As construction advances on a 35,000-square-foot data center in Palm Coast’s Town Center and concerns recur, the City Council is stressing to the public that it is not an artificial intelligence, or AI, center of the sort that drain water sources and consume colossal amounts of electricity, but an internet cable landing station, or CLS.
“There’s some fear about what’s happening at Palm Coast based on what’s happening in other places, and I think that is warranted,” Council member Ty Miller said. “There are all over the country hyperscale data centers being put up, which are 1 million-plus square feet, you know, over 300 acres, things like that. And so the cable landing station here is kind of a different animal.”
Miller described the Town Center facility as a “switching center” that won’t be doing the raw computing that AI centers do.
The data center is north of Imagine School and just south of the new Sabal Preserve residential development along Royal Palms Parkway. Atlanta-based DC Blox bought the land and is building the data center under the aegis of a subsidiary, or an associate. The cables will land in Flagler Beach–the only one announced so far belongs to Google–and snake underground to Town Center.
Flagler Beach is charging DC Blox $600,000 for the use of rights of way to land six undersea cables on their way to the Palm Coast CLS, or cable-landing station. DCBlox claims the CLS will accommodate up to 16 cables. It has no such deal with Flagler Beach. That city agreed to three cables for $600,000, then $250,000 for each additional cable, for a maximum of three more.
Palm Coast is not charging for the use of its rights of way.
Much of the rest of the company’s dealings with Palm Coast and Flagler County have been cloaked in secrecy. The land-use proposal did not have to go before either the Palm Coast Planning Board or the City Council, because the company scaled down the project enough that it did not trip the threshold requiring more than administrative review and approvals.
DC Blox issued a “fact sheet” through Palm Coast’s public information office to calm fears about water and electricity usage. It described the facility’s water consumption as a “closed loop” system. “The overall water usage of our facility is similar to that of a small commercial building,” the fact sheet stated. The facility is built “to support up to 10 [megawatts] of power, which is significantly less than the larger facilities often mentioned in the media.”
Nevertheless it is not a modest amount, though the standard calculation often used in media of a megawatt equating to powering 1,000 homes is a “myth,” according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission factsheet. A megawatt is more likely to power 400 to 900 homes. So the facility will unquestionably be the largest single private consumer of electricity in the city.
Palm Coast government and taxpayers will not benefit substantially, aside from a modest amount of property taxes. Because Palm Coat is one of the rare cities in Florida that continue to decline levying either a utility franchise fee or a utility tax, the facility will pay neither. Thus, the largest consumer of electricity in the city will not generate revenue for the city’s coffers aside from property taxes that may not be more–and likely will be less–than a Publix store.
But a Florida law may prevent consumers from feeling the disproportionate effect of data centers’ electricity consumption. “They basically banned the socialization of it, so they have to be kind of in two different buckets in terms of rates,” Miller said, “so it prevents us from paying for those as well, so I think that alleviated some of the concern.”
Council member Theresa Pontieri said the city administration is aware of the concerns and looking at any potential data-center-related land purchases or plans with that awareness.
The discussion had been prompted by two comments from the floor. George Mayo, who often addresses the council, spoke of his concern about data centers. He cited reports on CNN and “60 Minutes,” the news magazine show, about data centers’ water and electricity usage and their 24/7 “loud harmonic hum.”
“Just think twice before we get into that,” he told the council. “They always proclaim, we need jobs, we need jobs, but any walkthrough that I’ve seen of data centers, it’s just large servers, row after row of servers, and have yet to see a worker inside one doing anything. It’s not like a factory, where you can have 100 people doing this, that, or whatever their job may be.”
Dennis McDonald followed Mayo and referred to data centers as “AI centers.” He spoke of the ongoing phenomenon at Lake Jackson on the northwest edge of Tallahassee, a large body of water that has periodically and completely drained, as it did in 1999, 2007, 2012, and again last year.
“It’s a rain-fed lake, its beds dotted with sinkholes that drain into the aquifer,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported in December. “Porter Sink, the sinkhole responsible for the dramatic dry downs, serves as a sort of bathtub plug. Until the sink plugs itself back up there is no lake, and with the ongoing drought, there’s no telling when enough rain will fall to refill what is now a prairie.”
McDonald didn’t make a direct connection between the drained lake and data centers, and current plans for large-scale or “hyperscale” centers in Florida exist, but far from Tallahassee, while the majority of the state’s existing centers are small scale. But he said–accurately–that “there is, without a question, a major league water problem under Florida everywhere,” a reference to the diminishing volume of the aquifer, which just last week led the St. Johns River Water Management District to issue an upgraded drought alert for this region. “We need to be paying attention to what’s going on with the water reserves underneath us.”
Disappointed says
I, for one, would appreciate informative discourse and not the unfactual misinformation provided by citizens.
We need jobs in Flagler County and Palm Coast. Those jobs would be great if they were in technology, engineering, finance, etc.
We have to tell the C.A.V.E. (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) people to sit down, shut up and listen for a change.