Thermal Load Facility Requirements

Aerial view of a wide valley planted with young trees in contour rows. A lake sits on the hilltop; a waterfall falls from it into a river that runs down through the planting into a larger lake at the valley floor, where there are kayaks, a campground and picnic shelters. A road roofed end to end in solar panels crosses the valley on a viaduct, and vertical-axis wind turbines stand along the ridge. Left of centre, a single small stone-and-glass door is set into the hillside — the only building in the frame. — A facility that meets these four provisions. The upper lake, the fall, the river and the lower lake are the cooling system. The road is the generation. The door, left of centre, is the building — all of it. **Nothing here is required by the bill:** the bill requires a closed loop, and after that the heat has to go somewhere.

What this is

A working draft of a Utah bill setting siting requirements for large thermal load facilities — data centres, principally. It does three things: it keeps drinking water and basin water out of the cooling loop, it makes a facility bring its own generation and storage, and it makes it sign a paid grid-support agreement with the utility that serves it.

⭐ The frame is a parking minimum. Arizona has required a hundred-year assured water supply before a subdivision can be built since 1980. California has required solar on new homes since 2020. This asks a data centre for both. There is nothing novel in it, which is the entire point.

⚠ This was not drafted by a lawyer and it is not legal advice. It was drafted by a layman with machine assistance, against six enrolled Utah bills that passed and the live Utah Code. It is published in order to be corrected.

Why this is needed at all

The industry did not arrive in the desert by accident, and not in spite of the water. It came for the dryness. Evaporative cooling runs on wet-bulb depression — the gap between the air temperature and the wet-bulb temperature. Arid air has a wide gap, so a cooling tower in the Great Basin sheds an enormous amount of heat with almost no compressor running. In humid air that gap collapses and the same tower cannot keep up.

⭐ Which means the driest places in America are the most efficient places to evaporate water, and the industry sited itself accordingly. The scarcity is the amenity.

The second signal is worse, because it is not physics. A gallon at the tap in Salt Lake City and a gallon at the tap in a state that floods every spring cost approximately the same. One of them is near the last gallon in a terminal basin whose lake has fallen eleven feet. The other is one of millions. The price carries no information about which is which.

And the reason it is cheap is not an oversight. It is the point. A municipal water rate is not a market price at all. It is a regulated rate, set by a public commission on cost of service and deliberately held near the floor, because people die without water. The United Nations named it a human right outright in 2010. Two centuries of public health policy sit inside that number, and it is one of the better things government does.

⭐ The loophole is simply that the discount was written for people, and a machine can stand in the same line. An evaporative cooling tower buys water treated to drinking standard — at the rate built to keep a household alive — and evaporates it into the sky over a basin that has none to spare. None of that is unlawful. Nobody designed it. The entitlement just never specified that the beneficiary had to be a person.

⚠ Two signals, both pointing at the desert, and neither of them telling the truth. No part of that arrangement is anyone’s fault and no part of it is unlawful. It is a market reading one instrument wrong, and it has been reading it wrong for a century.

So this bill does not raise the price of water for anybody. §201(2) creates no rate, no tax and no surcharge. It says a large thermal load may not take potable water at all. Not one household pays a cent more, no rate case is opened, and nothing is deregulated. The human rate stays exactly where it is — and stays for humans.

⭐ It is the same instrument as a resident parking permit, a student fare or a pensioner’s bus pass: a rate set below cost for a class of person, which a company cannot buy into. You cannot buy a child’s ticket.

Which is why the remedy here is the loop rather than a quota. A sealed loop rejecting heat into rock does not care about humidity at all. It cares about the temperature of the ground — and below roughly ten metres the ground holds the annual mean air temperature rather than today’s. That figure is about 11–12 °C in the Salt Lake valley. It is about the same in Indiana. Close the loop and the desert’s one advantage disappears, because the rock does not know which state it is in.

The two water tests do different jobs

§201(2) — no potable water — protects the ratepayer. Treatment to drinking standard is among the costliest parts of a supplier’s cost of service and it confers no benefit whatsoever on a machine. That provision travels to any state.

§201(1) — no consumptive use of basin water — protects the lake. In a terminal basin every evaporated gallon is gone, treated or not. That one needs a terminal basin to make sense, and is why this is a Utah bill rather than a template.

⚠ And the test is consumption, not use. §201(3) says the section “does not prohibit a process by reason of the process being evaporative” where the vapour is condensed and returned. Once-through that gives the water back is legal. A wet tower is not. The ban is on the loss.

Where 36 hours comes from

It is not a number anyone picked to fit a particular technology. §202(3) writes the derivation into the statute: the storage requirement is 150% of one day of operation at peak load — the same one-and-a-half already applied to generation, applied to a day. Stated in hours only for administrative convenience.

⭐ And §202(4) names no technology and no ownership structure. Gravity, lithium, thermal, compressed air, a flywheel, or something not yet built — any means that delivers the capacity satisfies it. Utah has between seventeen and twenty thousand abandoned mine openings. The standard is not a moat.

The disclosure

⚠ The author intends to develop facilities that would supply parties subject to this bill. That is said here, first, rather than discovered later. A rule that creates a market for the thing you sell is a real conflict, and the answer is that every provision is written as an outcome rather than a method — if a competitor meets the standard with different equipment, the statute does not care.

The instrument

THERMAL LOAD FACILITY REQUIREMENTS

LONG TITLE

General Description:
This bill establishes siting requirements for large thermal load facilities relating to
water used for heat rejection, electrical generation and storage capacity, and coordination with
the electrical grid.

Highlighted Provisions:
This bill:
▸ prohibits the consumption of water withdrawn from within the Great Salt Lake basin for
heat rejection at a thermal load facility;
▸ prohibits the delivery of potable water to a thermal load facility for heat rejection;
▸ requires a thermal load facility to bring generation and storage capacity sufficient to
serve its own load, at a stated multiple of that load, from renewable sources;
▸ requires a thermal load facility to enter an agreement with the serving electrical
utility for grid support services, for compensation; and
▸ leaves the source, treatment and disposition of nonpotable water used by the facility
unregulated by this chapter.

Money Appropriated in this Bill:
None

Other Special Clauses:
None

Utah Code Sections Affected:
ENACTS:
54-25-101, Utah Code Annotated 1953
54-25-201, Utah Code Annotated 1953
54-25-202, Utah Code Annotated 1953
54-25-203, Utah Code Annotated 1953
54-25-301, Utah Code Annotated 1953

Be it enacted by the Legislature of the state of Utah:

Section 1. Section 54-25-101 is enacted to read:

CHAPTER 25. THERMAL LOAD FACILITIES

54-25-101. Definitions.
As used in this chapter:
(1) "Basin" means the Great Salt Lake watershed as defined in Section 65A-16-101.
(2) "Consumptive heat rejection" means heat rejection by a process that evaporates water
withdrawn from within the basin and does not recover that water and return it to the waters of the
basin.
(3) "Nonpotable water" means water that is not treated to the standards established under
Title 19, Chapter 4, Safe Drinking Water Act.
(4) "Peak load" means the highest hourly electrical demand of a thermal load facility,
determined by measurement after the facility has operated for 12 months and by design capacity
before that time.
(5) "Renewable" has the same meaning as "qualifying energy resource" in Section 54-17-601.
(6) "Thermal load facility" means a facility having an installed heat rejection capacity of
five megawatts or more, including a data center, and does not include a hospital, a public or
private school, a correctional facility, or a residential building.

Section 2. Section 54-25-201 is enacted to read:

54-25-201. Water used for heat rejection.
(1) A thermal load facility within the basin may not use consumptive heat rejection.
(2) A public water supplier may not deliver potable water to a thermal load facility for
the purpose of heat rejection, and a thermal load facility may not use potable water for heat
rejection.
(3) This section does not prohibit a process by reason of the process being evaporative. A
process that evaporates water and recovers and returns that water to the waters of the basin,
including a process enclosed so that vapor is condensed and returned, is not consumptive heat
rejection.
(4) Subsection (1) does not apply to water conveyed into the basin from outside it, and
this chapter does not limit the use of such water for heat rejection, for an ornamental water
feature, or for any other purpose.
(5) Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply to:
(a) water used for human consumption, sanitation, or food service at the facility;
(b) fire suppression, including the charging and testing of a fire suppression
system; or
(c) a use during a state of emergency declared under Title 53, Chapter 2a.
(6) This chapter does not regulate the source of nonpotable water conveyed into the basin
for use by a thermal load facility, the means by which that water is conveyed, the treatment
applied to it, or its disposition after use.
(7) A facility placed in service before the effective date of this chapter shall comply
with this section on or before December 31, 2035.

Section 3. Section 54-25-202 is enacted to read:

54-25-202. Generation and storage.
(1) A thermal load facility shall own, or hold under contract for the life of the facility,
generation capacity from renewable sources equal to not less than 150% of its peak load.
(2) A thermal load facility shall own, or hold under contract for the life of the facility,
energy storage sufficient to serve its peak load for not less than 36 hours.
(3) The requirement under Subsection (2) is 150% of one day of operation at peak load, and
is stated in hours for administrative convenience only.
(4) Nothing in this section requires the use of a particular generation technology, a
particular storage technology, or a particular ownership structure, and a facility may satisfy this
section by any means that delivers the stated capacity.
(5) A facility placed in service before the effective date of this chapter shall comply
with this section on or before December 31, 2035.

Section 4. Section 54-25-203 is enacted to read:

54-25-203. Grid support agreement.
(1) Before commencing operation, a thermal load facility shall enter into an agreement with
the electrical corporation or municipal utility serving the facility providing for:
(a) the dispatch of the facility's generation or storage in support of the serving
utility's system;
(b) compensation to the facility for that dispatch; and
(c) the allocation of interconnection costs between the facility and the serving
utility.
(2) The parties shall negotiate the terms of an agreement under Subsection (1), including
compensation and the allocation of interconnection costs.
(3) The commission may not prescribe the terms of an agreement under Subsection (1), and
may resolve a dispute between the parties on the petition of either.
(4) An agreement under this section does not make a thermal load facility a public utility.

Section 5. Section 54-25-301 is enacted to read:

54-25-301. Severability.
If any provision of this chapter is held invalid, the remaining provisions are given effect
without the invalid provision.

Section 6. Effective date.

This bill takes effect on May 6, 2027.

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