Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather see legislation banning crypto mining and AI data centers from the public grid entirely. No sense in forcing the broader public to subsidize them.
If they weren't on the public grid, they would just slap in a bunch of gas turbines and run one of the noisier, more polluting sources of electricity. I think it would be better if we required them to replace the power they used, but do so on the grid so that it benefits everyone.
If you ever visited the town and hit the restaurants during the summer you get a nice taste of the lake bottom when it flips. Pretty nasty yet few restaurants use water filtration to deliver fresh-tasting tea and water to their customers.
That's OT though.
The county will have a special meeting on data centers this Tuesday, June 9 where they are seeking public input. I expect that there will be plenty of people and hope they have time to give people an opportunity to speak. I visit this county regularly for grocery shopping, fuel, etc and if you go south one county there are already plenty of people who are sick and tired of the bitcoin operations and how they have disrupted life in that county. I hope we have a good turnout for this meeting so that this new operation gets canned before they build anything.
[0]https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/article315770666.ht...
Here is a quick overview of the proposed site. [1] You can see in yellow the 200 acre section where turbine generators will be sited. In the light blue area adjacent you can see a small part of the larger parcel where the data centers will be built. This is part of one of the last large ranches in this part of the county. The others are actively being developed for large (>50000 residents) developments that were supposed to be self-contained communities but which have evolved to be large residential areas that dump traffic onto undersized freeways which are currently under construction to handle the huge volume of new traffic and traffic from all the other losers who will live out there.
The red polygon show existing grid substation intertie where high tension power lines converge or radiate out across the countryside. The light blue polygon is an active natural gas production and compressor station. There is more natural gas infrastructure just below the red polygon too. The lake is obvious in the lower left corner. The natural gas wells and compressor station date to early Barnett Shale production in the county, before 2008. The electrical substation is legacy and has been expanded more than once during the last 15 years.
The black polygon is a small rural subdivision of 8 ~2.2 acre ranchettes around one original ~4.2 acre home site. Those people bought a small plot of ranchland for their own slice of rural Texas. That section was subdivided into lots about 9 years ago so every one of those people bought homes next to an operational gas compressor station. I wonder whether they will be at the meeting.
