Letters to the Editor

Is our state digging a hole?
In a quest for merging our rural economy with the 21st century and enticing our youth to keep their work skills in the state, our leaders are advocating building data centers, with micro-grid natural gas, coal or packet-nuclear power facilities. A local land owner is proposing a 1,500 acre solar energy facility on grazing land. Our primary employer in the county is pitching for mega-poultry facilities consisting of rows of poultry houses. Each of these in essence will dig a hole in our landscape. Once the top soil is scrapped away, building are erected, and metal frameworks go into place, the land would take generations to be reclaimed in a natural state.
While the ambition to diversify our work opportunities and advance our technology infrastructure is desirable, we must ponder at what cost. A recent study in New England looked at changes in land value near a 40 acre solar farm. Within a two mile radius, home and land estimates declined 2%. Those are home owners who will benefit from more energy on the grid, but not if they happen to want to sell their property. A recent Bloomberg report looked at electric bill increase in states which have encouraged building of data centers. The home owners have seen their rates go up more than 250%. At a recent County Commission meeting, someone mentioned that local home owners are reporting that their wells are running dry, after a couple of drought years. Where do we get water, when data centers and mega-poultry farms are pumping out aquifers to cool the buildings?
Looks like we might have some caution signs for our work in progress.
But, I am not a NIMBY kind of guy, nor a a Luddite in my man cave. When I think of technology advances, I look at my cell phone and consider what I saw in college 40 years ago. I attended San Jose State University in what has become Silicon Valley. My friends who were studying the new field of computer sciences in 1985 took a stack of punch cards, wrote programs in COBOL, Pascal, and BASIC, and went to the computer lab in which a very large room of big, metal boxes computed their programs. My hand-held cell phone now can generate images that not even George Lucas had access to when he released “Star Wars” in 1977.
I wondered, in another 40 to 50 years (I will not be around to find out), after one or two generations of data center advancements, will those acres-large buildings be as obsolete at the computer lab at SJSU. And, if so, what happens to those acres of buildings?
Let me make a modest proposal that we dig a hole.
Put the data centers underground. Under ground facilities reliably have a base temperature around 55 to 60F. Then build geothermal cooling loops, which do not extract water, but recirculate it to cool the building. Put the soil back on top of the facility (they never have windows anyway), and build the micro-grid energy facilities on top. Maybe even layer a mega-poultry farm on the remaining open land and put solar panels on the roof for a little extra energy. There would probably be a good amount of dirt left over to build berms around the complex to reduce the view of the facility. Plant trees and grasses, maybe even graze some sheep. Then it could look like the Apple world headquarters in Cupertino, CA, which you cannot even see except from an airplane.
“As architects we must look beyond the tolerances and ignorances of the moment, rural or urban, and try to see the future”. Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Future of Architecture” 1953.
Oscar Larson
Baker, WV