When Humphrey the camel drinks root beer, he plants his fuzzy toes in the dirt, throws back his long neck, and sucks the sweet soda from a repurposed bourbon bottle. When he’s satisfied, his owner, Brenda Rizzo—an amiable 75-year-old with curled hair, dressed in a casual T-shirt and capri pants—gives Humphrey a pat on the neck, retrieves the bottle, and lovingly adjusts the bug-protection net that shields his face.
“I got him on a buy-one-get-one deal at Walmart,” says Rizzo. “Just kidding. He came from an auction in Missouri. Can you believe the previous owners didn’t want him?” The mother of two and grandmother to four—including Lana, pictured above—lives on a farm near Sugarloaf, Pennsylvania, which her father-in-law bought 68 years ago. Now widowed, she’s kept company by Humphrey, two German Shepherd rescues, and a 34-year-old horse.
Brenda Rizzo tends to Humphrey, who is chugging root beer. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado, Emily Forlini, PCMag)
Humphrey and the gang may have to relocate again soon. Pennsylvania Power & Light (PPL) Electrical Utilities says it intends to seize part of Rizzo’s 101-acre farm through eminent domain, exercising its legal right to build infrastructure deemed necessary for the community. The term for a parcel acquired by a utility in this scenario is a “land easement.” While PPL is seeking just 4.35 acres, Rizzo would not feel comfortable living there, given what it plans to do with the land. The utility intends to erect an unspecified number of towers, each as tall as 240 feet, for an extra-high voltage (500kV) electrical transmission line.
PPL tells us this is necessary to support an influx of new data centers, which are popping up “like chicken pox” in the region, as Rizzo puts it. In June, Amazon announced it “plans to invest at least $20 billion in this part of Pennsylvania to expand its data center infrastructure for AI and cloud computing.” Meanwhile, OpenAI is working on an 875-acre site in Texas—roughly seven times as large as the Mall of America. Amazon’s Indiana mega-site spans 1,200 acres.
Living near a data center—the storage spaces for racks of graphics processing units (GPUs), or AI-specific chips—can be a nightmare. Just ask the Virginia community that couldn’t sleep due to a 24/7 hum or the Georgia households whose kitchen taps slowed to a trickle after Meta built a facility nearby. This story highlights another, rarely discussed human toll: the planned acquisition of private land, some of which has been in families for generations, to make way for the electrical infrastructure required to power these centers.
A PCMag photo illustration of how the 240-foot transmission towers might look (Credit: Emily Forlini/Joseph Maldonado/Zain bin Awais/PCMag)
The worst part? PPL employees, speaking on the record, tell me that there is currently not enough electricity available for the new GPU mansions, which, at this scale, can require as much energy as a small city. The company will take the land and build the line anyway, but it has serious concerns about whether there will be any electrons for it to deliver. Is the promise of the AI boom worth the disruption to the community?
‘They Offered Me $1 for My Land’
The part of Rizzo’s property PPL is after is where she buried her husband’s ashes, she tells me during a tour of her property in her 2017 Ford Escape. He died in December 2020 after Covid exacerbated his cancer. “When PPL first called, I started crying because I promised my husband on his deathbed I’d never sell the farm,” Rizzo says as we bump over the grass, then down a 100-year-old road to a peaceful fern-floored forest.
A 100-year-old road at the back of Rizzo’s property (Credit: Joseph Maldonado, Emily Forlini, PCMag)
Back at Rizzo’s modest three-bedroom house, she shows me a three-inch-thick folder of emails and documents related to the PPL situation. “They offered me $1 for my land. One dollar!” she says as she flips through the papers, her smile faded, her shoulders tensed. “They think because I’m older and I was a farm wife that they can take advantage of me. Nope.”
Contract showing PPL’s $1 starting offer for Rizzo’s land (Credit: Brenda Rizzo/PPL/Zain bin Awais/PCMag)
Brenda’s visiting 44-year-old daughter, Michelle, who lives about two hours away, likens the situation to “being raped or violated.” The Rizzos are among hundreds of locals who have been flooding into town meeting halls to protest the data centers. Outside of the environmental impact and degradation of property values, residents say the centers aren’t even creating many jobs.
Amazon’s $20 billion investment in sprawling facilities in Northeast Pennsylvania will employ a total of just 1,250 people. In contrast, Ford’s $5 billion electric vehicle factory will employ 4,000 in just that one location. Data centers are also driving up wholesale electricity costs by as much as 267% and inflating utility bills in nearby communities, Bloomberg reports. Yet Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, with the backing of President Trump, hailed the Amazon deal as an economic windfall for the state.
To get a sense of the tension at these meetings, watch this video of a July altercation between Sugarloaf County resident Robert Schnee and a PPL representative, which has garnered 45,000 views and hundreds of likes.
In the clip, Schnee raises his voice and gestures forcefully, desperately trying to elicit a response from the PPL rep, a woman shown only from the back. You can see her—standing next to a company-provided poster featuring basic facts about the transmission line—nodding silently.
“Everybody here worked their entire life for their properties! You have farmers who work 18-hour days that are affected!” he yells as the crowd starts to cheer and clap. “I have yet to hear tonight [from PPL], ‘How may I help you?’ We have questions! We know where this is going. This is a dog and pony show. So yeah, I think the people of Sugarloaf County have spoken.”
At one point, Schnee mentions the land is already scarred by defunct coal mines, wounds from the last century’s big business boom. He could have also noted the more recent wave of e-commerce warehouses that have paved over small farms. Now, the even larger data centers are moving in, plus Trump is reopening coal plants to “meet the growing domestic energy demands,” according to an April executive order. This week, the administration announced a $625 million investment in the coal industry.
Behind Schnee in the video stands John Zola, the founder of the Alliance to Stop the Line, the primary community group fighting to halt PPL’s construction of the transmission line. It has a core group of 50 members and a petition with over 2,700 signatures from individuals opposed to the project.
The organization says that it is aware of 95 households, or approximately 400 people, across a 12-mile area affected by the Sugarloaf line. PPL tells us the official number of households will become public later this fall, once it files the application to build the line.
John Zola standing where the line will run through his property (Credit: Joseph Maldonado/Emily Forlini/PCMag)
Zola, 62, greets me at his doorstep when I arrive in Sugarloaf, prior to my visit to Rizzo’s farm. Fifteen years ago, Zola, a successful HVAC business owner wearing shorts and a white Alliance to Stop the Line T-shirt, purchased a wooded property in the area and built a modern home featuring bay windows that overlook the valley.
His two children also recently built homes on the property. The line will run through the basketball court where his grandson plays. Giant towers will dominate the family’s vista, and real estate experts tell Zola they will “destroy” the value of his property. “We never would’ve moved here and done all this if we knew this was going to happen,” he says.
Zola is particularly concerned about the potential health effects for the three children who live there. The towers emit electromagnetic fields (EMFs), which the scientific evidence says are safe, although it is still an area of active study amid public reports of symptoms such as headaches, anxiety, suicide and depression, nausea, fatigue, and loss of libido, according to the World Health Organization.
“When the land surveyor came to my house, I put on a very sweet voice, smiled and said, ‘I have a .357 magnum and a backhoe.'” That’s a revolver and a gravedigger.
Health concerns are also top of mind for Brenda Rizzo, a major reason she would move off her farm if PPL acquires parts of it and builds the towers. But for now, she’s still fighting to stay.
“When the land surveyor came to my house, I put on a very sweet voice, smiled and said, ‘I have a .357 magnum and a backhoe,’” she says with a laugh. That’s a revolver and a gravedigger.
They left, but the PPL negotiator assigned to her case remains persistent. Rizzo says he has called her a dozen times since their initial contact in February and has shown up at her home unannounced three times.
Face-to-Face With an ‘Empathetic’ PPL
After visiting Rizzo, I drive to PPL’s headquarters in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I’m warmly greeted by Dana Burns, communications director. She brings me to a spacious conference room, where around an oval-shaped wooden table sit Joseph Lookup, vice president of planning and asset management, Shelby Linton-Keddie, senior director of government, regulatory policy, and external affairs, and Michael Shafer, regulatory council.
“Why do you think PPL’s relationship with the community has become so fractured over this project?” is one of the first questions I ask the group.
“I wouldn’t say it’s fractured,” replies Linton-Keddie.
I tell them that I saw a video of a resident yelling at a PPL representative at a public meeting while the crowd cheers the man on. Surely they know there’s some discontent, right?
“That’s me in the video,” Linton-Keddie says with a grin and a half-hand raise.
The room is silent when I ask how they would feel if the government took a slice of their backyard to build a 240-foot power tower.
“Listen, we’re empathetic,” Burns says. “I think they just don’t like change. They don’t want the development.” The room is silent when I ask how they would feel if the government took a slice of their backyard to build a 240-foot power tower.
In fairness, the data centers are also putting PPL in a tough spot. It will need to nearly double its capacity in the next five years or so, from its current peak of 7.5 gigawatts to 14.4 gigawatts—enough for approximately 10.8 million homes—largely due to the growth of data centers. Luzerne County, in which Sugarloaf is located, has just over 150,000 households.
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Up until now, there was “a very long period of essentially flat or declining load growth, partly because of energy efficiency and no new customers,” Burns says.
“Three years ago, nobody was talking about this, so it’s happening so fast and at a scale we haven’t seen during any of our lifetimes,” Linton-Keddie adds.
You’d think that would be an exciting moment for a stodgy public utility, which stands to make a killing on transmission fees, but when I ask what the feeling within the organization is about the data centers, there’s a long pause.
“Concern, mostly,” Shafer says.
“Excitement, too,” Burns cuts in quickly. “You know, all of it.”
“We don’t have a plan for electrical generation, so that’s where our concerns come in,” Shafer adds. “We need a backup plan. If we build the data centers and we have the wires hooked up, but there aren’t enough electrons, we get stuck.” (That lines up with the one-pager Burns hands me at the start of the meeting, titled “Pennsylvania’s Looming Energy Resource Adequacy Crisis.”)
A PPL flier calling Pennsylvania’s energy deficit a “crisis” (Credit: PPL/Zain bin Awais/PCMag)
In other words, there isn’t enough electricity to power the data centers, even if PPL builds the transmission lines. PPL only transports power; it doesn’t make it. Coal, wind, solar, and nuclear plants connect to the grid, which is operated by PJM Interconnection LLC in Pennsylvania and 12 other Northeastern states.
In September, PJM executive Stu Bresler called the electricity shortage a “very significant issue” in an announcement that the company is launching an initiative to determine how to generate more power. When I correspond with a PJM spokesperson via email, they add that the intention is to have a plan in place by the end of the year.
An Amazon spokesperson tells me that they cannot comment on the Sugarloaf project in particular, but adds that Amazon is aware of rapidly growing energy demands and has several ongoing efforts to modernize the grid, including deploying new technologies to replace transmission lines that “avoid increased costs” for households.
PPL says that it can neither confirm nor deny whether the Sugarloaf line is for data centers, but all our discussions have centered on them. PJM senior communications manager Jeffrey Shields is more forthright: “Recent transmission needs have been driven generally by growing demand that is a result of data centers.”
PPL also declines to say who the client for any data centers would be. But Amazon seems like a likely suspect. The tech giant’s $20 billion data center investment is in this exact area. On the same day I met with PPL, an Amazon representative attended a local community meeting about the proposed data centers in nearby Archibald, Pennsylvania, according to a report in the Scranton Times-Tribune.
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The Susquehanna Steam Electric station has two reactors. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado, Emily Forlini, PCMag)
Amazon also already operates a data center in this area, next to the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, a nuclear plant. The Sugarloaf transmission line will originate near the plant and extend to an industrial data center park across the mountains. PPL tells me the Sugarloaf line is not related to the Susquehanna plant or Amazon, although the tech giant in June announced plans to expand operations from the Susquehanna plant to more “data centers in the region.” The exact sites are unknown.
PPL’s public-facing website insists the Sugarloaf Transmission Project is a run-of-the-mill upgrade that’s “necessary to help protect the electric grid from extreme weather, reduce outages, and enable renewable energy interconnections.” It does not use the words “data center” or name Amazon, although it does make vague mention of new business projects.
At the same time, the language PPL uses with residents has also shifted over time. “First, PPL talked to us about a ‘client’ that needed the line, and then it changed to ‘clients,’” says Andy Sanko, 58, a vocal opponent of the line and the superintendent of the Council Rock school district, about two hours away from Sugarloaf. PPL wants to take a slice of the Sugarloaf property that has been in his family for six generations. Sanko’s parents live there, and their six grandchildren stand to inherit the place.
Andy Sanko (right) and his parents at the couple’s home (Credit: Joseph Maldonado/Emily Forlini/PCMag)
“If PPL said that the line was specifically to serve one single client, then public advocates and regulators would fight to have the entire project costs be borne by that client,” says Gary Cunningham, director at Tradition Energy, an energy advisory firm. The argument would be that the company the project benefits should pay for it, not local residents who have little say in the matter.
The truth may lie in a May 2025 PPL presentation. On a slide that PPL tells me relates to the Sugarloaf project, it describes the impetus for the line as follows: “A customer has submitted a request to have their facility served from a 230kV source in Hazleton, PA.” The transmission upgrades are estimated to cost $197.5 million, as shown in the presentation below. PPL repeatedly declined to answer who the “customer” is.
A PPL presentation on the Sugarloaf Transmission Project referencing a single “customer” in need of electricity (Credit: PPL/Zain bin Awais/PCMag)
If the identity of the tech company that will use the data centers leaks, says Darryl Lawrence, an elected state official in Pennsylvania who protects consumers from public utility abuses, it could prompt that company to kill the project or switch its investment to another state to avoid a fight over who will foot the bill—bad news for Gov. Shapiro’s big deal.
The Phones Are Ringing, and the Clock Is Ticking
PPL’s trained negotiators, called “right of way agents,” are now working to finalize the land easement settlements with local residents despite the uphill challenges the data centers face. If residents don’t agree to a price by the time the utility files its formal application this fall to build the line with the Public Utility Commission (PUC), PPL’s Shafer says, the original offers stand.
“They came to my work, and they call me constantly,” Sanko says of PPL’s right of way agents. He shows me the voicemail section on his phone, which is full of messages from an Alabama number. Other residents tell me their assigned agents are from Texas and Tennessee.
The out-of-state element feels like an insult to a local like Sanko. How can someone with no connection to the area rip away part of his family’s property and build hideous towers that ruin the rest of it? “They offered me $3,000, which is too low,” Sanko says. “I told them, ‘Find every 7.37-acre plot of land in Sugarloaf Township that costs $3,000, and I will immediately buy them all.’”
Rizzo’s right of way agent upped his offer from $1 to $41,078 after her resistance and suggested that PPL could move the line 20 feet to avoid her husband’s ashes, but it’s still not enough. The contract he is asking her to sign effectively gives PPL access to the rest of her property to build supporting lines, store equipment, and spray pesticides. It has access to expand the area “upon, across, over, under, along, and within” the easement at any time—yet another reason she wouldn’t feel comfortable staying on the property.
A sign on Rizzo’s property (Credit: Joseph Maldonado, Emily Forlini, PCMag)
PPL’s application is likely to be approved because it’s widening sections of land it already owns near these properties, says Lawrence, the consumer advocate. That land is currently empty and too thin to accommodate the 240-foot towers. The project is scheduled to break ground in early 2026, with a targeted completion date of 2027, as requested by its unnamed customer.
Community resistance might be the only hope to torpedo the project. “Public participation is crucial, as I’ve told the folks in Sugarloaf,” Lawrence says. “The more organized they are, the more their numbers, the louder the outcry is, it’s going to be heard.”
There is precedent. Google this week killed a data center project in Indiana amid community pushback, according to NPR affiliate WFYI. Another data center developer scrapped plans for a facility in central Pennsylvania in August, partly because it would’ve been responsible for paying for the necessary electrical upgrades, PennLive reports.
At the same time, a slate of proposed legislation, including Pennsylvania Senate Bill 939, aims to make it harder for local municipalities to halt data center buildouts. They would also fast-track the centers’ approvals. President Trump is also working on slashing red tape at the federal level and signed an executive order in July to make it easier to build transmission lines and other infrastructure. “We’re making it very easy for you in terms of electric capacity and getting it for you, getting your permits,” Trump told Silicon Valley CEOs at a September White House dinner.
President Trump attends a summit on AI investments in Pennsylvania in July. (Credit: Amazon)
In a post-visit phone call, Rizzo sounds resigned. She tells me in a quiet voice that she may “just need to see how much” she can get from PPL for her land at this point.
Meanwhile, when I ask Zola in person what he’ll do if the transmission line goes up, there’s a long pause. “I can’t even imagine that,” he says. “I’ll fight it to the end.” The emotional toll on him and his family “cuts deep,” but the self-described “meat and potatoes guy” says he “won’t give PPL the satisfaction of going to therapy.”
Instead, he has hired a lawyer to explore ways to fight back and is focused on gathering more signatures for the Alliance to Stop the Line petition. He calls local politicians daily, but he says they aren’t taking his concerns about property values, the environment, public health, and other issues seriously.
“I keep telling myself, ‘This is America. This is happening in America,’” Zola says. “When local politicians won’t listen to you about a serious issue, something is wrong. The system is broken.”
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About Our Expert
Emily Forlini
Senior Reporter
Experience
As a news and features writer at PCMag, I cover the biggest tech trends that shape the way we live and work. I specialize in on-the-ground reporting, uncovering stories from the people who are at the center of change—whether that’s the CEO of a high-valued startup or an everyday person taking on Big Tech. I also cover daily tech news and breaking stories, contextualizing them so you get the full picture.
I came to journalism from a previous career working in Big Tech on the West Coast. That experience gave me an up-close view of how software works and how business strategies shift over time. Now that I have my master’s in journalism from Northwestern University, I couple my insider knowledge and reporting chops to help answer the big question: Where is this all going?
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