Officials Powerless to Stop 8 New Data Centers That Could Transform Small Texas County
"c0lo" writes:
Officials powerless to stop 8 new data centers that could transform small Texas county:
At least 248 data centers are planned to be built in Texas - nearly half in unincorporated areas.
Brian Crawford points to the top of a hill northwest of his family's home garden, just past their gently sloping yard dotted with live oaks beginning to flower.
"All of this would be buildings," said his wife, Laura Crawford. "A slab of concrete," Brian added.
Their property is a 118-acre paradise along the Paluxy River Valley where the couple care for a menagerie of animals including their two enormous donkeys, Little Joe and Hoss, chickens and a herd of African antelope that they inherited when they bought the property nine years ago.
Instead of green, about 600 yards away from their garden, they could soon be looking at 2,100 acres of warehouse-like structures filled with computing servers that process the digital world, flattening their scenic view into something industrial. The site plan calls for a campus that spans almost six times the size of University of Texas at Austin's main campus. Its Florida-based developer refers to it as the Comanche Circle project, but the eventual company that will run the data center has not been publicly revealed.
This is just the beginning of the data center revolution in Hood County, a rural community of 62,000 people about an hour southwest of Fort Worth. Developers have proposed eight data centers spanning over 7,600 acres, or 12 square miles. While it's unclear how much power all of the facilities would require, the Comanche Circle data center, plus two other smaller projects from the same developer, could use up to 3 gigawatts of electricity at full capacity, according to its developer [Video not reviewed. --Ed] - enough to power about 3 million homes. Some of the power could be generated by a new on-site gas plant, and some will likely come from the state's power grid, according to the project's concept plan.
Comanche Circle will need an initial one-time "flush and fill" starting next year of 95 million gallons of water for its seven-year buildout, and then 150,000 gallons per day - equivalent to the average use of 500 U.S. households, according to the minutes of the local water district board meeting where the developer made its request [.PDF]. In an email to The Texas Tribune, the developer said that the number submitted to the district board was incorrect and his three data centers combined would use "less than 50,000 gallons per day of groundwater" at full build out.
Hood County locals are relentless in their fight against the data centers, packing county meetings and town halls and voicing their fierce opposition to the facilities threatening to transform their charming, small-town community.
But, county officials say their hands are tied in their ability to stop or slow development. Two efforts by Hood County commissioners to pass a moratorium on data centers failed , as a state lawmaker warned they were acting outside of their authority. And the county has been sued twice by developers -after the local officials rejected one data center's concept plan, citing a lack of information about critical considerations like where they'd get their water from, and then tabled a vote on another.
"I was elected by the people to represent their opinion," Kevin Andrews, a Hood County commissioner who has lived in the county for two decades, said in an interview. "But I also have to follow the law ... and not get the county sued."
Data center developers are more frequently choosing rural, unincorporated areas like Hood County because it's an easier path to build, experts say. In Texas, counties typically don't have the power to block development - unlike city officials who wield zoning authority.
"Texas has always viewed counties as rural toddlers that can't be trusted with full powers," said Robert Paterson, a professor at UT-Austin who specializes in land use and environmental planning.
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