Opinion.
There are numbers that might be worth thinking about: I see 1,340 potential data center sites. And, as a second choice, another 450,000 additional sites?
To read more articles by Mark Trahant, go to: Marktrahant.substack.com
Where do those numbers come from? That’s the number of active Superfund sites listed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List. The second number listed are the 450,000 estimated brownfield locations.
More numbers: There are 19 Superfund sites located on tribal land and about 200 Superfund sites that the EPA says are of “direct interest” to tribal nations. Another 141 Superfund sites are located within 10 miles of tribal land and 400,000 tribal citizens live within three miles of a heavily contaminated site.
A few miles from my home in Southern Idaho is the former FMC Elemental Phosphorous Plant Site. The plant was built in the 1940s to process the ore. The facility is now gone and deadly waste ponds are capped and, in theory, monitored.
What if that land was a proposed data center? What if toxic lands, lands ruined by the industrialization of the past, were listed as possible sites?
The Trump administration’s EPA says it’s worth considering these sites. “Superfund sites have significant redevelopment potential, and many Superfund sites are suitable for redevelopment even if cleanup is still ongoing. EPA’s Superfund Redevelopment Program and site staff work with communities, stakeholders, and other interested partners to consider and integrate future use opportunities into Superfund cleanup plans,” the agency says on its web site.
But even if there’s merit to the idea itself, there has to be a lot of thought — and community discussions about going this route.
Workers, of course, would have to be protected. But that could be a problem that’s managed. And not every site would work. The former FMC site has plusses (and some big minuses). It has power. It can’t be used for much of anything. But it also might be too close to town, an airport, and who knows how the rumble of a data center might impact toxic waste ponds.
But we should be thinking differently about location. Data centers are being planned on federal lands because there’s no body that can tell the Trump administration, “no.” And now we know that the Secretary of Interior has a financial interest as he considers, makes that approves, building data centers on federal lands. Other data centers are being planned for communities where we have political clout. Fewer ways to say, “no.” (And Elon Musk is now pondering data centers in space where it’ll be free of regulation. Right? I don’t think so.)
Building a data center on toxic land might be outrageous. But consider where many are being constructed now: Near homes, schools, basically next door. Remember the shopping mall on screen as The Twin Pines Mall in Back to the Future? That’s now a proposed 10-megawatt data center (a small one.)
Of course there’s no national standard for where we build these data centers, large or small. It’s pretty much up to federal land managers, local government officials or elected tribal leaders. And that means the industry is free to pick willing participants that favor the quick build. (The rush of this whole enterprise has been compared to the building of railroads in the 19th century. And that was a pretty dark history.)
Last week at Groundswell’s Rural Renaissance Roadshow I heard a different take from Amelia Powers Gardner, a county commissioner from Utah County. In a remote part of the county, land owners had property that could be developed for a variety of reasons.
“So this is land that was really not developable. They can’t really farm it because the soil isn’t very good and it’s unirrigated land. It’s called the mining and grazing zone. And so we’ve got property owners who’ve literally owned property for decades that they can do nothing with that my county is collecting about $35 a year on that for property tax,” she said. The property tax on the data center is about $6.5 million a year, enough money to bond two schools.
And the county was facing another pressure point: Growth. Some 25,000 people a year are moving there and that requires new electricity generation and power lines.
“So we are required to bring that in and that’s a very expensive process and that would’ve cost the rate payers in my community a lot of money. And they figure about $10 per household per month is what that would’ve cost to bring that in,” Gardner said. “But because we have data centers, we can make the data centers pay for it. And so we have a whole bunch of people saying now saying we don’t want a data center because that’s what is the sexy thing to say now. And when we tell them, okay, well, we can raise your power bill $10 a month indefinitely.”
What’s the bigger picture?
“You have to go off of the data, not the emotion. I can’t tell you how many times I have somebody screaming saying, we live in a desert, we can’t have water,” she said. But the project was a closed loop water that used a small amount of water, she said more than a local city park.
How do communities figure that part of the equation? What do we want, what do we need? More access to the electric grid? A clean up of toxic lands? The “if you do this,” list can be long.
Most projects have some sort of Community Reinvestment Act fund that can be used for a variety of local initiatives.
Amelia Powers Gardner talked about another county in Utah and a clean energy project. The commissioner is a rancher, thousands of head of cattle, thousands of acres, and she has wind and solar installations on her ranch where she grazes her cattle.
“Well, her community, what they chose to do, they want to have a say in what does this money go to? So they have this community reinvestment fund and they decided to put in a new rodeo grounds. That’s what the community wanted …
“World champion bareback riders and bull riders are from their county. And the county chose with that money from the data center that what they wanted was a new rodeo grounds. So that’s what they’re doing. And they just wanted a stay in that. In my county, it’s used mostly for STEM education.”
To get there, a conversation about what’s needed and why. Followed by an enforcement mechanism that makes companies do what they say they will do.
“You need to be looking down the road. Make sure that you’ve got your community engagement, your listening throughout the process, community investment, and then beyond the standard agreements, negotiate past your boilerplate agreements,: Gardner says. “This is something that we got a little bit creative with on our last expansion of the metadata center. We had an area of road that needed to get finished and we just threw it in there in the negotiation. We’re like, ‘And you need to finish our road.’”
Why not?
I can see a long list of priorities that would make sense for this kind of partnership between a tribal nation and a data center company.
—New schools, and better STEM education
— Better infrastructure for the community, water, sewer, electric grid improvements. Plus home repair and weatherization
— Natural resource enhancements, money for fish and wildlife projects
— And, why not even aspirational demands: Funding a tribal archive (one where the data is limited so the outside world does not have access)
There are plenty of reasons for tribes — and communities — to just say no. Or even pause. There are so many data centers projects now are one-sided and unfair. The industry is using tricks in the law to gets way without regulation, negotiation, or fairness. But it doesn’t need to be that way.
And the toxic lands were we already live? Well, there not going anywhere or being restored in any logical way now. It doesn’t need to be that way. Finish our road.
