The Box Elder data center needs water rights, permits, workers, contractors, logistics, and public approval. Each one of those can be levera
The Stratos Project in Utah. Kevin O’Leary has gotten his stupid 40,000 acre data center approved, for Box Elder, near the Great Salt Lake.
There is still time to overturn this. Why is it so important? The linked article will explain it, but TL;DR:
- It will DEVASTATE the community and the lake, when Utah is already in a record high drought.
- It will consume an egregious amount of water daily, emitting a catastrophic amount of heat.
-This will in turn deplete the town of its resources and alienate people from their jobs, while it claims to allow more to be made.
-If the lake dries up, it will release arsenic into the air and pollute the town of Box Elder.
-This will undo YEARS of strides against Climate Change. We are at a point where we are transitioning away from Fossil Fuels, into clean sustainable energy. Do NOT let this pass.
File a formal protest, contact your states representatives and your county’s leaders and speak out against this to ensure we are heard. Take measures to protect your community and fight for Utah’s.
We can stop this, we can still win, there is hope.
You can donate to help, or if you live nearby you can sign and fight against this change. Do not think this ends here, this is the first battle of many, and do not think this won’t come for you. If we win here we show them they can’t push us around. We ALL have a voice, don’t let it stay silent!!!
Skeptics of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County are sweating about a lot more than its energy demands and potential toll
Excerpt from this story from The Salt Lake Tribune:
Skeptics of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County are sweating about a lot more than its energy demands and potential toll on water supplies.
Turn out, it could create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology, said Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.
“I suspected it would not be good,” Davies said. “What I’ve found is it’s so much worse than I even thought it would be.”
News of the proposed sprawling data complex, dubbed the Stratos Project, became public last month. The project’s boosters say it will likely need 9 gigawatts of energy at full build — more than double the electricity currently used by the entire state of Utah. That energy will likely come from a pipeline carrying natural gas from Wyoming to Nevada, Oregon and California. The project’s developer, “Shark Tank” celebrity Kevin O’Leary, specifically chose Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley to build the complex because the pipeline spans it, state officials have said.
Davies has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations to better understand the shear scale of what’s proposed. And what he’s penciled out so far has him alarmed.
“Nine gigawatts, that’s a number that’s really challenging to get your brain around,” the professor said. ”Communicating the scale has been a real problem.”
The project will actually produce more than 9 gigawatts of energy, Davies explained, because anytime a gadget consumes power, it also produces energy in the form of heat, whether it’s a toaster, a car or a sprawling rack of computer servers.
All the heat the Stratos Project emits will add up to another 7 to 8 gigawatts of energy in the form of waste heat.
Typically, waste heat is generated far from the power plant itself, in homes, businesses or on roads where it dissipates.
But for the Stratos project, it will get dumped into the local environment of Hansel Valley, in the same geographic bowl as the power plant. That actually makes the data complex a 16 gigawatt thermal load project, the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day,” Davies said.
“What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies wondered. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high desert environment? A valley?”
The professor predicts dumping that much heat and energy into Hansel Valley will raise local temperatures by five degrees Fahrenheit during the day and up to 28 degrees at night.
“That’s the difference between Utah’s semi-arid climate and the Sahara Desert,” said Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University who has reviewed Davies’ estimates. “This would absolutely change the landscape.”
Evaporation would spike. The dewpoint could vanish, with devastating consequences on wildlife, plants and the fertility of land owned by other ranchers in the valley, the scientists said. Abbott suspects Hansel Valley would become another dust source on the Wasatch Front, in addition to the exposed and drying lakebed of the shrinking Great Salt Lake.
“I’m happy to be further educated. Maybe I’m getting something wrong here,” Davies said. “But that is kind of the point, right? You literally have a hyperscale project that is getting no due diligence.”
