It’s not like Lucas Smolcic-Larson doesn’t have a complex enough beat for MLive, covering utilities and energy issues across Michigan.

But now, thrust into the realm of proposals to build humongous data centers by high-tech companies, it’s like he’s been handed a scrambled Rubik’s cube and told to solve it – and explain how – while people shout all around him.

Land use issues. Regulatory issues. Economic issues. Technological issues. Power grid issues. Environmental issues. And that old standby, NIMBY issues – not in my back yard.

“This has been a challenge for me,” Smolcic-Larson told me this week. “This is the biggest story in the utility world right now and it is technical, but it has big implications for the power bills that we pay, and that’s why people should track it.”

The cente

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