Good Data Centers?

Happy Monday! Hope you all had a great weekend!

Back to the potential Data Center.

I am still waiting on the public records request from the 16th to be filled. Hoping to have that this week. That will provide more information about the potential data center that I can then pass along to you!

On Saturday, I was invited by North Suncoast Conservative Club to participate in a roundtable discussion along with Jimmie T Smith and Joe Hicks. Jimmie does videos on his social media pages regarding county issues and Joe provides insight into things like the county budget.

It was a great conversation about Citrus County. The majority of the hour was spent discussing the data center and the potential impacts to Citrus County. Below is a gist of the conversation which centered on how the county can turn this into something positive.

I know there is a lot of chatter about how this is bad for the community and the environment, but what if there was a way to limit that?

Does that change anything in your mind?

We talk about wanting more businesses to pay taxes and ease some of the burden on citizens, this can help with that. Data centers generally pay significant amounts of taxes. If this facility is as large as it appears it will be (800+ acres), that is A LOT of tax revenue, unless the county decides to ease some of that to attract them via incentives.

In theory, we are looking at tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue for this facility. It is worthy of a discussion at the very least.

Obviously, environmental concerns are a major factor. As it is, they are changing the allowable use of the property to allow a data center. That will be a by right development and outside the BOCC approval process. That means, they can build it to county codes and the BOCC has no say.

The problem with that is that county codes do not really address data centers. There are things like noise ordinances, water usage (mostly state issue), building codes for the building... but nothing specific to a data center.

As Joe stated: "There are bad data centers and good data centers".

The bad data centers are the ones you read about... the horror stories... and all that is true. They use a ton of water and electricity. We are talking about millions of gallons of water per day/month/etc. These are mostly open loop cooling systems that require tons of fresh water. Many of these bad ones also do not have enough power generation from local utilities providers, so they bring in on-site generators to generate the needed power... and that creates noise. Then you see utilities costs skyrocket.

All the bad things you have read about.

But what about "good" data centers? These are the newest technology. They utilize a closed loop system where they fill it with water once and it cycles through. Think of a car radiator. So long as there are no leaks, you fill the coolant reservoir and never touch it again until it is time for preventative maintenance.

We do not constantly add coolant to our vehicles, right? That is the same concept here. No need for constant flow of water. Also, newest systems build power plants on site. This provides the electricity needed for the project and does not trickle to other users.

The question now becomes... if this is a done deal, how can we make sure we get a "good" data center that is as environmentally friendly as possible?

That is where the BOCC steps in. The commissioners can make changes to the Land Development Code (LDC) that essentially outline how these data centers are to be built. They should be able to place limitations on some of these things... at the very least require them to come back to the board for discussion/negotiation/etc.

Remove the ability to build them by right without having to come to the board and require them to present their plans to the board for approval. This gives control back to the commissioners and they can ensure that we get a "good" data center.

Without the LDC changes, the county does not have the ability to do that.

One fact was mentioned that brings context to all of this. We constantly use our phones, search on Google, go on social media, shop at Amazon, stream videos/shows/movies... and so on.

All these things operate from Data Centers. As we use more of these types of services, the computing needs continue to increase. As we use AI to make our lives easier, computing needs increase. Unless we all stop using these services, Data Centers will need to expand.

We need Data Centers to operate in the world today... and if we must have one here... this is our chance to make sure we do what we can to protect what we have here in Citrus. We need to make sure we get a "good" data center and protect Citrus from the bad ones. We need the ability to say "no" and that requires our commissioners to be proactive about it... yesterday.