alt Hacker NewsThere is new data center project 30 miles outside my city that plans to build a 1000MW natural gas power plant and a 500MW biomass plant that will take millions of acres of forest to sustain (to quite the developer it will burn 350-500 truckloads of logs per day).
If this is an example of the kind of buildout we want to streamline, I say no thanks.
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My town just found out about the forest service’s intent to do some major logging and the truck traffic is way out of spec to the existing roads to the trees.
The scale the data centers want to operate at maybe way out of spec. to the existing infrastructure.
https://www.iberkshires.com/story/84456/Town-Residents-Conce...
Biomass is almost certainly a better form of energy production than whatever your existing energy mix is and it is being villanized, nice.
One of the perverse things about our current permitting regime is that it's often easier for a company to build a private natural gas power plant connected to their data center than it is for the local utility to build a new wind or solar farm. The former can often be done without any kind of discretionary permit at all, whereas the latter goes through a public process in which residents can complain and sue to block the project.
And both are much easier than getting permits for a high voltage transmission line to another region of the country where it might make more sense to build a wind or solar farm.