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?”
If nuclear bombs are hard to wrap your head around, try Walmart Supercenters. In acreage, the Stratos facility will be equal to about 2,000 of those big box stores — but its energy footprint will be that of 40,000 Walmart supercenters, or 2,000 Walmarts stacked 20 deep, he wrote in a summary of his findings.
The environmental consequences could be downright apocalyptic. Davies calculated it would spike local temperatures by five degrees Fahrenheit during the day, and 28 degrees at night.
“That’s the difference between Utah’s semi-arid climate and the Sahara Desert,” Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University who reviewed Davies’ work, told The Salt Lake Tribune. “This would absolutely change the landscape.”
The valley, Abbott predicts, will become yet another desiccated landscape that adds to the area’s dust problem as the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake exposes more lakebed.
Davies’ preliminary analysis adds to a mounting body of research on data centers’ thermal impact. Another study exploring the heat island effect of the facilities suggested that they could spike land temperatures by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit for miles around them. On top of straining the local ecology, this may already be redounding on the facilities themselves: last week, Amazon Web Services said that it had to temporarily shut down a data center in northern Virginia because of overheating.
More on data centers: In Irony-Soaked Incident, Amazon Data Center Shuts Down Due to High Temperatures
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