Tag: spartanburg

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.

    Cold Wave, Hot Planet, and the Old Trick of “Whatever Happened to Global Warming?”

    This morning, we woke up to a solid coating of ice and snow here in Spartanburg, SC. The kids are ecstatic, and we have a rare Sunday morning without attending worship at our church. “Snow Days” here in the Southeast USA are one of those rare treats that not only drive people to the grocery store for bread and milk but also remind us of the simple joys of meteorology, family, and bundling up to go make snowpeople and snowsquirrels.

    President Trump recently posted a familiar taunt about this “record cold wave” hitting roughly 40 states, then demanded to know: “Whatever happened to global warming?” The line is designed to feel like common sense. It also relies on a category mistake so basic that it functions less as an argument and more as a test of whether we can still distinguish weather from climate.

    Let me start with the obvious and non-negotiable point. A cold wave is weather. Global warming is climate. Weather is what your body meets when you step outside today. Climate is the long story of patterns, averages, extremes, and probabilities over decades. Confusing the two is like arguing that because one person had a bad afternoon, the whole biography is a lie.

    And this matters right now because the cold is not theoretical. This weekend’s storm system has been described as sprawling and dangerous, with snow, ice, outages, and widespread travel disruption across large portions of the country. People and more-than-humans die in cold snaps. Communities can be immobilized. Grids and water systems can fail. None of that is diminished by insisting, clearly and calmly, that a warming planet does not mean the end of winter.

    Why a warming world can still deliver severe cold

    Here’s the part that seems to surprise people every year… global warming loads the dice, but it doesn’t remove variability. We are adding heat to the Earth system overall, especially into the oceans, and that shift changes the background conditions in which weather plays out. NASA puts it plainly in materials aimed at non-specialists… a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which can contribute to heavier snowfall when temperatures are still cold enough for snow.

    Then there’s the polar vortex, which is not a new invention but a real atmospheric feature that can, under certain configurations, stretch or wobble in ways that allow Arctic air to plunge south. NOAA’s explainer is useful here because it describes the mechanism without turning it into political theater.

    The more contested question is whether, and how, Arctic warming may be influencing the likelihood of certain jet stream patterns or polar vortex “stretching” events. NOAA has highlighted research suggesting Arctic change can be associated with events that deliver extreme cold into the U.S., while also acknowledging this is an active research area with complexity and ongoing refinement. If you want a careful summary of the “some evidence, not settled, still being worked” reality, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has a sober discussion of how scientific findings have differed across studies and models.

    So yes… a frigid outbreak can happen in a warming world. In some cases, warming can even intensify the water cycle and shape storm dynamics in ways that worsen impacts, including snow and ice hazards, depending on the temperature profile of the air mass involved.

    What the best synthesis says about cold extremes

    If we zoom out to the scale climate science is actually talking about, the headline is straightforward: as the planet warms, cold extremes generally become less frequent and less severe, even though they do not disappear. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report explicitly treats this, including regionally, noting projected decreases in cold spells over North America under continued warming.

    This is the mature way to hold the reality. Not “winter is canceled,” and not “it’s cold today so a warming planet is fake,” but rather: the distribution is shifting. The tails move. The overlaps remain, and the costs of getting this wrong are paid by real bodies in real places… especially the elderly, the poor, the unhoused, and anyone living in fragile infrastructure conditions.

    The deeper problem with the President’s rhetoric

    The rhetorical move in Trump’s post is not curiosity. It is contempt for scale. It treats the climate crisis as a punchline and the public as if we cannot learn the difference between an experience and an explanation.

    And that contempt has consequences. When leaders encourage people to dismiss climate reality as ideology, they create the conditions for underinvestment in preparedness and resilience in weatherization, grid hardening, public health capacity, and the kind of local mutual aid that becomes lifesaving when the lights go out and roads glaze over.

    This is where I want to bring in a conviction that has been forming in my own work, what I’ve called ecological intentionality. The question is not whether we can win a snarky argument on social media. The question is whether we can train our attention on what is actually happening in the atmosphere, the oceans, our towns, and the lives most exposed to harm.

    A cold wave is not evidence against climate change. It is evidence that our moral and infrastructural responsibilities do not pause for talking points. The atmosphere does not care about our slogans. The grid does not care about our sarcasm. The vulnerable neighbor down the street certainly does not.

    So if we want a real question to ask in the wake of this storm, it might be something like:

    If extremes are becoming more disruptive and more expensive, why are we still treating climate risk, energy resilience, and public safety as partisan props instead of basic obligations of governance and community?

    Back to the tree line

    In my backyard, the black walnut does not “debate” the cold. It receives it. It holds it. It keeps faith with time. That is not passivity but discipline and a kind of creaturely realism. It reminds me that perception comes first. Not as an excuse to avoid ethics, but as the condition for any ethics that might actually be honest.

    We can do the same. We can tell the truth about the weather and climate at once. We can care for people in the cold without surrendering our minds to the cheap thrill of false equivalence. And we can choose, even now, to become the kind of communities that prepare, adapt, and protect because reality is not an opponent to be dunked on. It is a world to be inhabited responsibly.

    12 Cedar Roses

    For Merianna on our 12th Wedding Anniversary…

    12 Cedar Roses

    From the cedars in our yard,
    I gathered what time had folded as
    cones that had become blossoms,
    spirals turning the world inward
    like memory, like prayer.

    12 cedar roses,
    for twelve years that have ripened into ring and root.
    Not perfect, no bloom is,
    but resilient, fragrant with rain,
    their brown petals open as if listening.

    You, across the table,
    the light falling through the window like grace,
    half of our meal left untouched because we were talking again
    about the kids, about work, about that wild dream
    of a small school and church, or maybe just rest.

    We have built this life
    not from marble or vows,
    but from mornings and errands,
    from the long silence of growing beside one another,
    like those cedars in our front yard,
    their roots weaving underground,
    trading water, sharing breath and the prayers of photosynthesis.

    Each rose is a year we learned
    to bend without breaking,
    to find the sacred in the daily,
    to let the seasons speak through us as
    green, gold, bare, then green again.

    When the wind moves through their branches tonight,
    I will hear the rustle of your laughter,
    the sound that still steadies me,
    and I’ll remember:
    Love is not a bloom we hold,
    but the trees that keeps making them.

    Emerald Ash Borer and Spartanburg (and Us)

    Lately, I’ve been thinking about the remaining ash trees here in Spartanburg. These quiet giants are now gravely threatened by the emerald ash borer, a small, invasive beetle that’s making its way across our county.

    This beetle (first discovered in the US in Detroit in the early ’00s) burrows beneath the bark of ash trees, cutting off their lifelines. It’s a slow-motion crisis, one that’s easy to miss until a favorite tree starts to show signs of stress, such as leaves thinning, bark splitting, a hush settling over a place that once felt vibrant.

    But this isn’t just about trees. In my work and study, I keep coming back to the idea that we’re all entangled here… people, trees, insects, the soil under our feet. What happens to the ash tree happens to the creatures and people who live around it. Our ecosystems aren’t just backgrounds; they’re communities, and we’re an integral part of them, just as they are an integral part of us.

    So what do we do? For me, the first step is to pay attention. Notice what’s changing in your yard, your local park, or the street where you walk your dog. Talk with your neighbors about what you’re seeing. And when you can, support local efforts to monitor and care for our ecosystems.

    Maybe most importantly, let this be a moment for spiritual reflection and a reminder that our call to care for the earth isn’t just about preservation, but about love and connection. The fate of the ash tree is tied up with our own, whether we notice it or not.

    Let’s notice. And let’s act with intention (not sure releasing non-native wasps is the way to go, either)…

    Invasive Emerald Ash Borer attacks South Carolina ash trees:

    “I would argue that the Emerald Ash Borer is the most invasive forest pest of this generation,” Clemson University forestry professor David Coyle said. “It’s on the level of Chestnut blight.”…

    “We can expect Ash to be very rare in South Carolina, as it’s becoming a very rare tree in most of the U.S.,” Jenkins said.

    Here, they often follow the rivers, which is where most Ash trees are found. That includes Lawson’s Fork Creek, which flows right through the Edwin M. Griffin Nature Preserve…

    “That tree’s doomed; there’s no coming back for it,” said Sam Parrott, executive director of SPACE. “I think most of our mature Ash trees are toast, unfortunately.”

    Morning Light from Merianna

    Merianna’s newsletter is one of the highlights of my newsfeed…

    Morning Light – by Merianna Harrelson – Merianna’s Substack:

    This time last year, I didn’t know we were moving cities, changing jobs, or starting new schools for all our children. Even as I write it, it feels strange that we didn’t know our present reality would exist…

    While our lives are being turned upside by advances in technology, changing political climate, and more powerful natural disasters, may these changes remind us to love more deeply and work more compassionately for what is good and just.