I’m a rube who has been trying to explain wherever I can comment t that the local opposition to data centers does NOT (in my experience) come from people who are primarily worried about utility costs and water usage. No it’s because we grew up in, or chose, a rural area, and that’s how we want it to stay. ( Okay, maybe the Chinks are using that kind of sentiment, but that doesn’t mean their meddling is the root of it.)
There exist in my state, Pa, over 4 million acres of public land owned by either the state or the federal government. (Sez the game commission) .
So why hasn’t anybody asked why these behemoths can’t be built on public land?
It is puzzling to me whether this could be done given the power requirements of each plant. In response to my previous post ; “Please Sir, I want SMR! “ You dear polymaths seemed to express a consensus that each one would require a HUGE nuclear plant. And a video someone helpfully posted pointed out that if they use electrical power, there will be condemnations of land to build the huge towers which carry the electric power lines.
But why are they futzing around with local zoning regulations and community opposition when the state or fed govts could just say: put it here, a remote site in the center of a trackless forest?
Oh, yeah, as I’ve written before, this would mean the crashing fall of the paradigm our generation has lived by all our lives, basically: conservation good. But so what! It’s a brave new world now. And as a land-use lawyer, it looks to me like our entire country is relentlessly being subjected to a nationwide Heavy Industry zoning overlay district, to facilitate data centers EVERYWHERE—
EXCEPT, there’s little mention using PUBLIC land!
Why the F not? There is SOOOO much of it, especially out West, but вs I said, even here in Pa, one of the original 13 colonies!
I know Trump has proposed opening federally owned land for this purpose.
As a rural landowner, I’m reduced to the posture “better 6 or so miles away than on MY land”—while my Prog daughter chides me for not helping organize opposition to the second data center being proposed in our small, heretofore rural, township.
I dont know, sometimes this entire phenomenon brings to my mind that universally derided phrase from the Vietnam era: “in order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy it.” It was considered a laughable oxymoron then; Now, in connection with data center development in our American “villages”, it seems to many people to be a self-evident truth.
Whaddya think dear polymaths? Instead of a moratorium on data centers in Pa, could Gov. Shapiro have solved the problem by announcing that they could be built in state-owned land?
