Make data centers great again

The building is under the street. The surface is whatever the town says it is — and the bill hands that choice to the town, not the builder.
Below grade, closed loop, passively cooled. The coolant is de–ionised water, bought outside the basin and shipped in. It never evaporates — so this building adds water to the basin instead of drinking it.

No need to go nuclear

All the generation and storage one hall needs, on less than a hundred acres — ten Salt Lake blocks — and the hall is under none of them; the farm keeps farming under the panels. This is what thirty–six hours of storage and 150% of peak load look like: 1,748 feet of head, a pond you could throw a stone across, and a fire you are allowed to light because it is nobody’s drinking watershed.
the upper lake 11–13 °C at depth, all summer the generation stands on top of the hall — 150% of peak penstock — the water falls, the turbine turns the lower lake the same water, waiting to be pumped back up tonight the racks, below grade the earth battery — pipe loops in the rock COOLING — the lake's sealed circuit COOLING — the racks' sealed circuit POWER — upper lake to lower lake, and back up at 3am One hole. Power and cooling. The coolant never leaves the pipe. The water never leaves the hill.

Two sealed loops in the same rock, and they never touch. All winter the lake pushes cold down into the stone. All summer the racks pull it back out. Rock is slow — it takes years to warm, and if it ever does you dig deeper or make the lake bigger. No tower, no plume, nothing lost to the sky. It is ancient tech. Persian qanats ran cold water through rock three thousand years ago; building below grade to stay cool is older still.

At three in the morning it buys power nobody wants and pumps the lake uphill. At four in the afternoon, when every air conditioner in the valley switches on, it sells that power back down the hill while its own panels are peaking. The grid gets a customer it can lean on instead of one it has to plan around — and the owner gets paid twice for the same power, every day, forever.

Try putting seven hundred megawatt–hours of lithium and a windowless grey concrete box heat island full of racks that sound like jet engines in the nice part of town, and you will meet the fire marshal, a concerned citizen with a decibel meter and a folding chair, the leader of every HOA within reasonable driving distance, and the six o’clock news.

Propose a reservoir in Utah and you get asked whether there’ll be fishing.

Never Trust Polished Boots — Utah Code 54–26 Part 10, thermal load facility siting. Full text overleaf. PDF, bill included → Below grade §1005 · no consumptive heat rejection §1002 · 150% of peak, deliverable to the serving utility, and 36 hours of storage §1003 · grid support §1004.   All three bills: 0z-info.org/earth-and-water/bills.html   Renderings, not photographs — made with the help of AI, in the cloud at a data centre, hopefully not burning coal. Not drafted by a lawyer and not legal advice: published in order to be corrected. Bring the bill, or bring a correction to it.