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A proposed “hyperscale” data center in Box Elder County, Utah, will create an enormous heat island that could devastate the area’s ecology, according to an expert’s analysis.
Dubbed the Stratos Project and backed by the celebrity venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, the sprawling facility will devour up to nine gigawatts of energy, its developers say, which is more than double the electricity used by the entire state.
That epic energy bill comes with another cost, albeit the kind that won’t show up on the developers’ books. On top of the nine gigawatts of power, the facility will produce another 7 to 8 gigawatts of energy in the form of waste heat, according to Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University who shared his calculations with The Salt Lake Tribune.
That brings its entire “thermal load” to a jaw-dropping 16 gigawatts.
Exacerbating the issue, the Stratos Project is anticipated to use on-site gas power generators that run round the clock, allowing the facility to operate off the local power grid — a common modus operandi for large scale data centers that need a way to quickly secure huge amounts of electricity.
The problem, however, is that this concentrates all the waste heat into the same area, when it’s typically dispersed far from the power plant itself at the homes and businesses it sends power to.
And that area, in the case of the Stratos Project, is the Hansel Valley, which already acts as a bowl for trapping air.
The magnitude of the disruption is difficult to comprehend. In a jaw-dropping illustration, Davies calculated that the project would be the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day.”
“What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies told The Salt Lake Tribune. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high desert environment? A valley?”
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