Tag: energy

Project Spero and Spartanburg’s New Resource Question: Power, Water, and the True Cost of a Data Center


Spartanburg County is staring straight at the kind of development that sounds abstract until it lands on our own roads, substations, and watersheds. A proposed $3 billion, “AI-focused high-performance computing” facility, Project Spero, has been announced for the Tyger River Industrial Park – North. 

In the Upstate, we’re used to thinking about growth as something we can see…new subdivisions, new lanes of traffic, new storefronts. But a data center is a stranger kind of arrival. It does not announce itself with crowds or culture. It arrives as a continuous, quiet, and largely invisible demand. A building that looks still from the outside can nevertheless function as a kind of permanent request being made of the region to keep the current steady, keep the cooling stable, keep the redundancy ready, keep the uptime unquestioned.

And that is where I find myself wanting to slow down and do something unfashionable in a policy conversation and describe the experience of noticing. Phenomenology begins with the discipline of attention…with the refusal to let an object remain merely “background.” It asks what is being asked of perception. The “cloud” is one of the most successful metaphors of our moment precisely because it trains us not to see or not to feel the heat, not to hear the generators, not to track the water, not to imagine the mines and the supply chains and the labor. A local data center undermines the metaphor, which is why it matters that we name what is here.

The familiar sales pitch is already in circulation as significant capital investment, a relatively small number of permanent jobs (about 50 in Phase I), and new tax revenue, all framed as “responsible growth” without “strain” on infrastructure. 

But the real question isn’t whether data centers are “the future.” They’re already here. The question is what kinds of futures they purchase and with whose power, whose water, and whose air.

Where this is happening (and why that matters)

Tyger River Industrial Park isn’t just an empty map pin… its utility profile is part of the story. The site’s published specs include a 34kV distribution line (Lockhart Power), a 12” water line (Startex-Jackson-Wellford-Duncan Water District), sewer service (Spartanburg Sanitary Sewer District), Piedmont Natural Gas, and AT&T fiber. 

Two details deserve more attention than they’re likely to get in ribbon-cutting language:

Power capacity is explicitly part of the pitch. One listing notes available electric capacity “>60MW.” 

Natural gas is part of the reliability strategy. The reporting on Project Spero indicates plans to “self-generate a portion of its power on site using natural gas.” 

    That combination of a high continuous load plus on-site gas generation isn’t neutral. It’s an ecological choice with real downstream effects.

    The energy question: “separate from residential systems” is not the same as “separate from residential impact”

    One line you’ll hear often is that industrial infrastructure is “separate from residential systems.” 

    Even if the wires are technically separate, the regional load is shared in ways that matter, from planning assumptions and generation buildout to transmission upgrades and the ratepayer math that follows.

    Regional reporting has been blunt about the dynamics of data center growth (alongside rapid population and industrial growth), which are pushing utilities toward major new infrastructure investments, and those costs typically flow through to bills. 

    In the Southeast, regulators and advocates are also warning of a rush toward expensive gas-fired buildouts to meet data-center-driven demand, potentially exposing customers to higher costs. 

    So the right local question isn’t “Will Spartanburg’s lights stay on?”

    It’s “What long-term generation and grid decisions are being locked in, because a facility must run 24/7/365?”

    When developers say “separate from residential systems,” I hear a sentence designed to calm the community nervous system. But a community is not a wiring diagram. The grid is not just copper and transformers, but a social relation. It is a set of promises, payments, and priorities spread across time. The question is not whether the line feeding the site is physically distinct from the line feeding my neighborhood. The question is whether the long arc of planning, generation decisions, fuel commitments, transmission upgrades, and the arithmetic of rates is being bent around a new form of permanent demand.

    This is the kind of thing we typically realize only after the fact, when the bills change, when the new infrastructure is presented as inevitable, when the “choice” has already been absorbed into the built environment. Attention, in this sense, is not sentiment. It is civic practice. It is learning to see the slow commitments we are making together, and deciding whether they are commitments we can inhabit.

    The water question: closed-loop is better but “negligible” needs a definition

    Project Spero’s developer emphasizes a “closed-loop” water design, claiming water is reused “rather than consumed and discharged,” and that the impact on existing customers is “negligible.” 

    Closed-loop cooling can indeed reduce water withdrawals compared with open-loop or evaporative systems, but “negligible” is not a technical term. It’s a rhetorical one. If we want a serious civic conversation, “negligible” should be replaced with specifics:

    • What is projected annual water withdrawal and peak-day demand?
    • What is the cooling approach (air-cooled, liquid, hybrid)?
    • What is the facility’s water-use effectiveness (WUE) target and reporting plan?
    • What happens in drought conditions or heat waves, when cooling demand spikes?

    Locally, Spartanburg Water notes the Upstate’s surface-water advantages and describes interconnected reservoirs and treatment capacity planning, naming Lake Bowen (about 10.4 billion gallons), Lake Blalock (about 7.2 billion gallons), and Municipal Reservoir #1 (about 1 billion gallons). 

    That’s reassuring, and it’s also exactly why transparency matters. Resource resilience is not just about what exists today. Resilience is about what we promise into the future, and who pays the opportunity costs.

    Water conversations in the Upstate can become strangely abstract, as if reservoirs and treatment plants are simply numbers on a planning sheet. But water is not only a resource, but it’s also a relation of dependency that shapes how we live and what we can become. When I sit with the black walnut in our backyard and take notes on weather, light, and season, the lesson is never just “nature appreciation.” It’s training in scale and learning what persistence feels like, what stress looks like before it becomes an emergency, and what a living system does when conditions shift.

    That’s why “negligible” makes me uneasy. Not because I assume bad faith, but because it’s a word that asks us not to look too closely. Negligible compared to what baseline, over what time horizon, and under what drought scenario with what heatwave assumptions? If closed-loop cooling is truly part of the design, then the most basic gesture of responsibility is to translate that claim into measurable terms and to publicly commit to reporting that remains stable even when the headlines move on.

    The ecological footprint that rarely makes the headlines

    When people say “data center,” they often picture a quiet box that’s more like a library than a factory. In ecological terms, it’s closer to an always-on industrial organism with electricity in, heat out, materials cycling, backup generation on standby, and constant hardware turnover.

    Here are the footprint categories I want to see discussed in Spartanburg in plain language:

    • Continuous electricity demand (and what it forces upstream): Data centers don’t just “use electricity.” They force decisions about new generation and new transmission to meet high-confidence loads. That’s the core ratepayer concern advocacy groups have been raising across South Carolina. 
    • On-site combustion and air permitting: Even when a data center isn’t “a power plant,” it often has a lot in common with one. Spartanburg already has a relevant local example with the Valara Holdings High Performance Compute Center. In state permitting materials, it is described as being powered by twenty-four natural gas-fired generators “throughout the year,” with control devices for NOx and other pollutants.  Environmental groups flagged concerns about the lack of enforceable pollution limits in the permitting process, and later reporting indicates that permit changes were made to strengthen enforceability and emissions tracking. That’s not a side issue. It’s what “cloud” actually looks like on the ground.
    • Water, heat, and the limits of “efficiency”: Efficiency claims matter, but they should be auditable. If a project is truly low-impact, the developer should welcome annual public reporting on energy, water, and emissions.
    • Material throughput and e-waste: Server refresh cycles and hardware disposal are part of the ecological story, even when they’re out of sight. If Spartanburg is becoming a node in this seemingly inevitable AI buildout, we should be asking about procurement standards, recycling contracts, and end-of-life accountability.

    A policy signal worth watching: South Carolina is debating stricter rules

    At the state level, lawmakers have already begun floating stronger guardrails. One proposed bill (the “South Carolina Data Center Responsibility Act”) includes requirements like closed-loop cooling with “zero net water withdrawal,” bans on municipal water for cooling, and requirements that permitting, infrastructure, and operational costs be fully funded by the data center itself. 

    Whatever the fate of that bill, the direction is clear: communities are tired of being told “trust us” while their long-term water and power planning is quietly rearranged.

    What I’d like Spartanburg County to require before calling this “responsible growth”

    If Spartanburg County wants to be a serious steward of its future, here’s what I’d want attached to any incentives or approvals…in writing, enforceable, and public:

    1. Annual public reporting of electricity use, peak demand, water withdrawal, and cooling approach.
    2. A clear statement of on-site generation: fuel type, capacity, expected operating profile, emissions controls, and total permitted hours.
    3. Third-party verification of any “closed-loop” and “negligible impact” claims.
    4. A ratepayer protection plan: who pays for grid upgrades, and how residential customers are insulated from speculative overbuild.
    5. A community benefits agreement that actually matches the footprint (workforce training, environmental monitoring funds, emergency response support, local resilience investments).
    6. Noise and light mitigation standards, monitored and enforceable.

    I’m certainly not anti-technology. I’m pro-accountability. If we’re going to host infrastructure that makes AI possible, then we should demand the same civic clarity we’d demand from any other industrial operation.

    The spiritual crisis here isn’t that we use power. It’s that we grow accustomed to not knowing what our lives require. One of the ways we lose the world is by letting the infrastructures that sustain our days become illegible to us. A data center can be an occasion for that loss, or it can become an occasion for renewed legibility, for a more honest accounting, for a more careful local imagination about what we are building and why.

    Because in the end, the Upstate’s question isn’t whether we can attract big projects. It’s whether we can keep telling the truth about what big projects cost.

    Doomsday Clock Eighty-Five Seconds to Midnight: An Invitation to Attention

    The news that the Doomsday Clock now stands at eighty-five seconds to midnight is not, in itself, the most important thing about this moment. The number is arresting, and the coverage tends to amplify its urgency. But the deeper question raised by this year’s announcement is not how close we are to catastrophe. It is how we are learning, or failing, to attend to the conditions that make catastrophe thinkable in the first place.

    What the Clock reflects is not a single looming disaster but a convergence of unresolved tensions from nuclear instability, ecological breakdown, accelerating technologies, and political fragmentation (not to mention our spiritual crisis and the very real scenes we’re seeing with our own eyes in each of our communities with federal authorities and directed violence here in the United States).

    These are not isolated threats. They form a dense field of entanglement, reinforcing one another across systems we have built but no longer fully understand or govern. The Clock does not merely measure danger. It reveals a world stretched thin by its own speed.

    One risk of symbolic warnings like this is that they can tempt us into abstraction. “Eighty-five seconds to midnight” can feel cinematic, even mythic, while the realities beneath it, such as warming soils, poisoned waters, eroded trust, and automated corporatist decision-making, remain oddly distant. When risk becomes spectacle, attention falters. And when attention falters, responsibility diffuses (part of the aim of keeping us distracted with screens and political theater).

    This is where I think the Clock’s real work begins. It presses on a crisis not only of policy or technology, but of perception. We have grown adept at responding to emergencies that suddenly emerge, and far less capable of staying with harms that unfold slowly, relationally, and across generations. Climate disruption, ecological loss, and technological overreach do not arrive as single events. They address us quietly, repeatedly, asking whether we are willing to notice what is already being asked of us.

    In earlier posts, I’ve suggested that empathy is not first an ethical achievement but a mode of perception, or a way “the world” comes to matter. Attention works in a similar register. It is not merely focus or vigilance. It is a practiced openness to being addressed by what exceeds us. The Doomsday Clock, at its best, functions as a crude but persistent call to such attention. It interrupts complacency not by predicting the future, but by unsettling how we inhabit the present.

    And here is where something genuinely hopeful emerges.

    The Clock is not fate. It has moved away from midnight before, not through technological miracles alone, but through shifts in collective orientation, such as restraint, cooperation, treaty-making, and shared commitments to limits. Those movements were not perfect or permanent, but they remind us that attention can be cultivated and that perception can change. Worlds do not only end. They also reorient.

    Hope, in this sense, is not confidence that things will turn out fine. It is the thing with feathers and the willingness to stay present to what is fragile without turning away or grasping for false reassurance. It is the discipline of attending to land, to neighbors, to systems we participate in but rarely see or acknowledge. It is the slow work of empathy extended beyond the human, allowing rivers, forests, and even future generations to count as more than abstractions.

    Eighty-five seconds to midnight is not a verdict. It is an invitation to recover forms of attention capable of holding complexity without paralysis. An invitation to let empathy deepen into responsibility. An invitation to notice that the most meaningful movements away from catastrophe begin not with panic, but with learning how to listen again to the world as it is, and to the world as it might yet become.

    The question, then, is not whether the clock will strike midnight. The question is whether we will accept the invitation it places before us to attend, to respond, and to live as if what we are already being asked to notice truly matters.

    Pragmatism for Whom? Energy, Empathy, and the Limits of “All-of-the-Above”

    A recent opinion piece in The Hill argues that Democrats should and are beginning to rethink their approach to climate and energy policy. Pointing to renewed support for natural gas infrastructure, oil and gas exports, and an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, the author suggests that political realism requires prioritizing affordability, job creation, and national security alongside emissions reduction. The argument is presented not as climate denial but as maturity…a necessary correction to what is portrayed as ideological rigidity. It’s a case worth taking seriously, precisely because it names real pressures and real people. But it also leaves something essential unexamined.

    In recent weeks, a familiar argument has returned to public discourse that Democrats, and perhaps climate advocates more broadly, must recalibrate their approach to energy. Affordability matters, jobs matter, national security matters. An “all-of-the-above” energy strategy here is not ideological retreat but political maturity.

    There is truth here, and it should be acknowledged plainly. Energy transitions are not experienced in the abstract. They are lived locally…in monthly bills, in the dignity of work, in the stability or fragility of rural communities. Any climate politics that fails to take this seriously will not only lose elections, but it will also lose trust.

    And yet, there is a deeper question that this rhetoric consistently avoids. Not whether energy should be affordable, or whether people deserve good work. But whose experience counts when we decide what is practical?

    Pragmatism and the Shape of Time

    Much of the current defense of fossil fuel expansion rests on short-term accounting. Natural gas reduced emissions relative to coal, while fracking boosted GDP and export capacity, strengthening allies and weakening adversaries. These claims are not fabrications in that they are partial truths framed within narrow temporal windows.

    What often goes unspoken is that infrastructure remembers. Pipelines, compressor stations, export terminals, and extraction fields are not neutral bridges toward a cleaner future. They are long-term commitments that shape what futures remain possible. Once built, they exert a quiet pressure on policy, markets, and imagination alike.

    This is not ideology. It is systems thinking. What appears pragmatic in electoral time can prove costly in ecological time.

    The Missing Dimension: Empathy as Perception

    In my own work on empathy, I’ve argued that empathy is not primarily a moral sentiment or an ethical achievement. It is a way of perceiving and is how the world first comes to matter to us individually.

    What’s striking in many contemporary energy debates is how narrow the field of perception has become. Voters, workers, markets, and allies all appear. But watersheds rarely do. Soil rarely does. Forests, species, and future bodies remain largely invisible.

    This absence is not accidental. It reflects a failure of empathy…not emotional indifference, but perceptual narrowing. We have learned to see economic benefit clearly while training ourselves not to see cumulative ecological harm until it arrives as crisis.

    Empathy, understood ecologically, resists this narrowing. It asks us to attend to what bears cost slowly, silently, and often without political voice.

    Land Is Not an Abstraction

    Extraction economies are often defended as lifelines for “overlooked” places. But land is not an abstract resource pool waiting to be activated for growth. It is a living field of relations between humans and more-than-humans that remembers disturbance long after boom cycles fade.

    Anyone who has spent time with communities shaped by extraction knows the pattern. Initial prosperity with infrastructure investment and job creation. And then, often, degraded water, long-term health impacts, ecological fragmentation, and economic precarity occur when markets shift.

    To name this is not to dismiss workers or romanticize poverty. It is to refuse a false tradeoff that pits dignity of labor against the integrity of place.

    Beyond the Binary

    The real failure of the “all-of-the-above” framing is not that it includes fossil fuels. It is that it treats energy as a menu of interchangeable options rather than as a formative relationship between people, land, and time.

    A genuinely pragmatic energy politics would ask harder questions:

    • What kinds of work help communities remain with their land rather than exhaust it?
    • What forms of energy production cultivate care, skill, and long-term stewardship?
    • What do our infrastructure choices teach us to notice…and what do they train us to ignore?

    These are not elitist questions. They are practical questions in the deepest sense.

    A Different Kind of Realism

    Climate politics does not fail because it asks too much. It fails when it asks too little…when it narrows realism to GDP curves and election cycles while ignoring the slow violence written into landscapes and bodies.

    If empathy is how the world first comes to matter, then energy policy is one of the most powerful forms of moral formation we have. It shapes what we see, what we value, and what we are willing to sacrifice…often without saying so aloud.

    The question before us is not whether fossil fuels have brought benefits. Of course they have. The question is whether continuing to expand systems that require ecological blindness can ever count as practical in a world already living with the consequences of that blindness.

    Pragmatism worthy of the name would begin there.

    What is Intelligence (and What “Superintelligence” Misses)?

    Worth a read… sounds a good deal like what I’ve been saying out loud and thinking here in my posts on AI futures and the need for local imagination in steering technological innovation such as AI / AGI…

    The Politics Of Superintelligence:

    And beneath all of this, the environmental destruction accelerates as we continue to train large language models — a process that consumes enormous amounts of energy. When confronted with this ecological cost, AI companies point to hypothetical benefits, such as AGI solving climate change or optimizing energy systems. They use the future to justify the present, as though these speculative benefits should outweigh actual, ongoing damages. This temporal shell game, destroying the world to save it, would be comedic if the consequences weren’t so severe.

    And just as it erodes the environment, AI also erodes democracy. Recommendation algorithms have long shaped political discourse, creating filter bubbles and amplifying extremism, but more recently, generative AI has flooded information spaces with synthetic content, making it impossible to distinguish truth from fabrication. The public sphere, the basis of democratic life, depends on people sharing enough common information to deliberate together….

    What unites these diverse imaginaries — Indigenous data governance, worker-led data trusts, and Global South design projects — is a different understanding of intelligence itself. Rather than picturing intelligence as an abstract, disembodied capacity to optimize across all domains, they treat it as a relational and embodied capacity bound to specific contexts. They address real communities with real needs, not hypothetical humanity facing hypothetical machines. Precisely because they are grounded, they appear modest when set against the grandiosity of superintelligence, but existential risk makes every other concern look small by comparison. You can predict the ripostes: Why prioritize worker rights when work itself might soon disappear? Why consider environmental limits when AGI is imagined as capable of solving climate change on demand?

    Quantum–Plasma Consciousness and the Ecology of the Cross

    I’ve been thinking a good deal about plasma, physics, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and my ongoing work on The Ecology of the Cross, as all of those areas of my own interest are connected. After teaching AP Physics, Physics, Physical Science, Life Science, Earth and Space Science, and AP Environmental Science for the last 20 years or so, this feels like one of those frameworks that I’ve been building to for the last few decades.

    So, here’s a longer paper exploring some of that, with a bibliography of recent scientific research and philosophical and theological insights that I’m pretty proud of (thanks, Zotero and Obsidian!).

    Abstract

    This paper develops a relational cosmology, quantum–plasma consciousness, that integrates recent insights from plasma astrophysics, quantum foundations, quantum biology, consciousness studies, and ecological theology. Across these disciplines, a shared picture is emerging: the universe is not composed of isolated substances but of dynamic, interdependent processes. Plasma research reveals that galaxy clusters and cosmic filaments are shaped by magnetized turbulence, feedback, and self-organization. Relational interpretations of quantum mechanics show that physical properties arise only through specific interactions, while quantum biology demonstrates how coherence and entanglement can be sustained in living systems. Together, these fields suggest that relationality and interiority are fundamental features of reality. The paper brings this scientific picture into dialogue with ecological theology through what I call The Ecology of the Cross. This cruciform cosmology interprets openness, rupture, and transformation, from quantum interactions to plasma reconnection and ecological succession, as intrinsic to creation’s unfolding. The Cross becomes a symbol of divine participation in the world’s vulnerable and continually renewing relational processes. By reframing consciousness as an intensified, self-reflexive mode of relational integration, and by situating ecological crisis and AI energy consumption within this relational ontology, the paper argues for an ethic of repairing relations and cultivating spiritual attunement to the interiorities of the Earth community.

    PDF download below…

    Quantum–Plasma Consciousness and the Ecology of the CrossDownload

    AI Data Centers in Space

    Solar energy is indeed everything (and perhaps the root of consciousness?)… this is a good step and we should be moving more of our energy grids into these types of frameworks (with local-focused receivers and transmitters here on the surface)… not just AI datacenters. I suspect we will in the coming decades with the push from AI (if the power brokers that have made and continue to make trillions from energy generation aren’t calling the shots)… 

    Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers:

    CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Fox News interview on Sunday that Google will soon begin construction of AI data centers in space. The tech giant announced Project Suncatcher earlier this month, with the goal of finding more efficient ways to power energy-guzzling centers, in this case with solar power.

    “One of our moonshots is to, how do we one day have data centers in space so that we can better harness the energy from the sun that is 100 trillion times more energy than what we produce on all of Earth today?” Pichai said.

    Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of Science, Ethics, and Spirituality

    I’ve been interested in seeing how corporate development of AI data centers (and their philosophies and ethical considerations) has dominated the conversation, rather than inviting in other local and metaphysical voices to help shape this important human endeavor. This paper explores some of those possibilities (PDF download available here…)

    Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of ScienceDownload

    Renewables Pass Coal’s Share in Global Electricity Generation

    China is leading the way here in solar… It’s time for our leaders and economy here in the US to start waking up to reality. That won’t happen in the current scenario of our political landscape, obviously, but there needs to be intentional focusing on reducing consolidated power grid structures in favor of local (and flexible) sources of electricity and fuel (as well as our food supplies). 

    Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights 2025 | Ember:

    Solar and wind outpaced demand growth in the first half of 2025, as renewables overtook coal’s share in the global electricity mix…

    Solar grew by a record 306 TWh (31%) in the first half of 2025. This increased solar’s share in the global electricity mix from 6.9% to 8.8%. China accounted for 55% of global solar generation growth, followed by the US (14%), the EU (12%), India (5.6%) and Brazil (3.2%), while the rest of the world contributed just 9%. Four countries generated over 25% of their electricity from solar, and at least 29 countries surpassed 10%, up from 22 countries in the same period last year and only 11 countries in H1-2021…

    PDF Report availalbe here

    Let’s Flood the Planet with Solar Panels

    I have very similar thoughts about our growing energy needs and utilizing the very free and abundant (and powerful) resource that is energy being produced by our own star that floods our Earth with more than enough energy potential to get us out of the capitalistic and colonialist matrix that is the fossil fuel industry… a mesh of Whitehead Schedulers powered by solar energy would do wonders to transform the daily lives of humans and more-than-humans here on Earth…

    Good read and idea (and stats, espeically out of Pakistan):

    A Modest Proposal – by Bill McKibben – The Crucial Years

    So let’s start at $2.5 trillion, the number for the panels alone, because, hey, Tik Tok videos. Is that an absurd number to imagine helping to pay? The International Monetary Fund reported recently that the world spends $7 trillion a year subsidizing fossil fuel. And all it gets us is the chance to buy more fossil fuel—the last line of Jacobson’s email makes it clear that even at the full price this would be a huge bargain. You save huge amounts of money because you don’t have to pay for fuel any more. Once the panels are up, sunshine is free. It changes everything.