Decatur residents, green advocates call on Google to break Broadwing gas
deal
[November 14, 2026]
By Maggie Dougherty
CHICAGO — Decatur residents joined environmental advocates in front of
Google’s Chicago headquarters on Thursday to protest the tech giant’s
deal to power its data centers with energy purchased from a natural
gas-fired facility.
Through the deal, Google is making a major investment in carbon capture
and sequestration technology, known as CCS, that would trap carbon
dioxide emissions from power plants and bury it thousands of feet
underground.
The project announced last October between Google and Broadwing Energy
is currently under development in Decatur with the expectation of
bringing CCS technology to commercial operation by 2030, to potentially
store over 2 million tons of carbon dioxide waste per year in an
injection well operated by Archer-Daniels-Midland, Co., known better as
ADM.
But ADM already has a poor reputation with residents of Decatur, some of
whom say the company has lost their trust after a series of leaks at the
company’s CO2 monitoring wells went unreported and violated the Safe
Drinking Water Act.
Instead of investing in the Broadwing project, the coalition of
residents and activists called on Google to make a comparable investment
in renewable energy and battery solutions, and to invite Decatur
residents to the table for future discussions.
Kavi Chintam, Illinois campaign manager for the solar energy advocacy
nonprofit Vote Solar, said the state is at a crossroads. She urged
lawmakers to pass the POWER Act, a bill that would regulate data
centers’ energy and water usage, require greater transparency and set
environmental reporting standards.
“How we require data centers to power their operations today will define
this state’s climate legacy,” Chintam said. “Illinois can choose to cede
its climate leadership to further the interests of the data center
industry, or we can establish the strongest clean energy requirements in
the nation.”
Whether tech companies can use natural gas to power data centers is a
contentious question in ongoing negotiations around the POWER Act. It’s
likely that any legislation passed will require data centers to pay to
bring new energy to the grid to offset what they use, but the type of
energy will be crucial.
Advocates delivered a letter to Google’s Chicago headquarters during the
rally, seeking a response by Dec. 3.
Promise, doubts for CCS
This May, a Google executive confirmed the company remained committed to
its ambitious goal of running on 100% carbon-free power by 2030, a goal
it first set in 2020, despite the challenges it now faces to power its
major buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Advancing CCS technology has been a key part of Google’s strategy toward
achieving that goal, and success of the Decatur site would be a major
milestone — not just for Google, but globally.
But while CCS has been heralded as a solution to keep natural gas plants
on the grid without harmful carbon emissions, critics say the technology
is unproven — it has not been successfully deployed by electric
utilities in the U.S. yet — and environmental advocates consider it a
distraction used to prolong fossil fuel generation.
The new project’s storage goal would roughly quadruple the volume of
carbon waste ADM sequesters at its existing site, according to the most
recently available U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data.
Illinois’ landmark climate bill, the 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs
Act, or CEJA, requires power plants in the state to reduce carbon
emissions to zero by 2045. But the state’s transition away from fossil
fuel generation has coincided with the data center boom, resulting in
high energy prices for everyday users and deep concerns for grid
reliability amid projected shortfalls.
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Residents of Decatur join environmental advocates at a Nov. 12,
2026, rally in front of Google’s Chicago headquarters, calling on
the tech giant to break its power purchase agreement with Broadwing
Energy. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Maggie Dougherty)
When asked in October whether the state would need to delay its phaseout
of fossil fuels to prioritize energy supply, Gov. JB Pritzker told
Capitol News Illinois that developing technologies — like CCS — might
allow gas plants to reduce emissions enough to continue operating
without punting on the carbon mitigation timeline.
“Keeping those plants going is actually in the bill that was passed,
CEJA,” Pritzker said. “That is, it can keep going if it meets certain
requirements, and we believe the technology is advancing quite fast, and
so will allow those folks to apply the technology to bring down
emissions and make it possible for gas plants to keep going.”
But in lieu of successful CCS implementation, allowing technology giants
like Google to power their data centers with gas-fired plants would be a
major step back for the environmental coalition — and likely a red line
in negotiations.
Water, pollution
Residents are also concerned about the impacts of the Google-Broadwing
project on Lake Decatur, the city’s primary source of drinking water,
and one that has been strained by recent drought conditions.
Verlyn Rosenberger is a retired teacher and now an organizer with the
progressive grassroots organization Illinois People’s Action. She has
lived in Decatur for 64 years, her entire adult life, she said.
“Lake Decatur is where 70,000 Decatur residents, myself included, get
our drinking water,” Rosenberger said. “In 2025, during the drought, the
city asked us to ration water. We were told that every gallon mattered.
There is no backup.”
Most traditional methods of generating electricity are heavy water
users, mostly employing water for cooling. Natural gas plants drew an
average of 2,803 gallons per megawatt hour in 2021, according to the
U.S. Energy Information Administration.
That’s far more water-efficient than coal plants, which used an average
19,185 gallons per megawatt hour, but less water-efficient than most
renewables, which do not rely on water.
Beyond using water for cooling, residents worry about environmental
contamination if the pipes transporting carbon dioxide from the plant to
the sequestration wells leak.
Advocates say an investment by Google in renewable energy resources
instead would be well-suited to the area and create new workforce
opportunities. They suggest a partnership with Richland Community
College, which hosts a Clean Energy Job Hub — another product of the
CEJA legislation.
“Building a methane gas plant next to ADM will bring more fossil fuel
pollution to Decatur instead of new clean energy investments that can
put our CEJA workforce graduates to work,” said Manley Mallard, who also
lives near the Broadwing project. “That’s the wrong direction.”
Neither Google, ADM, nor Broadwing Energy’s parent company responded to
a request for comment.
Capitol News Illinois
is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state
government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded
primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick
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