OPB4%
Why data centers pose an outsized threat to Eastern Oregon’s air quality 14%
By April Ehrlich20%
7/22/2026, 1:00:01 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Appeal to Authority, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 9.7% saturation with 325 hits. Analysis detected 2,689 faulty-reasoning hits from 3,347 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 30.8% and a BS Rank of 14% (17,021 of 19,669 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 86.50% of the article peer group.
When the Waltons built their lemon-colored ranch home outside Umatilla in northeast Oregon, they were drawn to the area’s rolling hills.
“All of our neighbors were farmers,” Josh Walton said on a sunny afternoon this spring.
“So, all this used to be a cornfield.”
The landscape has changed a lot in the last 15 years.
Instead of overlooking crop fields and the Columbia River in the distance, the Waltons’ backyard view is now the towering white walls of a data center operated by Amazon.
This complex of four boxy buildings is roughly the size of nine Walmart Supercenters.
At night, its stadium-level lighting shines into the Waltons’ bedroom windows, making sleep difficult for Walton, his wife and their two teenage sons.
Most summer days, the data center’s cooling fans drone like low-flying passenger jets.
“Except it’s constant and doesn’t fade away,” Walton said.
The family could face another intrusion from their super-sized neighbors: diesel pollution.
Across the country, Amazon, Google and other tech companies have stocked up on diesel generators to keep their data centers humming during power outages.
Like diesel-powered buses, these generators chug out black exhaust full of air pollutants that can cause cancer, asthma and heart disease.
At a time when the risk of major blackouts is growing, that could add massive air pollution to Oregon and the Northwest.
Yet Oregon air regulators haven’t modeled the potential risk from Oregon’s growing data center market, and policymakers haven’t asked them to.
While the precise risk to the public is unknown, it could be enormous.
To measure the potential harm, OPB used pollution permits to calculate emissions based on a possible blackout scenario and then checked those estimates with regulators and industry analysts for accuracy.
OPB focused on the Lower Umatilla Basin because that is where Oregon’s largest, most power-hungry data centers are clustered.
All are owned by Amazon.
We found the company has amassed enough diesel generators to cloud the nearby cluster of small, rural towns along the Columbia River with smog.
For each hour that an outage lasts, they would emit about twice as much pollution as all of the exhaust from cars and trucks on Oregon’s roads over the same hour.
If a region-wide blackout forced Amazon to run its generators for an hour, it would create more diesel pollution than 38,000 semi-trucks driving through town over the same period.
That extreme level of pollution would only occur during a blackout stretching across a 30-mile-wide region, which Amazon says is highly unlikely.
“OPB’s calculation relies on a scenario in which the entire Umatilla Electric Cooperative territory loses power simultaneously,” Amazon spokesperson Adrienne Talbot said in an email.
“This has never happened in the utility’s 89 years of operation and would be an extraordinarily rare event anywhere in the United States.”
But widescale power outages are not unheard of.
In 2021, an ice storm knocked out power for more than 300,000 Oregonians in the Willamette Valley.
Some were without power for hours.
Others were in the dark for days.
And two weeks after Talbot said Umatilla Electric had never experienced a large-scale outage, a neighboring utility — the Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative — did experience a territory-wide power failure across about 4 million acres for about an hour.
The outage was triggered by a wildfire.
Amazon has cleaner alternatives it could use for backup power.
It could replace its current generators with new ones that have pollution controls.
A company spokesperson said its new data centers will all have generators with pollution controls.
But that won’t help the Watsons if the power goes out today.
If electrical grids become increasingly unstable, the chances of a region-wide outage increase.
The Western Electricity Coordinating Council projects that by 2034, Pacific Northwest residents could see more than 700 hours of potential power failures annually.
“It’s certainly something that could happen,” said Jay Dietrich, research director of sustainability at Uptime Institute, a data center consultancy.
“You have to be aware that it could happen and you have to plan for it.”
Other parts of the country are already experiencing grid strain during extreme weather events, like storms and heatwaves, prompting data center operators to run their generators nonstop for multiple days, even when their local permits expressly prohibit that.
Five times this year, the Trump administration used a 1930s law originally written for wartime to allow data centers to tap their diesel generators and stop drawing power from the electrical grid.
These emergency orders enabled data center operators to run their generators for multiple days, forgoing local pollution regulations.
Potential air pollution is one of the tradeoffs Oregon’s city and county leaders are making as they welcome data centers.
These high-tech projects have brought public revenue and jobs.
For the first time in years, these small farming towns are seeing their budgets and populations grow.
Some officials in these communities say they trust the state to keep the air clean.
“We’re not air quality experts and don’t have to really deal with it in any other circumstance,” said Hermiston Assistant City Manager Mark Morgan.
Morgan said they rely on the state’s environmental regulators to ensure air quality is safe.
Those regulators say they’re concerned about air pollution from data centers’ generators, but they’re limited in what they can do.
This year, Gov.
Tina Kotek convened a data center advisory committee to address issues from data center growth and recommend policy solutions.
Air quality was added to the committee’s to-discuss list on Friday, after OPB contacted the governor’s office for this story.
It will be on the agenda on July 31.
In a statement to OPB, the governor’s office said the committee will “certainly be considering diesel generator impacts in their deliberations.”
“The Governor believes there should be intentional statewide planning on data centers to ensure Oregon is effectively mitigating adverse impacts while maintaining strong economic growth and responsible stewardship of local tax revenues,” Press Secretary Luke Harkins said.
“That’s why she convened the Data Center Advisory Committee and looks forward to their recommendations later this year.”
Backbone of the internet
Just about everything on the internet runs through data centers.
Their computer servers host streaming movies, video games and business documents, and they train and host artificial intelligence models.
Processing all of that data requires an exorbitant amount of electricity.
The data center behind the Waltons’ home is part of a class of massive data centers called “hyperscale.”
It uses more than 100 megawatts of electricity at once, enough to power about 80,000 homes.
That energy must be constant.
Last year, one in five data center operators experienced a power loss that cost them more than $1 million, according to an analysis by Uptime Institute.
“If my airline reservation system goes down, I can’t sell new tickets.
I can’t put people on planes, right?”
Dietrich of Uptime Institute said.
“There are different ways those losses materialize, but they can easily get into the millions of dollars if it’s a really critical system.”
Meta, Apple and other tech companies own dozens of data centers across Oregon, varying in size and power load.
It’s difficult to gauge the scale of data centers in Oregon compared to other states, partly because multiple buildings might be clumped together as a single campus sharing the same address.
The Pew Research Center lists Oregon among the ten states with the highest number of operating data centers, though its figures don’t consider their size or capacity.
Hillsboro, outside Portland, is home to about 40 individual data center buildings, but many of those have a small footprint.
Prineville in Central Oregon has about 13 hyperscale buildings.
The Lower Umatilla Basin — which includes the towns of Boardman, Hermiston and Umatilla — has about 45 hyperscale buildings.
Those structures dwarf most other data centers in the state.
Where life is sweet
Satellite images of Umatilla and Morrow counties show a grid of circular crop fields, like a collection of verdant coins, where farmers grow potatoes, onions and watermelons.
Hermiston is “where life is sweet,” as the city motto goes, with murals of watermelons painted around town.
Farmers across the country have been struggling in recent decades due to rising costs and market consolidation.
Some Oregon farmers have sold or leased their land to make ends meet.
Over time, some of those verdant coins have given way to solar panel farms, wind turbines and hyperscale data centers.
The Lower Umatilla Basin is now a web of industrial power lines.
Those power lines are partly what has brought data centers to this area.
Data center operators want affordable power, lots of water, vast stretches of land — and friendly local governments.
In Hermiston, Amazon has hired hundreds of employees and contractors to staff its two hyperscale data center campuses.
Hermiston has given the company 15-year tax breaks for each campus.
So instead of property taxes, Amazon pays annual fees amounting to about $9.5 million.
Amazon also pays annual franchise fees, which businesses pay when their power lines or cables encroach on public rights-of-way.
Hermiston’s revenues from franchise fees have more than tripled since Amazon came to town, from $1 million in 2024 to a projected $3.4 million by the end of this year.
Amazon also contributed about $25 million toward water and other utility infrastructure, so the city can deliver water to Amazon.
Another $9 million helped the city build an RV park for Amazon’s construction workers.
That money has funded new city buildings, services and infrastructure.
City staff say these financial exchanges are not quid-pro-quo deals, and that each agreement between the city and Amazon stands on its own.
“This is paid for by Amazon,” said Morgan, Hermiston’s assistant city manager, waving toward the city’s newly constructed City Hall.
The building’s front overhang is made of green glass circles, a tribute to the region’s farming industry.
An analysis by city staff estimated about 4,200 people in the Lower Umatilla Basin work at data centers — about 9% of this region’s total population.
These locations hire technicians to install, maintain and repair hardware and network infrastructure, as well as contractors for security, building maintenance and construction.
Between these jobs and the public fees Amazon pays, Morgan said, the benefits of becoming a data center hub have outweighed the costs.
“We’re just comfortable in the discussions we’ve had that they can operate safely,” Morgan said.
‘The cumulative impact … is going to be incredibly high’
When a power outage strikes, large data centers first switch to their battery backups.
Those run out of juice in about 10 minutes, according to Uptime Institute.
Operators then fire up dozens — sometimes hundreds — of train car-sized diesel generators to keep the power flowing.
Diesel exhaust is part gas, part soot.
It’s what creates smog around freeways and traffic-heavy cities like Los Angeles.
Its most harmful pollutants include nitrogen oxides, or NOx, and particulate matter.
The World Health Organization has classified both as carcinogens.
Oregonians might already be familiar with the term particulate matter, or PM 2.5, from wildfire smoke.
Similar to smoke, tiny particles from diesel exhaust can lodge in people’s lungs and enter their bloodstream, elevating their risk of heart attacks and lung disease.
Severe health effects can occur within a day of exposure.
Hospitals, grocery stores and large corporate buildings commonly rely on diesel generators for backup power.
They’re sturdy, reliable and relatively cheap.
But those buildings use a small fraction of the electricity of hyperscale data centers, so they only need a few diesel generators to power their essential services.
At OHSU, Oregon’s only public academic hospital system, much smaller generators can cumulatively generate 18 megawatts of electricity.
The backup diesel generators at Amazon’s 14 data centers in the Lower Umatilla Basin are collectively rated for about 3,700 megawatts of power.
That’s over 200 times more than OHSU’s backups.
Last year, data centers in Oregon had about 6,000 megawatts of backup electrical generating capacity — double the average power usage of all the homes in the state.
An Amazon spokesperson declined an on-the-record interview with OPB, but in background conversations, staff said the company is investing in alternative energy sources — including nuclear, solar and wind — to help ease local grid strain.
In a statement, Kerry Person, Amazon’s vice president of global operations and data center delivery, said the company’s generators aren’t currently high polluters.
“Our emergency generators run approximately 12 hours per year, almost entirely for brief compliance testing,” Person said.
“These systems exist solely to protect continuity of essential services during rare power interruptions.”
When there isn’t an emergency or a blackout, data centers have to maintain their generators by running each of them at low capacity for a minimum of 30 minutes a month.
State environmental regulators say that maintenance doesn’t release a concerning amount of pollution.
What does worry them, though, is what would happen during a summer heatwave or wildfire-induced blackout, when multiple data centers might crank up many of their generators at once.
“The cumulative impact, in terms of NOx emissions, in terms of PM 2.5, is going to be incredibly high,” DEQ air quality administrator Ali Mirzakhalili said.
Oregon isn’t tracking data center air pollution risks
On paper, Oregon limits how much diesel fuel a data center can use in a year — around 700,000 gallons for each campus.
Amazon would likely exceed those limits during an extended blackout, Mirzakhalili said.
“Is that fuel sufficient to satisfy a long-duration emergency?
I don’t think so,” Mirzakhalili said.
“Should that happen, they’re going to use more fuel than that, and we’re not going to stop that.”
Amazon didn’t directly respond when asked about the possibility it might exceed state limits.
It stressed the importance of preparing for severe weather or other disruptions to the electrical grid.
Data center operators can reduce their diesel pollution by installing generators that include pollution controls, like filters.
Those generators can cut emissions by about 90%, but they are pricey.
Just one pollution-controlled generator could cost upwards of $1 million, almost twice as much as a standard industrial generator.
Amazon is the fifth most valuable company in the world, valued at $2.6 trillion, with $78 billion in profits last year.
DEQ now offers fast-tracked air pollution permits to operators who primarily use pollution-controlled generators, but no companies have taken up the offer in the last year.
Staff with the agency say they’re worried about data centers releasing concentrated plumes of diesel exhaust.
“It’s a carcinogen,” Mirzakhalili said.
“That’s an additional load to the environment that we don’t want to see.”
Other than its fast-tracked permits, Oregon doesn’t have statewide laws or policies specifically addressing diesel generators at data centers.
“It’s a risk we have to understand,” said Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at University of California, Riverside, who has studied the health impacts from data centers.
Ren has advocated for state governments across the country to take a closer look at how data center emissions could impact the towns where they are concentrated.
California, Virginia, Illinois and Washington have strictly limited data centers from using generators without pollution controls.
Washington regulators are also tracking and modeling diesel pollution in regions with large numbers of data centers, so lawmakers can eventually develop policies that can protect people from pollution.
Oregon isn’t tracking how much air pollution data center generators could release during a major power outage.
Pausing environmental laws for data center power
The risk of air pollution from data centers’ diesel generators goes beyond the Pacific Northwest.
Diesel generator capacity at data centers in the U.S. nearly tripled in 2024, according to a report by the Better Data Center Project, an organization that advocates for cleaner data centers.
If they were all turned on at once, diesel generators at data centers across the country could provide enough electricity to power roughly 20 million American homes.
That’s a lot of potential power — and a lot of potential exhaust.
Trump administration policies may be increasing that potential health risk.
Four researchers who spoke to OPB say they are worried about something called “demand response.”
That’s when electric utilities request data centers stop pulling from the grid when overall electrical demand is high, like during heat waves or snowstorms.
When that happens, most data centers turn to their backup power supplies.
Oregon’s air pollution permits don’t allow industrial businesses like data centers to participate in demand response.
They can only use their generators if they unexpectedly lose power.
But those regulations can be cast aside by the federal government.
During a winter storm that stretched across southern and northeastern states, three electric utilities serving 97 million customers asked the federal government to waive environmental limitations on data centers in order to prevent blackouts for residential customers.
The U.S.
Department of Energy granted their requests under a section of the Federal Power Act, a 1935 statute originally created to compel utilities to cooperate during war.
The Trump administration has used these emergency powers to allow coal plants to continue operating past their retirement dates — and to allow data centers to use their backup diesel generators — regardless of environmental restrictions.
During this year’s winter storms, the Energy Department’s emergency orders allowed data centers in 14 states and the District of Columbia to rely on their backup power instead of the electrical grid.
The orders specifically excluded other businesses and agencies that have backup power — including hospitals, first responders, air traffic controllers, and facilities treating water and waste — from using those backups without environmental limitations.
Looking for alternatives
Not far from Hermiston, Umatilla has also seen financial benefits thanks to data centers.
It has four in city limits, and three others in the works.
All but one belong to Amazon.
Umatilla has seen a seven-fold increase in its overall budget since Amazon started building more data centers here around 2018, according to city manager David Stockdale.
Umatilla is now one of the few cities in Oregon with growing revenues.
That’s helped the city repair roads and old buildings at a time when many Oregon communities are facing budget cuts.
“Prior to data centers arriving here, quite literally everything was deferred maintenance,” Stockdale said.
“Prior to 2018, it had been about 25 years since there had been even a road construction project in the whole city.”
Amazon has also brought people.
Housing construction is at an all-time high, Stockdale said, with around 100 new homes entering the market every year — significant for a town with around 2,200 households.
But Stockdale also acknowledges data centers’ environmental impacts, including the potential for increased air pollution.
He’s helping spearhead an effort to build a battery storage facility on about 1 million square feet, which could help power data centers during blackouts.
Stockdale said the project is stalled by slow-moving negotiations with state land use regulators.
Umatilla city officials are also hopeful that a business could turn carbon dioxide from diesel exhaust into clean, restaurant-quality carbon dioxide for carbonating sodas.
They’re in the early stages of helping the company find suitable land in city limits.
Stockdale sees this as an example of the city doing its best to mitigate environmental harms that could come from data center pollution.
“We’ve tried to take a proactive approach rather than reactive,” Stockdale said.
Even so, Josh Walton — whose home now sits in the shadow of that hyperscale data center near Umatilla — feels like he’s on the losing side of an industry that’s rapidly transformed his community.
“It seems like it happened so quickly,” Walton said of the data center behind his home.
“We were never notified.
We never received a letter.”
Walton’s property is 450 feet from the data center site — far enough that officials weren’t required to tell him of the plans.
To Walton, it feels like his health, and that of his family, depends on the economic whims of local politicians.
“There’s noise pollution, there’s light pollution, there’s increased traffic,” Walton said.
“We just hope that the people that are in charge are doing the best for the community.”
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