|
996 South Main Street, Nephi, Utah 84648 - Voice: 435 623-0525 - FAX: 435 623-4735 News for November 27, 2024 |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|||
|
By Myrna Trauntvein UMPA (Utah Municipal Power Agency) has a policy for requirements and obligations for data centers seeking to connect the electrical grid of its member cities and Nephi should also have one for natural gas. A data center is a large group of networked computer servers typically used by organizations for the remote storage, processing or distribution of large amounts of data. “Large data centers send out teams to find ideal locations,” said Seth Atkinson, city administrator. “There are also brokers. Then there are speculators who will flip and sell sites, ready or not.” He said that speculators should be avoided because they would likely be contacting individual council members and telling them that the structure that the city had in place to handle large development was wrong. One such speculator had contacted JD Parady, council member, said Atkinson. “I am leaning toward a true request form that those seeking to develop data centers would need to comply with,” said Atkinson. “There should also be a fee and a proposal.” They will need gas and power, he said. He said that Parady had been contacted and told that the city was not willing to work with the speculator. “The natural gas that such a center would need would be far beyond what the entire gas system in our area can provide,” he said. It would require more gas than all of the city users, including manufacturing businesses use in order to supply the demands of a data center. Modern data centers are very different than they were just a short time ago. Infrastructure has shifted from traditional on-premises physical servers to virtual networks that support applications and workloads across pools of physical infrastructure and into a multi-cloud environment. In this era, data exists and is connected across multiple data centers, the edge and public and private clouds. The data center must be able to communicate across these multiple sites, both on-premises and in the cloud. Even the public cloud is a collection of data centers. When applications are hosted in the cloud, they are using data center resources from the cloud provider, he said. In the world of enterprise IT, data centers are designed to support business applications and activities. “The electric power they would require is also beyond our capacity to supply,” he said. “Even at the peak of power use during the summer months, we have been using 29 megawatts (MW).” Small-size data centers have a power consumption of up to 20 MW, while mid-size facilities can consume between 50-70 MW and the larger ones can be from 100 MW to 250 MW. The largest one to date consumes over 500 MW of power. AI (Artificial Intelligence) data centers use even more power. On average, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search. In that difference lies a coming sea change in how the US, Europe, and the world at large will consume power and how much that will cost. US utilities will need to invest around $50 billion in new generation capacity just to support data centers alone. In addition, analysts expect incremental data center power consumption in the US will drive around 3.3 billion cubic feet per day of new natural gas demand by 2030, which will require new pipeline capacity to be built. Data centers are one of the most energy-intensive building types, consuming 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building. “There is also a difference in the size of gas pipeline needed,” said Atkinson. “We have an 8-inch line and they use a 20-inch line.” He said that speculators were highly aggressive with little regard for the needs of the community. Data center security is paramount in protecting sensitive information and maintaining operational integrity. “We are wading into a whole new world,” said Atkinson. “It will take a lot of money to meet the needs of the utility intensive data center.” Peggy Johnson, Nephi resident, said that a data center was a “big thing.” She related Midvale City’s experience. That had shown that they require lots of money to start-up and do affect education. “Rust Finlinson is on the UMPA technical committee,” said Atkinson. “UMPA requires all power plants built as a result of accommodating data centers in the UMPA membership area is that the plant, once built, be turned over to UMPA.” He said that some areas were more attractive to developers because they struggled working with power suppliers such as Rocky Mountain Power and were wanting to work with smaller power providers such as Current Creek and UMPA. UMPA Data Center Policy was for those seeking connection to member cities from 5MW to 50 MW. “This policy outlines the requirements and obligations for data centers seeking to connect to the electrical grid in Provo, Spanish Fork, Salem, Nephi, Manti and Levan, member cities of the Utah Municipal Power Agency,” reads the opening paragraph of the UMPA Policy #1. As they reviewed the policy, Jeramie Callaway, council member, said that he would like to see a power plant definition clarified in the document. Shari Cowan, council member, said the developers indicated that a center would employ 500 to 3,000. “Those are not good numbers,” said Atkinson. “That is what alerts us to the idea that they are speculators.” He said that the proposals coming reminded him of the dot com era when people invested in wild speculation in support of those selling the idea of having a strong company but those companies ended up selling and consolidating into large corporations. “I like going thorough UMPA,” said Travis Worwood, council member. Justin Seely, mayor, said that the city also needed to set up a similar document to cover the natural gas that comes to the east Juab area. One concern would be that such speculators would go to the county and try to get the center approved. “The county will need to learn how the developer plans to obtain natural gas,” said Atkinson. “If they propose to generate their own power, they will need to have natural gas. Current Creek uses natural gas.” Simply put, said Atkinson, was that natural gas was the best way for data centers to power next-generation technology, such as AI, while minimizing emissions. Technological innovations such as AI, are requiring more and more data storage and, therefore, power generation.
| ||
