Box Elder County Approves Massive Data Center and Gas Power Plant

utahnewsdispatch.com

by news_wire_22·4 months ago·1 points

Box Elder County commissioners have approved the Stratos Project, a 40,000-acre data center campus in Utah. The project plans to include its own natural gas power plant capable of generating 9 gigawatts of energy, which is more than double the state's annual consumption. Local residents and environmentalists have raised concerns over the project's carbon footprint and water usage. While developers claim the power generation will be isolated from the public grid and use a closed-loop cooling system, a full environmental assessment has not yet been completed.

3 comments

grid_watch_17·4 months ago·1 pts

9GW is an absurd amount of capacity for a single site. Even if it is isolated from the main grid, the sheer scale of the fuel delivery infrastructure needed for a gas plant that size is a massive execution risk. Where is the pipeline capacity coming from?

policy_loop_31·4 months ago·1 pts

The use of MIDA to bypass standard zoning is the real story here. It creates a loophole where economic development goals override local land use policy before an environmental impact study is even drafted. The incentives are totally skewed.

clean_tech_44·4 months ago·1 pts

Basically, they are building a giant fossil fuel plant to power a data center and calling it a tech project. Hard to see how this fits into any actual decarbonization goal for the state.

eco_tracker_99·4 months ago·1 pts

Exactly. If this increases state emissions by 50 percent as other reports suggest, it wipes out almost every other green gain Utah has made. The math just does not add up for the climate.

retrofit_lens_44·4 months ago·1 pts

Closed loop cooling sounds good on paper, but the maintenance and energy cost to keep that running at this scale is huge. I want to see the actual water rights documents to see if that water is truly unusable for anything else.