Skeptics of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County are sweating about a lot more than its energy demands and potential toll on water supplies.
”Turn out, it could create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology, said Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.”
I work in the O&G industry. “Heat islands” are a legitimate concern for both refineries and power plants. Failure to limit the heat emissions in a given area can require personal to wear more protective gear just to get inside the facilities. Alternatively, you have to shut parts of the plant down to get people safely into and out of it for maintenance.
It absolutely has an impact on the surrounding ecology. And you can see the brownfields that certain decommissioned sites create, stretching for miles in every direction.
For a state like Utah, with a relatively low per-capita population and some of the country’s last pristine wilderness, rolling out a bunch of industrial facilities to suck up the potable water and blast the area with vented coolant would have a very real and noticeable impact.
The problem is that we’ve done this cycle of development and decimation so many times in our industrial era that “doing what we’ve always done” gets written off as fear-mongering, because we no longer recognize the impact.
I work in the O&G industry. “Heat islands” are a legitimate concern for both refineries and power plants. Failure to limit the heat emissions in a given area can require personal to wear more protective gear just to get inside the facilities. Alternatively, you have to shut parts of the plant down to get people safely into and out of it for maintenance.
It absolutely has an impact on the surrounding ecology. And you can see the brownfields that certain decommissioned sites create, stretching for miles in every direction.
For a state like Utah, with a relatively low per-capita population and some of the country’s last pristine wilderness, rolling out a bunch of industrial facilities to suck up the potable water and blast the area with vented coolant would have a very real and noticeable impact.
The problem is that we’ve done this cycle of development and decimation so many times in our industrial era that “doing what we’ve always done” gets written off as fear-mongering, because we no longer recognize the impact.