Representative Ro Khanna introduced a Data Center Bill of Rights and described the industry as engaged in "damaging practices," according to Benzinga's report. His summary of the bill: "The Data Center Bill of Rights gives local communities the right to oppose them. It bans data centers in residential areas and farmland." The specific complaints he lists are construction starting before environmental review completes, transmission and water and infrastructure costs landing on residents and ratepayers, noise, air quality, and groundwater contamination. Senator Elizabeth Warren's framing runs alongside it: one AI data center drawing the electricity of 100,000 households.
Khanna says backup generators are becoming de facto private power plants, and that is the observation with real regulatory teeth. Emergency generators get permitted under a different and much looser air standard than prime power, on the theory that they run a few dozen hours a year for testing and outages. Run them as baseload behind the meter and the permit no longer describes the machine. Virginia has been arguing about exactly this loophole, and 73,000 megawatts of off-grid generation is moving through permitting with very little scrutiny. Generators also reject their own heat, which is a load nobody counts because it sits outside the IT boundary.
Two of the four nuisances Khanna names come straight out of the mechanical yard. Noise at the property line is air-cooled chillers, dry coolers, and condenser fans, and it is the complaint that survives every other concession an operator makes. Community pushback over cooling noise is now its own category of opposition. Groundwater is tower makeup, blowdown chemistry, and in a growing number of filings the fluorinated compounds in two-phase systems. North Carolina has been running that fight in the Cape Fear basin.
Here is the structural problem with the bill as described. Zoning a data center out of farmland changes where the thermal load sits. It does not change the thermal design of the several hundred facilities already permitted, and those are the ones generating the complaints Khanna is responding to. The Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez moratorium bill has the same gap. A federal rule that set a maximum consumptive water intensity per megawatt-hour, or a property-line sound limit, would reshape what gets built far more than a siting ban, and it would do it inside the mechanical scope where the vendors can actually respond. Nobody has filed that bill. Until someone does, the cooling spec stays the lever nobody in Washington is pulling.