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AI Data Centers on Public Land · The Overlap

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There's a phrase in the federal file I've now read about nine times,
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and it gets worse every single time.
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That's substantially the same.
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On june twenty sixth, twenty twenty six,
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the Bureau of Land Management,
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BLM, the agency that runs the public acreage across the western part
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of the United States, approved a data center on public land outside of Boulder City,
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Nevada. eighty acres, one hundred and seventy megawatts,
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the first
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Data center ever authorized on Bureau of Land Management ground in
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the history of the United States.
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No new environmental assessment,
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no public comment period. And here's how this was legal.
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The developer, a company called Townsite Solar two,
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already held a right of way grant on that federal parcel.
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Got it in September 2023 for a solar project.
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In June 2026, BLM amended the grant to allow a data center instead.
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And treated the new project as substantially the same as the old one
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for purposes of the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA.
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That's the 1970s law that requires the federal government to look before
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it leaps on anything that it approves.
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A solar farm, a 170 megawatt computing facility with its own backup fuel.
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Substantially the same. Now,
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the obvious read is that somebody was lazy.
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Overworked field office, sack of paper,
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initial, you know, your signature there and go home,
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but I don't buy it and here's why.
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The man who signed it, Bruce Silito,
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manages BLM's Las Vegas field office.
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He knows what a data center is.
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And on september first, twenty twenty six,
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an administrative judge at the Interior Board of Land Appeals,
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that's the appeals body inside the Interior Department that reviews BLM decisions.
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A judge named David Gunter stayed the whole project.
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His findings were that BLM likely acted arbitrarily or capriciously because
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the environmental review it leaned on had been done before
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the project changed locations.
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Different site, different type of facility entirely,
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the same file. Two and a half weeks later that stay,
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on september eighteenth, reported showing the administration weighing
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at least twelve data centers and related infrastructure projects covering
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at least seventeen thousand six hundred acres of
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of BLM land across Arizona, Idaho,
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Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming.
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Most of them had never been disclosed to the public.
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So that's the question we're going to chase today.
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How did seventeen thousand six hundred acres of land that belongs
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to every person listening to this podcast become the path of least resistance
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for the most capital hungry industry on the planet?
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And who benefits from a filing that calls a computing plant and a solar farm
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the same thing?
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This is the overlap.
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The podcast where we talk about business,
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labor, systems of power, and American injustice.
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How are you, Joshua?
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Just fine, thanks for asking. But let's hop into it.
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So here's the episode in one sentence.
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The federal government has decided that public land is the cheapest place
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in America to put AI. And the people who live next to that land are about
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to find it out about it after the fact,
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and they're organizing anyway.
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So let's give the strongest version of the case for actually doing this,
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because it's a real case, and some of it actually
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Holds a special place in all of our hearts.
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Compute is infrastructure now,
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right? The binding constraints on building it are land and power in that order.
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And the West has federal acreage sitting next to existing transmission lines.
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On November fifth, twenty twenty five,
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the Department of Energy under Secretary Chris Wright,
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picked four federal sites to invite private partners onto
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the Idaho National Laboratory,
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the Oak Ridge Reservation.
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The Paducah gaseous diffusion plant and the Savannah River site.
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Those are nuclear legacy industrial sites,
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fenced, already degraded, already wired into the grid.
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If you told me the choice was between a decommissioned uranium enrichment plant
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and somebody's farmland in Virginia,
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I'd take the enrichment plant every time.
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And I wouldn't feel conflicted about it.
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Right, and that's really the sales pitch.
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It is the sales pitch partly. So what breaks is basically what we opened with.
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The town site project is nothing like Paducah.
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It sits on federal land at the edge of a very small Nevada city.
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And the city council learned out about the approval after it was already signed.
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And the mechanism that let that happen runs far past that one file.
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Executive Order one hundred four three one eight signed on july twenty third,
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twenty twenty five.
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Defines a quote qualifying project for expedited federal permitting
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at 100 megawatts and up. So the review you get out of scales with
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the amount of power you need, the bigger the load,
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the lighter the look. And by the end of this,
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you'll know who signed the first one,
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what statute he used, and which company holds the grant,
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what machines that back these things up are earning for the people who sell them,
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and what happened when 5,000.
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Gallons of diesel came out of a data center tank in New Jersey twelve days ago.
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You'll know about the number that has not been reported anywhere until this month,
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which is the acreage.
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from a news outlet in Washington DC.
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They later sent a letter to BLM about it,
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which was today, September twenty third,
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twenty twenty six.
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Which leaves the question of what it is about public land specifically that makes
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it worth all this trouble. These companies can buy private land,
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they do buy private land constantly.
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So why the federal parcel and why the amended grant,
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and why the review that was written for something else?
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And that's because the federal parcel doesn't require something.
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So let's break that down. If you start with the order,
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because everything kind of downstream you know runs on it,
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Executive Order 14318, Accelerating Federal Permitting
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of Data Center Infrastructure,
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signed into law July twenty third,
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twenty twenty five, published in the federal register after that.
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It creates a category called qualifying projects,
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which sets the floor at a hundred megawatts of new load.
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And directs federal agencies to identify federal land suitable for what
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it calls expeditious data center development.
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That's the architecture. A threshold,
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a category, and an instruction to find land.
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Then the energy department did its version on November 5th,
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2025. Writes four sites: the Idaho National Lab,
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Oak Ridge, Paducah, Savannah River,
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all offered up to private sector partners.
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For data centers plus the power to run them.
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Now these are DOE, Department of Energy lands under DOE control.
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And if that's where the story stayed,
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this would be a completely different episode about a completely different
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set of problems. BLM land is is a different kind of place from
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a fenced federal reservation. BLM land is the land you drive past.
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It's grazing allotments and desert and like the ridge behind a subdivision.
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And BLM has one specific tool that it hands out constantly,
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the right of way grant, authorized under Federal Land Policy and Management
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Act of nineteen seventy six. That's FLPMA,
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the statute that governs what BLM is and what it's allowed to let people
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do on public land. A right of way is how a power line crosses public ground.
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It's how a pipeline crosses, how a road crosses,
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how a solar array gets sited out.
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Townsite Solar 2, TS2, an affiliate of Skylar Capital Management,
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and the name kind of tells you what it was originally for,
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has held a right-of-way grant on 80 acres of federal land near Boulder City since
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September of 2023. Solar and battery storage.
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Totally normal. Thousands of those exist.
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Now what ha watch what happens on the city side,
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because that's the part that decides everything after it.
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TS2
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Also had an option to lease eighty-eight point five acres of land owned
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by Boulder City itself, right next door,
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you know, and in January of twenty twenty-six,
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it applied to put the data center there.
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Now city land means city process.
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And in May of 2026, Boulder City's own planning commission voted six
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to one against even adding data centers to the city's land management process.
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That's the local rule book for what can be built and where.
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Six to one.
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A resident named Brynn Delorimer had organized a petition against it,
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their neighbors showed up, and the commission said no.
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And on june twenty sixth, twenty twenty six,
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BLM amended the federal right of way grant on the adjacent parcel to permit
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a one hundred seventy megawatt data center instead of a solar project.
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Bruce Silito signed it, no new environmental assessment,
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no public comment.
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On the theory that it was substantially the same as the solar project that they
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had already reviewed. And in early July,
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when the federal approval was in hand,
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TS2 withdrew its application to the city.
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Same developer, a parcel, one fence line over,
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and no local approval required because the land's federal,
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and the city just doesn't have any jurisdiction on it.
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I want to flag one thing right away because it's better to,
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you know, say it up.
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Front rather than catch it later,
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but the the paperwork and the coverage give slightly different megawatt numbers,
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right? Some documents say 167,
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the developer filing says 170,
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I've been saying 170. It's the same place either way,
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and the gap really doesn't change anything.
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It's three megawatts. But you should know that this record specifically
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is not perfectly clean. But here's what I could not find,
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and I looked for it, believe me.
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What does TS two pay the United States for that acreage?
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A right-of-way grant comes with rent.
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There's a schedule. the public documents I could get don't actually state
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the number on this one. Now BLM has it,
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I assume, but BLM didn't post it and nothing required BLM to post it
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in the approval that made this the first data center ever on American public land
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that belongs to all of us.
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So we know the acreage, we know the megawatts,
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we know who signed it. The price is the thing that is not there.
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And that gap is the oldest feature of public land law in this country,
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which is why it doesn't read to me as an oversight.
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~ the original arrangement was the general mining law of eighteen seventy-two,
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way back in eighteen seventy-two.
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~ the Congressional Research Service wrote it up late last year in a report
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on hard rock mining. ~ the eighteen seventy-two law let individuals
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and companies explore, develop,
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and then actually purchase federal land containing mirror minerals through
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a process called patenting. Not not don't think
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Like intellectual property, it's a different process there.
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but it was for nominal sums. Like I mean truly nominal,
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like to pennies on the dollar.
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~ you found something on public land,
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you filed, you got title, you paid effectively nothing,
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and there was no rent or no royalty.
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That was what the eighteen seventy two law was working exactly as written.
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I was basically
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It was about gold, by the way.
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right. ~ basically about encouraging people to to you know facilitate their
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discovery of these r ~ resources.
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The reform came in nineteen twenty.
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Woodrow Wilson signed the Mineral Leasing Act,
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which ended ~ patenting for oil and coal and replaced it with leasing.
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So now under the 1920 law, you lease the ground,
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you pay rent, and you pay the public a royalty on production.
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Seems fair. ~ WyO History's account of that statute,
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which draws on the public lands scholar John Leslie,
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treats it as the thing that ~ changed Wyoming's economic destiny.
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And the number that they use is Wyoming's federal mineral royalties.
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Hitting $948 million in fiscal year 211.
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So nearly a billion dollars in one year to one state because
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in 1920 Congress decided the public was a landlord,
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not a donor. So there are two available postures for public land.
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He can give it away for a nominal sum and collect nothing,
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or lease it and collect a royalty on what the land produces.
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A right-of-way grant for a data center is neither of those.
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It's a permission slip with rent attached,
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and the rent is set against the acreage.
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with nothing charged on what's produced on the acreage.
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A hundred and seventy watt ~ megawatt facility could run compute compute worth
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whatever compute is gonna be worth in twenty thirty on ground priced
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is essentially desert land.
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Yeah, so let's put a a tip to that to that pen,
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if we will, in the eighteen seventy two comparison before we kind of lean harder
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on it than the evidence might allow us to.
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The number you hear thrown around for the the mining law giveaway is
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two hundred and thirty one b b billion dollars.
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The Cato Institute, now they're a libert libertarian think tank,
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~ so they're pretty much pro development,
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no, you know, friend to environmental litigation.
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Published a policy analysis arguing that figure is unrealistic,
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and estimating the actual subsidy across a hundred and twenty-five years
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at somewhere between three million and sixteen billion.
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Now that's a range so wide that it's almost a confession that like nobody
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has any idea, right? At all. But the low end of it is three million dollars.
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So if a if Cato is closer
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to write than you know the environmental activists are,
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then the eighteen seventy two law gave away two hundred and thirty
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one billion dollars is a sentence I should stop repeating.
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Okay, I'll take that. ~ and I'll keep the structural point because Cato isn't
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disputing the structure. Nobody disputes the structure.
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Patenting for n nominal sums with no royalty happened.
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What's contested is how much it's worth and which is a different argument.
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And the fact that the ~ data centers are not under either category,
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right? Because you're not extracting something essentially from the land itself.
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Yeah, it's not really I mean it's a it's a service really not a product.
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And I'll I'll agree on that. Now the the part where somebody gets paid,
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right, the because none of this actually runs on land alone.
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A data center needs electricity every single second.
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When the the grid has a hiccup,
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when a diesel generator, you know,
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carries the loads, when you see your lights flashing,
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kind of, you know, blinking, that is one generator picking up where
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the second generator shuts down.
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Like that's a that's a pretty common thing.
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But
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All of these facilities also has a a whole tank full of fuel,
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usually diesel, sometimes natural gas,
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depending on where they are located in the US.
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Caterpillar actually makes those generator sets and the turbines,
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and in the second quarter of twenty twenty six,
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Caterpillar reported twenty point five four billion dollars in revenue.
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That is up twenty-four percent from year over year.
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Their power generation retail sales grew seventy two percent year over year.
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Nine point four billion dollars in orders in the quarter.
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Order backlog is about seventy two point one billion and they're putting
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two hundred seventy five million into expanding the plants in Lafayette,
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Indiana to build more of them.
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Cummins, you might
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Nice pronunciation there.
16:23
yeah, you know you have to separate it.
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~ Will and I both lived in Lafayette,
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Louisiana, and it's very much a flat A.
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Lafayette, ~ Indiana is a much different place and it's often confused when we're
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telling it to strangers from out of state.
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And they fancy up there.
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Yeah. So Cummins, which you might be familiar with Cummins Diesel
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or Cummins Trucking, ~ they're another really big name in that market.
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And they posted record profits in the power system segment in the first quarter
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of twenty twenty six, right? On data center backup demand.
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So if you follow the money, right,
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the land comes from all of us,
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the public, at a price that nobody can know.
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It's just a secret number except to a very select group of people.
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Then the computing power belongs to whoever is setting up the data center.
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In this case, maybe it's the equity partners,
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maybe it's anthropic, maybe they're hoping to contract with Google.
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Nobody nobody really can know that information because it's in
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a contract somewhere that we're not allowed to see.
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Right? And then the reliability,
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right? Like the thing that makes the whole thing actually work gets bought from
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Caterpillar with a seventy two percent sales jump and it burns diesel.
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In whatever part of the US it lands in.
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So I'm going try to build the case for for the data data centers in favor
17:43
of Davis data centers, because I think the people making it believe it,
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and some of it's not wrong, right?
17:49
~ argument number one that they make compute is national infrastructure.
17:53
you can argue about whether the current AI build AI build out is a bubble.
17:58
~ maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
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I mean, some chunk of it is probably,
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who knows how much. But there's no version of the next 20 years where
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the United States needs less computing capacity.
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And the two things that can cap that are electricity and land,
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power and dirt. So that's that's the first thing we need,
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right? ~ argument two, federal industrial sites are genuinely the best place
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to put it. Paducah gaseous diffusion plant enriched uranium,
18:25
the Savannah River site made weapons material.
18:27
Those places have transmission infrastructure,
18:30
security parameters, industrial zoning and everything but name,
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and no neighborhoods outside inside the fence.
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So putting a load-heavy facility there instead of on farmland outside
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a growing town is the right call on the merits.
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And I think it's defensible. Argument three is speed.
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The full environmental review on a major federal action takes years.
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~ and sometimes it's decades, it seems like.
18:52
~ the competitors, our competitors in the the AI race,
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whatever that is, and wherever it ends up,
18:58
Yeah.
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our competitors don't run a NEPA process.
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If the choice is a faster review or no facility,
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The fast review is the serious answer.
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Finally
19:07
Hold on, I wanna I wanna hitch
19:09
up there just real quick. I think it's also important to remember that in
19:13
a place or I mean, and let's be honest,
19:15
our biggest competitor right now is China.
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And and it's because they're producing AI models much faster than we can.
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~ and it's but it's for for public from their perspective,
19:25
public good goods purposes, right?
19:27
They don't have a NEPA process because ultimately their entire nation takes
19:32
I mean they're communist, so they take part in the active
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profit of these AI data centers,
19:39
of these AI models, that is complete public ownership of those facilities and those,
19:45
you know, capabilities. So I I do want to point just add that in there
19:49
to the point three.
19:50
Yeah. Unfortunately those costs don't fall equally across the entire population.
19:54
They tend to fall on the people that ~ have the bridges or buildings collapse
19:58
on them or the ~ glaciers melt and form a tidal wave.
20:01
But ~ neither here nor there. Argument four,
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~ this is the last of these arguments that are often made in favor of data centers.
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~ this is the one actually supported by evidence rather than just vibes.
20:14
there's a peer-reviewed analysis written up in the conversation this year,
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finding that data centers do measurably help local economies.
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Employment up about 0.9%, wages up 1.1%,
20:25
business establishments up 1% in the first three years,
20:29
growing to roughly 3.5%, 5%, and 4.7% over the longer run.
20:34
That's a published result from people with no brochure to sell.
20:38
So anybody telling you these facilities are all cost and no benefit
20:41
is arguing against it. Now, whether that's enough benefit,
20:44
is another part of the debate,
20:45
but at least there is some some economic value there.
20:48
~ and in Boulder City specifically,
20:51
the city stood to receive almost one point five million dollars from the lease,
20:54
plus property taxes, permit fees,
20:56
and administrative charges, roughly two point three million a year in new revenue,
21:00
which in a city that size pays for police,
21:03
fire, emergency response and utilities.
21:05
So that's the case in favor of data centers.
21:08
And I'm gonna say which of the legs of that argument just broke because argument
21:12
two and argument three are load carrying for me and one of them cannot hold on,
21:16
cannot hold the weight. the second argument,
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put it on degraded federal industrial land,
21:20
requires that somebody actually evaluate whether a given part of parcel
21:23
is degraded federal industrial land.
21:25
That evaluation is the environmental review.
21:28
It's the thing that distinguishes Paducah from the ridge behind somebody's house.
21:31
And my third argument, speed, is an argument for removing exactly that evaluation.
21:37
So I've been holding them attention,
21:38
~ both arguments and tension, but they really don't fit.
21:41
If the review is what makes the site defensible,
21:43
then a threshold that exempts the largest projects from review takes
21:46
the defense away. ~ so I'd rather just say which leg broke than pretend
21:50
I mean something narrower.
21:51
Sure. And the the evidence on that is is actually from a USGS,
21:56
US Geological Services Report,
21:58
or government services report,
21:59
sorry, which might actually be useful because no one actually reports on that.
22:04
~ so July twenty-second, twenty twenty-six,
22:07
the United States Geological Survey publishes Scientific Investigations Report
22:12
2026-5035, titled Co locating
22:17
AI data centers with
22:20
energy infrastructure on federal public lands.
22:23
Not only is that a mouthful, I think it's it's pretty interesting that
22:26
it tells it all right there. So it's that's government scientists
22:30
axy asking where this stuff like is,
22:33
like actually. And the findings were that six percent of the AI data centers
22:38
in the Western part of the country and 22% of the Western power plants
22:44
sit either
22:46
on or directly within one mile of BLM land.
22:50
Like 22%. That's almost a quarter of the power generation in the western part
22:56
of the United States is already sitting on or propped right up against
23:01
the land that is owned by all of us.
23:03
So when the executive order says fine federal land for expeditious data center
23:09
development, the natural target is the ground where the power already exists,
23:14
right?
23:15
Which is the ground that people already live next to.
23:18
Four fenced nuclear sites are a very small slice of that.
23:22
And that's unfortunately where the argument collapses,
23:25
because the clean version where we're talking about just the Paducah sites described
23:28
four sites. The actual program,
23:31
as of reporting on September eighteenth,
23:32
is at least twelve projects. So going from four to twelve,
23:36
tripling the number of projects on at least seventeen thousand
23:40
six hundred acres across six states.
23:42
I have a list, right, because that's where this stops being kind
23:45
of a policy argument and turns into something funnier and dumber at the same time.
23:49
RIA data filed with BLM's Four Rivers Field Office in Idaho
23:56
in August of 2025 for a large scale data center campus with its
24:01
own power plant built on the public land right next to it,
24:05
like directly alongside it. Prometheus hyperscale.
24:10
Submitted right of way proposals in Wyoming for an access road,
24:14
a telecommunications line, and a water pipeline across public land
24:19
to support data centers. And the biggest one in Utah,
24:23
Valar Atomics, or Valor V A L A R Atomics,
24:28
applied for survey access on ten thousand two hundred acre federal site near Green
24:34
River for nuclear power development and a data center.
24:38
Ten thousand two hundred acres.
24:40
of public land for a nuclear reactor to run a giant AI computer.
24:47
And the company is named Velar Atomics,
24:49
which is from Tolkien, right? The Velar are the gods.
24:52
~ so we I think we know who's behind that.
24:57
Yeah, ~ it's pretty much always the same guys.
25:00
We did a whole episode about them.
25:00
Palantir, you know. Yeah.
25:03
Yeah.
25:04
It's it's all from the eBay from the eBay acquisition.
25:07
The the other one is actually Prometheus,
25:10
right? The titan who stole fire from the gods and had his liver eaten
25:14
by an eagle every day until Heracles freed him.
25:18
Right. Prometheus hyperscale is asking for a water pipeline,
25:20
which is appropriate, I think.
25:22
A across the desert, right? Just so you know.
25:24
~
25:24
Yeah.
25:25
and and Rhea, who by the way is also a Titan.
25:28
Rhea was the mother of Zeus, once her own power plant,
25:32
and the gods of the West want ten thousand two hundred acres in Utah.
25:37
So we've essentially got a pantheon of ~ would be Greek gods sitting
25:42
up on Mount Olympus or wherever they sit,
25:43
~ applying for rights of way at a field office.
25:47
Right. And and here is the piece that kind of wraps it all up because
25:52
I can't do better than the reality that we're living in.
25:55
But Valar Atomics withdrew the application after press scrutiny.
26:00
The ten thousand two hundred acre nuclear data center campus on public land near
26:04
Green River, Utah was actually stopped by news coverage before NEPA.
26:08
A hearing or the Interior Board of Land Appeals ever touched it.
26:13
That's the part who should that should bother the people who design this.
26:16
If your process is so light that journalism is the binding constraint,
26:19
the press is doing the review.
26:21
Right. And and the quiet part is that we only know about the twelve projects
26:26
and the seventeen thousand six hundred acres because of that reporting,
26:29
right? BLM
26:30
Yeah.
26:31
didn't like announce it, which brings us back to the letter that went out today.
26:36
Stanton, Kelly, Gallico, Ansari,
26:38
and Grijalva. All Democrats, all representing Arizona,
26:42
writing to ask BLM ~ for details on four of those proposed twelve data
26:49
centers in their own state.
26:51
that they only read about in a Washington D C based news organization article.
26:57
Nothing like our legislators finding out from the the local paper.
27:00
But I want to be precise about who's doing what here,
27:03
because the record is lopsided and I'd rather acknowledge that up front.
27:07
The executive order is this Republican administration's.
27:10
The energy secretary picking sites is this administration's.
27:13
The BLM approval is this administration's.
27:16
The letter demanding answers came from five Democrats.
27:18
And then the local picture flip flips completely.
27:22
On June 24, 2026, voters in Spartanburg County,
27:25
South Carolina, and Calvert County,
27:27
Maryland threw out incumbents over data center fights.
27:30
And in Spartanburg, that was Republican voters removing Republican officials,
27:36
after which the county withdrew the tax breaks it had offered and moved toward
27:39
a 12-month moratorium. In Tulsa,
27:42
the City Council voted unanimously for a nine-month halt on
27:45
new data center construction. And Councilmember Jackie Dutton said she'd support
27:50
an indefinite one.
27:51
I'm sure you could speak to that more than I ~ but and in July twenty twenty
27:55
six New York became the first state with a data center moratorium when Governor
27:59
Kathy Hochell, a Democrat, signed an executive order pausing state permitting
28:04
for up to a year. So at the federal level this is a one party's program.
28:08
At the local level, the revolt is bipartisan in the most literal sense.
28:11
People in red counties and blue states are doing the same thing for the same reason.
28:15
Yes, they are. And then of course
28:17
Nimbi Nimbi is bipartisan.
28:19
right. And then of course is the jobs argument,
28:22
right? Since w you talked earlier about employ employment numbers,
28:25
we're gonna give some data on that,
28:28
right? Good jobs first. A research outfit that that tracked corporate subsidies
28:34
for decades. That's the name of the organization.
28:36
Good jobs first. I mean it's it's simple,
28:42
but sure, it works.
28:44
They identified the largest per job data center subsidy in the country
28:49
was in your wonderful state, North Carolina,
28:52
to Apple,
28:53
Mm.
28:54
like the you know, the one who makes half of you people's phones,
28:58
because I use an Android, at six point four million dollars per job.
29:05
That based on every job they created,
29:08
North Carolina granted them
29:10
A six point four million dollar per person tax break
29:17
in order to build in North Carolina,
29:19
right? That is what one state agreed to pay per position to host servers.
29:26
And I'm gonna let them hold on to that argument because the number,
29:29
if as extraordinary as those numbers are,
29:32
they don't kill it. ~ the peer-reviewed result still stands.
29:35
Employment wages in new businesses do rise in host communities.
29:38
~ what the $6.4 million figure tells you is about the price paid for that rise,
29:43
and also tells you something the study itself says,
29:45
which is better off metro areas capture more of the benefit than rural regions do.
29:49
Both things can be true at once.
29:51
Facilities help. The states are paying an extraordinary amount for the help.
29:55
And both can be true.
29:57
Okay, so let's go where the fuel is.
29:58
Because that's where this stops being about acreage and starts being about air.
30:02
Loudoun County, Virginia, known globally as Data Center Alley.
30:07
Julie Bolthouse is the director of land use at the Piedmont Environmental Council,
30:12
a Virginia nonprofit that tracks development in that part of the state.
30:15
And she has been counting generators.
30:18
Her number is roughly 4,700 diesel generators across Loudoun's data center.
30:24
four thousand seven hundred generators.
30:26
Those
30:26
Yes.
30:27
generators exist for emergencies,
30:29
which is the entire justification for them,
30:30
that the thing that runs when the grid fails,
30:33
which is supposed to be rare. In 2025,
30:35
a substation fire knocked out power,
30:38
and Loudoun's data centers ran on backup for four to five days straight.
30:42
Residents reported the smell of diesel exhaust in a Walmart parking lot.
30:46
Somebody described the noise as planes landing constantly
30:50
for over twenty-four hours.
30:52
And inside climate news reported in December ~ twenty twenty five that while this
30:56
was happening
30:57
Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality,
30:59
the state agency that writes air permits,
31:00
was weighing whether to allow expanded runtimes for those generators.
31:03
So that's the sequence you need to hold on to.
31:06
The emergency equipment ran for the better part of a week.
31:08
The neighbors could taste it in the air,
31:11
and the regulatory response under consideration was should we allow them
31:14
to run more?
31:15
Yeah, it never looks good when you look at it from these angles.
31:18
And then September eleventh of this year,
31:20
you know, twenty five years or how how long has it been?
31:23
Yeah, twenty five years since September eleventh,
31:26
which is I guess twelve days ago now.
31:28
~ Equinix, which is one of the biggest data center operators on the planet,
31:34
has a facility in Secaucus, New Jersey.
31:37
Two fuel filtration valves failed.
31:41
It's about five thousand to fifty five hundred gallons of diesel.
31:46
basically leaked out of a tank into Anderson Creek,
31:49
which feeds the Hackensack River in the Metallands.
31:52
Bill Sheehan runs the Hackensack River Keeper,
31:55
a watershed ag v advocacy group that's been on the river for decades,
31:59
and he went out and looked at it.
32:00
He watched containment booms get laid across the creek.
32:04
What he was told initially was that a computer glitch caused the spill.
32:09
Gothamus later reported the actual cause two failed valves
32:14
in the fuel filtration system.
32:16
Equinix self-reported it and hired Clean Harbors,
32:20
a national environmental services contractor,
32:23
who showed up with vacuum trucks and absorbent pads.
32:26
Sea Caucus Mayor Michael Gannelli's reaction,
32:30
reported at the time, was to assume there'd be like a giant fine
32:33
for something like this. You would think,
32:35
right? Like both ~ Will and I lived in Louisiana during the big BP oil spill.
32:37
Right.
32:39
It was
32:39
a very big deal. ~ But
32:42
Yeah.
32:43
The number that was probably the most staggering is the retail value
32:47
of the diesel that went into that creek,
32:49
right? So if you if you do the math then,
32:52
it was about thirty-one thousand dollars.
32:55
Now if you look at the the average cost of a gallon of diesel right now,
32:59
which I believe is over six dollars,
33:01
let's just cap it at six bucks.
33:03
That's where we get the number from.
33:06
Thirty one thousand dollars worth of current fuel.
33:08
Yeah.
33:09
So ~ it's staggering.
33:10
Which is go ahead.
33:13
Yeah. It really is. And it's
33:14
I mean
33:15
the pattern under all of those.
33:16
Exactly and and it spills into this this little,
33:19
you know, tributary of the Hackensack River.
33:22
And it's just a a line item on Equinix's books,
33:25
which is essentially the price of like,
33:28
you know, a Tacoma. Something by Toyota,
33:31
maybe a a you know, a a newer model ~ of a of a sedan.
33:35
More brand new Mac Studio.
33:37
Yeah, well, you know a maxed out Mac Studio for sure.
33:42
~ but the fuel is cheap, the cleanup is contracted out and the fine
33:45
is assumed rather than known and the creek is the one thing in
33:48
the transaction that can't send an invoice.
33:50
Alright, so I kinda I want to give you the part that that kind
33:54
of counts against this. And I I kinda wanna give it where it costs something because
33:59
we just made that spill sound like an ecological catastrophe.
34:03
Because it was. But New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protections,
34:09
the DEP, said that the spill was contained.
34:12
It said it had not impacted the Hackensack River.
34:14
There were no reported wildlife impacts,
34:17
no drinking water intakes in that area.
34:19
Officials said the fuel stayed in the creek.
34:22
Equinex reported it themselves and they had a remediation contractor working with
34:26
ours. And there's more. The Better Data Center Project,
34:31
which is a critic of this industry,
34:33
notes that most data center
34:34
Yeah.
34:34
diesel leaks are pretty small,
34:36
under 200 gallons. Now, if you drive a truck,
34:39
that's like a full fuel fill-up.
34:41
But they consider that small. Fortune cited that this month,
34:46
actually. So a $5,000.
34:47
gallon release is a pretty big outlier.
34:51
Well off of, you know, your typical tiny couple drops a year or whatever.
34:55
But if somebody says data centers are are constantly dumping fuel into waterways,
35:00
the actual record doesn't actually support that.
35:02
And i I'm not gonna, you know prop it up to make it sound more dangerous
35:08
or more, you know, often than it actually really is.
35:12
Well I wish I had a clean answer to that for ya.
35:15
~
35:15
Ha.
35:17
But really the accident was never the point.
35:19
I mean it's i the spills are vivid,
35:21
right? That's where you kind of get a it just hits you in the face when
35:23
you see or imagine five thousand gallons of diesel turning a creek into
35:27
a like raging diesel river. But the thing that stays behind when you get
35:32
rid of that the spills is still forty seven hundred generators in one county.
35:36
Running four to five days on a substation fire,
35:39
with the state considering longer permitted hours.
35:42
That's the designed operation of the equipment on a permit in public
35:45
air and nobody has to spill anything for it to happen.
35:47
And I noticed that the permitted version generates almost no coverage,
35:51
while the five thousand gallon version generates a week of it,
35:55
right? So the the newspapers are following this big spill for a week,
35:58
but then they take no note of the generators running constantly for five days.
36:03
So the thing that's easier to point at is the the thing that matters the least,
36:07
but that's just the way it goes sometimes.
36:09
Yeah.
36:10
So I guess honestly, you know,
36:13
two guys on a podcast don't necessarily have a fix for this.
36:16
I I don't know the answer. The goal is ultimately awareness and solidarity.
36:21
That's kind of the goal of this podcast.
36:22
So I'd rather, you know, put that part into the episode toothless than
36:28
not actually tell our audience the the real issues here.
36:31
Yeah.
36:32
I agree. So let's let's turn back to Nevada where the cost is really
36:35
the linchpin here. ~ Bryn Delormier or Delorm Delorimer lives in Boulder City.
36:40
It's probably Delorimer.
36:42
probably. sorry, th that that Cajun French sneaking in on me again.
36:46
This is Nevada, so
36:47
Yeah, that's that's a good point.
36:48
when when T S two,
36:52
which remember was solar, ~ originally the developer was s for a solar plant,
36:57
~ wanted City land for the project,
37:00
she, Miss ~ Delorimer
37:02
organized a petition against it.
37:04
Neighbors signed it. In May of twenty twenty six,
37:06
her city's planning commission voted six to one against opening the door
37:09
to data centers. By every measure available to a resident of a small city,
37:13
she had won. I mean that's that's not the this under underdog story we all love,
37:19
but not the one you hear very often.
37:21
Then on June twenty sixth, the BLM approved the same project on
37:25
the federal parcel right next door,
37:26
and her wind essentially ev evaporated because the acreage that mattered
37:30
was never under her city's control.
37:32
When TS2 withdrew its city application in July,
37:34
her response was that the developer had a had not actually heard the community.
37:37
Then the city council. July fifteenth,
37:40
twenty twenty six, they voted unanimously to appeal BLM's approval,
37:44
arguing the agency had departed from its own precedent and procedure for
37:47
a use ~ precedent and procedure for a use that had never before been authorized
37:52
on BLM land. And the statute they're arguing under is the FLPMA
37:55
you mentioned before, the nineteen seventy six law.
37:57
~ Sherry Jorgensen, the mayor pro Tem,
38:00
~ put it plainly.
38:02
We're taking on a giant. Now that's that's a city mayor talking,
38:06
right? ~ the sentence that sentence is the accurate description of the situation.
38:10
Because a city poun council with a city attorney's budget appealing
38:13
a federal land decision inside a federal appeals body against a project backed
38:17
by an executive order. That's worse than David and Goliath.
38:20
~ that's like David and and all Goliath and all of his brothers that
38:25
he brought those stones for, ~ if you remember that that story.
38:28
~ then
38:28
Or like Iran versus the US
38:30
Navy.
38:31
Yeah. maybe. that that could actually work out in in their favor.
38:35
th but that sentence is an accurate description of the situation,
38:40
right? and they got somewhere.
38:42
The the Center for Biological Diversity appealed too,
38:45
so they've now got some people jumping in as well.
38:47
And I'm sure they'll have some some friend of the court filings as well.
38:54
but Patrick Donnelly is the Great Basin director and on September first Judge Judge
38:58
Gunter granted a stay. So with both the city of Boulder City and
39:02
the Center for Biological Diversity appealing the BLM's decision,
39:05
~ they got a stay on the the project.
39:08
So the project is halted and a new environmental review is possible now.
39:12
I think it's important to point out here though that a stay is really just
39:16
a temporary pause button on this project.
39:19
And that doesn't mean we can, you know,
39:21
move on to something else because it will come back.
39:24
It means that that BLM may actually have to do the review it skipped.
39:28
And if it does the review and reaches the same conclusion,
39:32
then the project just goes forward and and continues on,
39:35
and the the appeal will have bought Boulder City a delay and a paper trail without
39:39
actually addressing the problem.
39:41
Just a little bit of whiteout on the process.
39:44
Yeah.
39:45
And here's what neither of us can tell you because it isn't in the record.
39:48
We don't know what TS2 pays the federal government for that right-of-way.
39:50
We don't know how much diesel will be stored on that site or how much water
39:54
a 170 megawatt facility there would draw,
39:56
because the environmental assessment that would have been that would have examined
39:59
those questions was written for a solar project in a different location.
40:02
BLM would have those figures or would have had to generate them.
40:06
But the approval made that made this the first data center on American public land
40:10
didn't require them to be public.
40:12
So when somebody in Boulder City asks what this
40:15
thing
40:15
will actually do next to their houses?
40:16
The answer in September 2026 as we sit here is that the document that will answer
40:21
your question does not exist yet and the project was approved anyway.
40:26
So I guess I want to kind of return back to the substantially
40:29
the same phrase because the opening was a little off,
40:33
right? I read it as though it was a lie.
40:36
But somebody typed that phrase out so they could throw it over the wall into someone
40:41
else's silo. And the longer we've spent uncovering this,
40:45
the more I I think it's the most honest sentence in the whole record.
40:48
Because ask what category BLM was actually filling out,
40:52
and the answer is the right-of-way category.
40:55
And
40:56
In a right of way grant under the FLPMA,
40:58
what BLM is authorizing is just a a private use of public acreage,
41:03
described by its footprint and its its length of term.
41:07
A solar array is a private use of public acreage.
41:11
A one hundred and seventy watt ~ you know,
41:14
megawatt, sorry, not watt, megawatt data center is a private use of public acreage.
41:22
In the box the agency wasn't filling in,
41:24
those two things are not the same thing.
41:27
And that's why Judge Gunter's pause reads kind of the way it does.
41:31
He found that the agency leaned on a review written before
41:35
the project actually changed locations,
41:37
right? His finding was about the location that they had initially submitted it for.
41:41
Whether a data center is a different animal from a solar farm
41:47
was never asked because the form doesn't have a line for it.
41:50
So the phrase I opened on is is the agency telling you exactly
41:53
how this country categorizes its own land,
41:56
right? A grant, stakes mark in the plot,
41:59
a lease term, and a rent price set on public property.
42:02
Whether the thing on top pulls one hundred and seventy megawatts
42:06
or stores a thousand gallons of diesel and runs the most valuable computing
42:12
in this economy is for permitting purposes,
42:14
just a filled in line on a form in Washington DC.
42:18
And that's the assumption the whole fight depends on.
42:20
The reason that should this go on public land is a hard question at all,
42:24
is that the public's acreage is priced as permission rather than as production.
42:28
~ rent on eighty acres of Nevada Desert with no royalty on what what
42:33
on what 170 megawatts produces.
42:35
Congress has done the other version.
42:37
It did it in nineteen twenty for oil and coal,
42:39
and you can see the reason the result in a single number.
42:43
~ arguably nine hundred and forty eight million million dollars
42:46
to Wyoming and federal mineral royalties in fiscal twenty eleven.
42:49
interior writes rent schedules.
42:52
Congress writes royalty regimes.
42:54
For compute on public land, neither one has written anything.
42:57
Now let me run the two things people actually want to do about this,
43:01
past the question of who they cost and ~ because I don't think either
43:04
one does what its supporters hope.
43:05
So moratoria first. Hochle's New York pause up to a year
43:12
Tulsa's nine months, Spartanburg's moving towards twelve,
43:15
those are real and they're the only lever a local body actually has.
43:18
Here's the cost. Boulder City's Revolt,
43:21
which I admire, cost Boulder City almost $1.5 million from the lease
43:26
and roughly $2.3 million a year in total new revenue that would have gone to police,
43:30
fire, emergency response, and utilities.
43:32
That money came off the city's own books,
43:34
and the residents who pay for those services are the ones carrying the bill.
43:37
And the developer's cost is just a delay in a different county.
43:41
Caterpillar's $72.1 billion backlog does not move because Tulsa said
43:45
no for nine months. The generator sets ship somewhere else.
43:48
Second, litigation. The Interior Board of Land Appeals stay is
43:53
the best outcome anybody in this story has achieved,
43:55
and what it produces is a redo.
43:57
A better environmental assessment on the same parcel for the same tenant
44:01
at the same rent. It costs BLM staff time and it costs TS2 a calendar year,
44:06
but it doesn't change a dollar of the arrangement.
44:08
The change that would cost the people at the top something is the
44:10
one nobody has proposed. Pricing public acreage and public power against what gets
44:14
produced on it. And putting permitted generator runtime on
44:17
the operator's meter instead of the neighbor's lungs.
44:20
That takes Congress for the first part and state environmental agencies
44:24
for the second. Virginia DEQ is sitting on exactly that question right now.
44:28
I'm not going to tell you it's likely.
44:30
I'll tell you that every fix currently on the table leaves the rent schedule alone.
44:34
And it leaves the seventeen thousand six hundred acres still on the table.
44:38
Exactly. And here's the position that I came in with that I'm leaving with because
44:42
I've been turning it over for forever now,
44:44
it seems like it hasn't resolved.
44:46
Messina, New York. Little town,
44:49
North Country, and its town board voted three to two against a six month data center
44:54
moratorium. Residents testified in favor of the data centers.
44:57
The reason they gave, reported by WWNY on September sixteenth,
45:01
is that Messina has been economically depressed for years and this
45:05
is industry coming back.
45:06
I'm not gonna call those people confused or say they've been marketed.
45:09
~ they live in a place that lost its employers and they're not
45:13
and they're being offered the only thing anybody's offered them in thirty years.
45:16
And the entire apparatus we described,
45:18
NEPA, FLPMA, the Interior Board of Land Appeals,
45:21
the Stay, the Appeal, the letter from five members of Congress,
45:24
none of it hands missing an alternative.
45:27
It can slow down a project, but it can't put anything in its place.
45:31
So I'm holding
45:33
two things in tension as we end this this episode.
45:35
The people who live next to a thing should get to decide whether it's built,
45:38
and yet a town with no other offer on the table is not really making
45:42
a free decision when it says yes.
45:44
I know how those two sound together,
45:46
but I don't have the third sentence yet.
45:48
Essentially we have to I don't know,
45:50
demand more from the press, like the media to report these sort of things.
45:53
They should be all over these dockets,
45:56
right? And sometimes they are.
45:57
Every right-of-way application on a BLM land,
46:01
you know, goes into a public planning system and is organized by a field office.
46:06
The RIA data application in Idaho went to the Four Rivers field office
46:10
in August in twenty twenty five and just sat there,
46:13
right? The Prometheus Hyperscale proposals for an access road and a
46:17
A telecom line and a water pipeline went into Wyoming.
46:21
And the Valar Atomic Survey request for ten thousand two hundred acres near Green
46:27
River, Utah went in and came back out after the press asked about it.
46:31
Those files are public before anybody gets approved,
46:35
and they're they're public in the name of a field office most people around there
46:39
have never heard of. The other docket is in your state's air permits.
46:45
Virginia DEQ has been weighing expanded runtime for data center generators
46:50
and state environmental agencies have taken written comment from anybody
46:55
on that kind of proceeding. You don't need a lawyer or a connection or
46:58
a weekday off to file a comment on a runtime rule.
47:01
But I don't know how much those comments actually matter.
47:05
And the third one is is the one that that already worked,
47:08
right? Spartanburg County, South Carolina had offered tax breaks for a data center.
47:13
The tax break is a public agenda item with public documents,
47:16
and after residents got into them and voters removed the incumbents
47:21
in office in June, the county clawed back the breaks.
47:26
What happened at ~ a county council meeting on paper anybody could actually read?
47:32
And if you want to put all the absurdity in one sort of nice package,
47:36
it's a single 12-day sequence in September.
47:39
September 11th, 5,000 to 55,500 gallons of diesel out
47:45
of one facilities tank into Anderson Creek,
47:47
and the retail value of that fuel is only about $30,000.
47:50
September 18th, reporting reveals at least 12 projects
47:55
on 17,600 acres of public land across six states,
47:59
most of it never announced.
48:01
Then finally on September 23rd,
48:03
today, ~ five members of Congress write to ask the agency what's happening
48:06
on public land in their own state because they read about it in a newspaper.
48:09
That $31,000 of diesel got cranes,
48:12
vacuum trucks, absorbent pads,
48:14
and a state agency statement and a week of coverage on the major media outlets.
48:18
The 17,600 acres got a letter.
48:21
That's how this runs. The arrangement responds to the small visible spill
48:25
and ignores the large invisible transfer.
48:27
And if you're designing it to work that way,
48:29
it would look exactly like that.
48:31
Yeah. Well look, thanks for spending a an hour on public land use with us.
48:36
If you if
48:37
Hey, when the data
48:38
center shows up in your backyard you'll be glad you heard the story here first.
48:41
We hope. If you if you want to listen to the show,
48:44
right, it's at FOF. foundation,
48:46
you can find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
48:48
And that's where we're putting the sourcing as well.
48:51
You includes the USGS report number two twenty twenty six dash five zero three five.
48:56
If you want to read what government scientists found about how close all
49:00
of this is already happening to the land that you already own a share of.
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And our collective vote is what made this happen.
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So be kind to each other, help out where you can.
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Like we always say, Bye.
49:13
Aye.