I think I’ve heard every complaint about data centers, often from folks who spend hours a day connecting with the rest of the world through technology that depends on the very data centers they despise. Given our increasing dependence on them, it’s worth asking how Indiana could build data centers we would be proud to leave to our grandchildren as a legacy, instead of apologizing for as a blight.
Utilities take land to serve data centers because it’s cheaper than the alternative. Data centers lean on the public grid because it’s cheaper than building their own power. They release waste heat because throwing it away is easier than using it. It’s cheaper and easier for them but more expensive and painful for us.
That waste is not a necessary evil we must endure for the sake of the cloud.
The era of ugly data centers that abuse the grid must come to an end. President Donald Trump and now Gov. Mike Braun have called on tech giants to build their own power plants, or at least pay the full cost of building new generation resources and the infrastructure upgrades they require. The president also wants to make buildings beautiful again.
Here’s a vision of what that might look like.
The ideal data center
Picture 500 acres of Indiana countryside. In the middle, a great ring of our own limestone on a green hill, topped with glass, beside a 45-acre lake that collects rainwater.
The limestone ring is the data center. The servers work inside the mile of castle-like wall, half in the earth and half in daylight.
Deep beneath the central tower, two small modular nuclear reactors of the kind already under construction in Canada, the kind Microsoft, Google and Amazon are already signing nuclear contracts to obtain.
These reactors are similar to the type safely used on aircraft carriers and submarines for decades. They can make every watt a data center campus will ever need and more. They don’t need to plug into the public utility grid and thus raise your bill or ask for a corridor across anyone’s farm.
The only line it asks of the world is a fiber cable, thin as a pencil, buried along the road.
The water, once used, moves in one sealed circle, lake to servers to gardens and back, forever. That allows a quarry’s water, server cooling water, and drinking water to remain three systems that never mix. Virtually none is drawn from wells or rivers or discharged anywhere.
Many data centers use loud fans to cool servers, but with liquid cooling there is less noise and the warmth can be harvested. In order of usefulness, that might include a glass atrium that stays tropical in January, greenhouses growing tomatoes through an Indiana winter, a mile of public trail warmed from below so it stays dry through every snowfall, or a moat held at the exact temperature tilapia love.
What do neighbors experience? A park, maybe with a stocked fishery, and ice skating in winter. Maybe a food forest, a pollinator habitat and a space to gather. No abatements asked, no TIF district demanded, no eminent domain and no pollution. And from the county road, the view is a green hill, a stone crown and morning mist instead of a gray box and a corridor of steel towers.
A metal warehouse’s last chapter is demolition, or worse, the chapter never comes and it simply sits. Stone halls are built to last and house whatever machines the future runs on.
We should demand more from technology leaders
The leaders of technology companies are mothers, fathers and grandparents too. They love their land and want to have a positive impact in the world. I do not believe they wake up wanting to leave something on this planet that looks like a cancer, detrimental to every generation that follows.
They build what the rules and the economics reward. Nobody is rewarding them for building something beautiful yet.
When the next data center comes to your county, you do not have to argue about whether the future is coming. You only have to say what my neighbors and I now say: its own power, its own water, no eminent domain, no tax abatements, no waste, no noise and a park worth keeping.
The computing is for us. Make the data centers pay for everything, and eventually they will be gone. The stone is for our grandchildren.
Sarah Brown lives in Greenwood. She is a mother of 15, author of more than 360 educational books and founder of the Fun-Schooling Movement and Dyslexia Games Therapy.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana deserves beautiful data centers | Opinion
Reporting by Sarah Janisse Brown, Opinion Contributor / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Sarah Janisse Brown, Opinion Contributor | USA TODAY Network
