Colorado can argue about data centers, or it can put conditions on them (Opinion)

I read Sunday's account of the Public Utilities Commission hearing and found myself agreeing with the people quoted in it. The former Kodak/Carestream industrial campus is seen from the air in Weld County near Windsor on Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2026. A company called Global AI purchased the property to build a 27-megawatt data center. Deborah Jones of Lakewood told the commissioners that data center operators must pay their own way for every single thing. No deals, no loopholes, no secret contracts. She is right. The Sierra Club is right that a contract nobody outside the room can read stops being a rule and becomes an exception waiting to be granted. The 91% of Coloradans who told Conservation Colorado they want commonsense protections are right too. What I did not find was one person who believes these facilities can be built well, in the right place, under conditions a community can enforce. The absence is the problem, because when a public debate offers only two positions, build anything or build nothing, a state ends up with the worst of both. One thing needs saying before the arithmetic, and I include myself in it. This demand is ours. Every search, every phone backing itself up at three in the morning, every scan a radiologist reads from home, and now every question any of us puts to an artificial intelligence. These buildings are the physical shape of what all of us started doing several times an hour, and no vote in Denver changes that fact any more than a city council could have voted away the arrival of the automobile. What a vote can change is where they go and who pays for them. Now the arithmetic, which deserves respect and not argument. Xcel estimates that new large-load requests could create the need for more than 1,900 megawatts by 2031, a 31% increase on everything it supplies now. Set that against what Colorado already runs. The QTS campus in Aurora draws around 160 megawatts, more than three times the peak demand of Denver International Airport, and at full build it will pass the Evraz steel mill in Pueblo as the largest single customer Xcel has in this state. Only two or three Xcel customers in this state exceed 50 megawatts at all. So the alarm is rational. It deserves a better answer than the one it is getting, and better than the one my own side of this argument has been offering. A data center is also a poor jobs program. A building the size of a shopping mall employs a couple of hundred people, and anyone selling one to a Colorado town as an employment strategy is misleading that town. So what we get to decide is whether the cost follows the customer who causes it, and whether we choose the ground they sit on. Both are answerable. Neither is answered by a moratorium, and Colorado already has eight of those, alongside two legislative sessions that produced no statute. Make cost causation complete and public. The large-load customer pays for the poles, the wires and the generation its arrival requires, and the arithmetic sits on the record where a ratepayer can check it. Refuse the secret contract. If genuine speed is needed, and it sometimes is, publish the terms and let the advocates who already sign nondisclosure agreements read them. Speed and secrecy are separate things. No utility should be allowed to trade one for the other. Put the water in writing. Closed loop cooling specified in the agreement, a hard cap on the draw, a penalty for breaching it, and disclosure facility by facility. Require the newcomer to bring generation and not only take it. A campus that arrives with its own power, and pays for it, is a different neighbor from one that joins the queue ahead of a hospital. Buried in Sunday's article was a sentence that might have been the headline. Most of the companies waiting in Xcel's queue want to build in metro Denver, along Interstate 25 and near Denver International Airport. They have already worked out where the argument is easiest. Colorado has not noticed what it owns. DEN sits on 53 square miles, the second largest land holding of any airport on earth, with more than 16,000 acres of non-aviation land available even after it builds out to twelve runways, and it is laying water, sewer, power and fiber along the Peña Boulevard corridor right now. Nobody lives beneath those approach paths, because when Denver opened that airport in 1995 it went out onto the plains and bought the emptiness on purpose. Under federal law the lease revenue cannot be diverted anywhere else. It stays with the airport. Colorado Springs is doing a version of this at its own airport business park, so the idea is not mine. Denver has paused this question rather than answered it. City Council members voted unanimously in May for a one-year moratorium on new data centers, scheduled to lift next spring. That pause is not an argument against choosing the ground. It is the time in which to choose it,The anger at that hearing is legitimate. Rates are climbing and people are asked to trust a process they cannot see. But anger aimed at the buildings lowers nobody's bill, while a condition written into a tariff binds for as long as the tariff lives. The final public comment hearing is October 20 at 4 p.m., and written comments remain open under Proceeding No. 26AL-0137E. If you go, bring a condition and not a veto. A moratorium buys a year. A condition buys a decade. Michael Canon lives in Castle Pines. He spent forty years building international air logistics operations, served as chief commercial officer of the authority developing Dubai World Central, and is co-author with John D. Kasarda of a forthcoming book on airport-driven regional development.