Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
How do you separate the verbiage that surrounds almost every issue today? In previous decades, people trusted the experts, the engineers, scientists, and technicians who made the industrial world go round.
Today, it’s very different. Some “keyboard warrior” living in his mother’s basement goes online and inundates social media with ridiculously inaccurate statements. People of similar ilk read his post and spread the cluelessness.
That’s how individuals damage the intellectual fabric of the modern world. The politicians do the same thing, only it’s orchestrated by the corporations that pay them.
Nearly every issue we face now has a lobbying group dropping thousands or even millions of dollars in the pockets of representatives and senators nationwide.
In Wyoming, data centers are one of the political Ping-Pong balls bouncing around the primary circuit.
You’ve probably read how data centers use all the water in a community, suck up all the electricity, and in the process raise the electricity rates for local consumers. The problem is that the same politicians who spread this news also endorse even heavier water use in coal-fired power plants.
A big data center, that is a “Really Big” data center, uses from one to five million gallons of water a day. This water is used to cool the servers stacked inside the facility.
Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and the Great Lakes region are all popular locations for data centers. In warmer regions of the nation, cooling must be done 12 months a year with high amounts of water. In the far north, you can literally open the windows in the winter to cool off the servers. Ambient outside temperatures below zero pumped into the facility by large fans are extremely effective.
On a much smaller scale, if you’ve ever been in the server room at a larger business, a school, or a university, you quickly learn that computers produce heat.
That old home PC you used for years before switching to a laptop had a power supply that converted 120-volt alternating current to five- and twelve-volt direct current. In the process, it produced a lot of heat. The cooling fan in the power supply sometimes roared if you let dust build up on the vents, slowing the airflow.
That’s the noise and heat created by one consumer-level PC. Now increase that PC to a much more powerful machine that requires many more amps to operate and then multiply it by 10,000 or so, and you have a data center.
Somehow the far-right extremists, the tinfoil-hat-wearing Freedom Caucus-style zealots, have equated data centers to a liberal plot to enslave the nation. Not likely. Data centers do just what their name implies. They process data, create designs, programs, images and media, and perform complex mathematical calculations, among many other functions.
I understand why the Freedom Caucus would oppose these. At their core, they process, enhance, and provide knowledge. The last things on the Freedom Caucus agenda are informed decisions, educated people and solutions to problems that don’t involve a gun.
A big data center can use the same amount of water that is consumed by a town the size of Gillette or Rock Springs. That’s a lot of water.
At the other extreme, the same people who decry data centers are all in on coal-fired power plants.
The Dave Johnston Power Plant has a generating capacity of 754 megawatts. If operated at full output around the clock, it can produce more than 18,000 megawatt-hours of electricity each day. It uses 15,000,000 gallons of water pulled directly from the North Platte River each day.
Coal heats water to create the steam that drives the turbines. Afterward, a cooling system removes waste heat and condenses the steam so the water can be reused. The visible white plumes associated with cooling towers consist primarily of condensed water vapor, not smoke.
Studies by the United States Geological Survey indicate that the heat generated is enough to increase the water temperature downstream by 28 degrees during peak production.
Eastern and West Coast power plants with greater access to surface water use different technologies. The Dave Johnston Plant is a once-through facility. That means the water cools the plant and is discharged back into the river.
The impact is that the dozen or so miles of the North Platte River east of the plant are significantly warmer than the river’s natural temperature. Wyoming Game and Fish studies have documented that trout don’t do well, but the bass, perch, bluegill and other warm-water species have adapted and now dominate that section of the river.
These same Freedom Caucus zealots don’t care one iota about the trout in the North Platte River. They’re too busy calling for the destruction of every wind-powered turbine across the windswept vastness of Wyoming because it “kills eagles.”
On one side, they don’t care about warmer water affecting fish habitat while suddenly becoming advocates for the eagles they’d happily shoot if they were allowed.
It’s not an intellectual dichotomy. It’s just political idiocy.
We need power plants whether they’re coal-fired, nuclear, wind-generated, solar or hydroelectric. They all produce that same 120 volts that eventually makes it to your kitchen. The electricity that you sometimes trip a breaker with when you plug too many appliances into one circuit.
The way that power reaches your home is all part of the grid, an increasingly political grid.
Don’t think that the pay-for-play representatives and senators dominating Washington, D.C. care a bit about whether you have a safe, reliable source of electricity. They don’t.
They do care very much about the amount of “influence” major energy corporations can put in their pockets. Influence comes with dollar signs attached. It always has in American politics, but now it’s on such an epic, open scale that most of us are simply overwhelmed by the corruption.
“Nothing to see here. Just a lobbyist passing out checks to representatives on the floor of the House in Cheyenne.”
Not all representatives, just the ones in the Freedom Caucus that voted as they were told by out-of-state handlers.
One final observation. We have a sizable group of paid politicians that are overtly concerned with the impact of data centers, but care nothing for the natural resources surrounding those proposed centers.
Sell off all the public land, build a fence around it, patrol it and keep the great unwashed away. These pristine sections of Wyoming are only for the wealthy and the well-connected. You don’t need to try to apply, you won’t make the list.
When will common sense return to the political process?
These paid-off politicians just do the work of the wealthy elite.
It’s always been part of the process, but it’s grown exponentially worse since the 1980s when Ronald Reagan quietly declared war on the working and middle classes.
His “trickle-down” economics didn’t trickle at all. They just put the savings, income, and value of the greatest portion of the American public up in steam, just like modern-day data centers and power plants.