SPANISH FORK, Utah — City leaders in Spanish Fork weighed the possibility of a new data center being constructed there amid growing pushback from concerned locals. The project is slated for the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon.
Local residents packed the room for Tuesday night's city council meeting, in which a public hearing over the data center went on for five hours and featured dozens of public commenters.
The city council ultimately decided to table their resolution to amend their ordinance that would allow for data centers to generate their own power. The topic is expected to be brought up again at their next council meeting on Sept. 1.
Volition CEO Jeff Chavez says his Provo-based company is trying to be the solution to problems they see within their own industry.
“Many years of extremely inefficient, wasteful, loud data center development,” Chavez said.
So months ago, they approached the city of Spanish Fork with that alternative.
“They said, ‘data centers require a lot of power — we would propose generating our own,’” said Jack Urquhart, who serves as the public information officer for the city of Spanish Fork.
Chavez says their project would take nothing from the grid, generate about 250 megawatts of power and utilize an existing distribution center that’s about 28 acres in size.
He also says their closed-loop cooling system would only need about two Utah households' worth of water to fill.
“You don’t need to come into a community and attempt to buy up something so large that it is a dramatic drain on our resources,” said Chavez.
He hopes their offering can be a response to others like the hyper-scale Stratos project in Box Elder County. But many locals aren’t sold on the idea.
“Even if you say we need data centers, we don’t need them in our backyard,” said Teresa Pierce, who lives near the old Fingerhut distribution center. “We need dumps, too, but I don’t want a dump in our backyard.”
Homeowners like Pierce have reached out to FOX 13 News with worries about the impacts of noise, emissions and more on their properties.
“It’s concerning, if not just for the fact that you keep seeing this pattern where the people don’t want it, but they’re given it anyway,” Pierce said.
Chavez hopes they can show how their project may stand apart from other data centers.
“We are trying to take an approach that is empathetic to the fact that people are not going to see things different very quickly,” Chavez said. “We have to earn trust.”
Pierce says that could be earned for her by proving their capability in a different location.
Tuesday night’s meeting began at 6 p.m. and could be seen here on the city’s YouTube page.
