would be 0% surprised if local animal studies are what help us actually figure out the effects of data centers faster than we will in humans.”
Rising surface temperatures
Though possible effects on animals and humans are unknown, a startling effect of data centers on nearby land was recently discovered.
Researchers at The University of Cambridge published a study in March that used remote sensors to observe temperature increases around active data centers. Data centers located in non-urban environments resulted in “heat islands,” where surface temperatures can rise as far as six miles away.
Illinois Times asked CyrusOne about the study’s conclusions and whether the company had previously sampled land surface temperature around its data centers.
“At CyrusOne, our facilities are designed, developed, and operated in accordance with applicable health, safety, environmental, and land-use requirements, while following established industry practices for site design, cooling, energy efficiency, and environmental performance,” wrote Blair Felter, vice president of communications. “We do not have surface-temperature data to share.”
It’s unclear how nearby farmland might be impacted by the CyrusOne data center and the heat it gives off from running continuously. Caruthers believes it will have some down-the-line effect, but his plan is to keep farming.
“I’m sure it’ll affect it, but we don’t have any control over that,” he said. “Unless it affects the cows and then we’ll have to go to plan B, I guess.”
What’s plan B?
“I don’t know yet, but we’ll have to figure something out.”
Farmland is assessed by soil quality, which then affects the sale price and, ultimately, the tax assessment.
Byron Deaner, the county’s chief assessment officer, said even if the study bears out in Illinois, farmland values wouldn’t change much until parcels of land are actually sold and the market potentially adjusts.
“You really wouldn’t see any impact to those values until you started to see some farmland with those different productivity indexes sell at different rates,” he said. “Maybe that would force the Illinois Department of Revenue to revisit the values associated with those soils, if they could contribute the environmental impact of the heat to those particular soil types within the particular distance.”
Jim Birge, manager of Sangamon County Farm Bureau, told IT that “research studies provide interesting theories, but at the moment, they appear to be just that.
“We do not have definitive data to determine exactly how farmland values could be affected by data centers,” he wrote.
Health concerns
Willis was supposed to visit University of Illinois Springfield to discuss the health impacts of data centers on April 15, a week after the county ultimately approved the CyrusOne project.
However, the UIS strike at the time forced a cancellation of the event. Willis told Illinois Times in May about the various unstudied impacts of data centers and their backup energy sources.
“This fine particulate matter can very quickly become a regional problem,” Willis said, though she noted it’s more of a concern for those near the site. “If you live near a coal-fired power plant, that’s probably a far more important source to consider than the data center if that’s not right near you – but this is likely contributing overall to regional air pollution.”
Almost half of all Americans are living in areas with heavily polluted air, according to the American Lung Association. Sangamon County, according to the American Lung Association, ranks middle of the road in particle pollution when compared to more than 200 more metropolitan areas.
Polluted air is “associated with increased risks of mortality, asthma and preterm birth,” Willis said.
She said she was surprised that CyrusOne plans to install 420 diesel-powered backup generators, a sentiment echoed by another researcher.
In March, Max Zhang, a professor at Cornell University who researches air pollutants produced by diesel-powered generators, told Illinois Times that was the largest number of backup generators he’d ever heard of for a data center.
“Given the number of generators, even only (running) 15 hours per year, that’s still going to have the potential to cause a lot of impact,” Zhang said. His research “found that the typical emission factors from diesel backup generators are at the level of the most-polluted combustion turbines, which means they tend to be highly polluting.”
For comparison, Springfield Memorial Hospital, the largest hospital in the county, utilizes just six backup generators for its main hospital in case of an outage.
This article appears in July 9-15, 2026.
Well done, Dilpreet!