UPHE Op-ed: The peasants must continue the rebellion
Dr. Brian Moench, UPHE’s cofounder and president, had an op-ed in Utah News Dispatch, in which he draws attention to yet another data center scandal happening in Utah.
Tech billionaires and their AI data centers are as popular with Americans as the measles. Seventy percent of Americans don’t want a data center in their community; environmental and resource concerns, like water and electricity use, were the primary reasons. A majority of Americans believe AI will do more harm than good to their daily lives. Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) mastermind, Sen. Stuart Adams, just lost his primary race for reelection — a loss so remarkable it made The New York Times — no doubt because he hung a hand grenade in the form of Kevin O’Leary’s Death Star around his own neck and pulled the plug.
Despite Adams’ much deserved rebuke, tech billionaires are not exactly licking their battles scars in Utah.
On May 29, Gov. Spencer Cox responded to the peasants’ anti-data center rebellion by issuing an executive order, “Establishing a Higher Bar for Data Center Development in Utah.” Seemingly Cox realized the public was lighting their arrows and ready to storm the castle. At first glance the order seemed like progress, despite it being extremely vague and offering no specifics. But on a second glance, on its face, there is nothing in the order other than some comforting “Whereas’s” that will lead to a “framework” to protect air quality and prevent increased water consumption.
If you’re wondering how this would affect future data center applications that were lining up to enter the pipeline, last week we got that answer. The goodwill of that executive order vanished as quickly as the latest Trump/Iran peace treaty.
A recipient of the state’s financial largesse via MIDA’s twin sister quasi-agency, UIPA (Utah Inland Port Authority), is a developer named Chuck Ackerlow. He is a prominent businessman and former chairman of the Utah Republican Party who spent a year in prison for failing to pay his taxes, in a scheme that cost Utah tax payers $600,000. Prosecutors portrayed him as an “unscrupulous tax cheater.”
Ackerlow is on the receiving end of typical UIPA subsidies to build an industrial park of 1,200 acres in one of UIPA’s “project areas” near Gilbert Bay of Great Salt Lake. Through various UIPA orchestrated instruments, Ackerlow will reap $234 million in subsidies via tax increment financing and tax-exempt bonds. One of the anchors of his development will be a data center that requires 500 MW of power from highly polluting gas turbines and an undetermined amount of water.
He applied to the Division of Water Quality (DWQ) for a permit to release 252,000 gallons a day of concentrated brine discharge from a reverse osmosis plant that he intends to build, drawing water from an aquifer that is already over-allocated and from which no new water applications have been allowed since 1996. He seeks to send the brine-choked waste water through a canal into Great Salt Lake wetlands.
This was the first opportunity for the governor to show the state’s newly minted courage on AI data centers. You know where this is going. The DWQ released notice that they intend to approve Ackerlow’s application anyway. They did consent to a hearing on July 27 to allow the public to express their righteous indignation.
Quietly behind the scenes, the federal government is also greasing the skids for Ackerlow and Big Tech billionaires to force-feed more data centers to Utahns and Americans in other states. The Environmental Protection Agency intends to change the rules on preconstruction permits to the benefit of data centers and power plants.
For decades those rules have required an air quality permit before breaking ground, and it must include modeling to show that the pollution from the project will not cause a violation of the national air quality standards in the relevant airshed. But under the Trump administration, the EPA intends to throw those rules overboard and allow construction of every part of the plant except the polluting part, and only after almost all the construction has already taken place, would Chuck Ackerlow or anyone else have to get a permit. So Ackerlow could dig and pour the foundation, erect the walls, put on the roof, and finish everything inside, and then he could go to the Utah Division of Air Quality and ask nicely for a permit once he has the gas turbines ready to hook up. Good luck to anyone trying to stop it at that point. The EPA is accepting public comment until June 29 on the changes that would allow construction before permitting.
Yes, Stuart Adams lost reelection. But the alignment of political power and enormous wealth is still poised to wreak havoc on Utahns, and the rest of us peasants must keep our arrows lit.