Agree in putting hold on proposed data centers for Sanpete

It made my day to recently learn that our Sanpete County Planning Commission had placed a hold on consideration of any proposed data center in Sanpete County, in order to enact the necessary measures to protect residents from the impacts these projects entail.

I appreciate the Messenger’s reporting on this development, and I’m sincerely grateful to our county planners and commissioners for their long-term foresight, vision, and public commitment to protecting our community. This is especially the case after witnessing, again and again, the failures of county commissions across our state, and across the country, to foresee and protect their communities from these serious impacts.

With the current nationwide spike and rush in applications for approving such projects, and with such limited precedent for properly reviewing their applications, communities across the country have struggled to apply the needed research and basic long-term planning when it comes to weighing public health, environmental, economic, and other impacts involved.

So much of this AI data center boom is unexplored territory and brings with it the hazards of boom-and-bust development that too often, in the experience of rural communities, tend to leave us dealing with unconsidered consequences. In the absence of better national or state-level standards and leadership in such matters, county commissions can find themselves under extreme pressures to accommodate certain risks to local communities, and to simply accept the promises of developers with limited evidence or guarantee of what the real outcomes will be.

For instance, over the past few months, the Stratos project in Box Elder County has attracted much negative attention from, and an overwhelming rejection by, the surrounding community, and rightly so. However, far less attention has been paid to the two recently-approved data centers in our neighboring Millard County (the 12 GW Joule and 10 GW Creekstone sites). At full build-out, these projects will require a combined energy input of 22 GW, more than double the 9 GW required for Stratos, and over 5 times the total current energy draw for the entire state of Utah.

In following Millard’s approvals process, my concerns have ranged from being primarily about water use, to also being about the tremendous emissions these two projects will produce. We share not only a watershed with Millard County but also an airshed, and air quality impacts do not limit themselves to county lines, or even to just the present generation.

The initial phase of the Joule project alone entails 4,380 tons of air pollution annually, including 1,380 tons of nitrogen oxide, a pollutant specifically resulting in smog-forming ozone and haze. This immense pollution output is not surprising, given that the primary power supply for each of the six initial buildings on the 4,000-acre site will be driven by 69 Caterpillar methane-powered generators. The long-term air quality, public health, and environmental impacts are not only local, but will be to our entire down-wind region.

For these reasons, thorough watershed impact, air quality impact (including long-term and larger-regional public health and environmental impact), and other appropriate studies must be conducted as part of any application process for such projects. These impact studies have been widely neglected in the cases of Box Elder, Millard, and other county approvals, but are, in my view, essential going forward following Sanpete’s moratorium period.

Again, it is for these reasons I’m so appreciative of our planning commission’s more careful approach here.

English Brooks
Ephraim