Palm Beach commissioners voted 5-1 against datacenter expansion
Developers have proposed a 600MW hyperscale datacenter on a 202-acre (82-hectare) parcel of land surrounded by water, west of Loxahatchee Groves in northern Palm Beach County, near the northern edge of the Florida Everglades. The Project Tango site sits across the street from a pump station that serves as the first step in pushing freshwater to the southern Everglades.
Environmentalists identified heat and water-temperature increases among the concerns the facility could pose to surrounding waterways. At peak capacity, a 600MW datacenter could use as much electricity as half a million US homes, based on US Energy Information estimates of residential electricity use, and the high energy demand of datacenters can also mean costly upgrades to the power grid that drive up electricity costs for households. Reinaldo Diaz, who grew up in Palm Beach County and founded Lake Worth Waterkeeper, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the watershed, said waste heat from Project Tango could increase water temperatures in the surrounding watershed, putting the Everglades further at risk of toxic bacterial blooms.
“Our watershed is really complex,” Diaz said. “Ours is more like a spiderweb that’s why the impacts would be far reaching.”
Northeast of the proposed site, the Loxahatchee River winds through one of the few surviving remnants of the northern Everglades beneath a canopy of bald cypress and native palm trees. Though the Everglades once stretched much farther north, water still circulates through this interconnected landscape through canals, sugar cane fields and grassy waters to surrounding lakes and marshes.
Project Tango would be built at the edge of wetlands the federal government and Florida have spent a combined $6bn restoring after decades of drainage and development. The concerns land in a water system environmentalists say is already stressed by drought, fertilizer runoff and warm temperatures. In recent summers, blooms of blue-green algae have covered nearly half of Lake Okeechobee, which feeds into the Everglades. The cyanobacteria blooms produce a toxin known as microcystin, which can make people and animals sick and contaminate drinking water. On July 30, the Florida Department of Health in Palm Beach County issued a health alert about cyanobacteria presence in the lake.
At a Palm Beach County zoning hearing in July, residents spoke about the proximity of the proposed datacenter to a local elementary school, about 1,200 feet away. They said they were concerned about potential noise, higher traffic, heat pollution, lower property values and higher energy bills. After more than 12 hours of testimony, commissioners voted 5-1 to deny an expansion of the proposed datacenter. Two more administrative applications from the developers that could add square footage to the datacenter remain pending before the county.
Christina Reichert, an Earthjustice attorney representing neighbors with the Western Palm Beach Community Alliance, said the group has challenged the developers’ efforts to convert a previously approved 2016 plan for warehouses and a server farm on the light industrial site into a hyperscale datacenter. Reichert said the facility could have offsite water, air and sound impacts not covered by light industrial use zoning. “One of the concerns we had about this location is the risk of increasing the heat in this area because it could lead to algal blooms in that canal that could compromise drinking water and Everglades restoration,” she said.
President Trump addressed datacenter neighbors’ concerns at a press conference, reiterating his non-binding pledge that datacenter developers bear their own electricity costs. “You have to convince your community how great these things [are]. You can’t fight it. You have to go with it,” he said.
Sue Ellen Loyzelle, who lives in the planned community of Arden next to the Project Tango site and is a founding member of the Western Palm Beach Community Alliance, said regulations need to be in place to reduce the potential effects on communities. “We don’t want our bills to go up, but it’s more than that,” she said. “What is all of this going to do?” Loyzelle said the Ratepayer Protection Pledge was a start. “Yeah, that’s a guardrail and we’re happy for that guardrail,” she said. “But there’s got to be a lot more guardrails.”
The applicant, PBA Holdings, Inc, says this facility would be different on water. At the commission’s zoning hearing in July, project manager Ernie Cox said the proposed datacenter would use a closed-loop cooling system that recirculates water, which could reduce the project’s water consumption. Diaz said the heat generated by the facility would still need to go somewhere, and even a few degrees of added warmth could fuel bacterial blooms in nearby waterways connected to the Everglades and nearby drinking water systems. Emerging research suggests that even much smaller datacenters can increase downwind air temperature by as much as 2C.
Many of the ingredients for bacterial blooms, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, already exist in nearby canals from decades of agricultural runoff from farmland where sugarcane is the dominant crop. “Even warming the water up a couple degrees could be like adding fuel to the fire,” Diaz said.
A health and safety assessment commissioned by PBA Holdings acknowledges that the datacenter could heat the air 1C to 2C (2F to 4F) around the cooling equipment, but dismisses concerns that the heat would reach the nearby community and school, explaining that prevailing winds would carry the heat in the opposite direction. The assessment does not address the risk for toxic bacterial blooms. In regulatory filings, PBA Holdings reported spending $20m on county approvals and ensuring the site has the power reliability for data and information processing. The developers say they chose the site because of its proximity to the West County Energy Center, the largest natural gas power plant in the United States, operated by Florida Power & Light Company.
Cox did not respond to specific questions about Project Tango or its potential to worsen toxic algal blooms, but in a statement he wrote: “We are disappointed with the Commission’s decision. We re-confirmed our commitment to all conditions asked of us associated with our request and we addressed concerns through in-depth technical studies and analysis. We remain committed to helping meet the region’s growing critical infrastructure needs and will be taking time to evaluate our options moving forward.”
The homeowners association for the neighboring community of Arden, the city of Westlake, the town of Loxahatchee Groves, an Everglades coalition, the Palm Beach County classroom teachers association, the school board of Palm Beach County, a Florida representative and a Florida senator have all written letters of opposition to Project Tango.
Next month, Palm Beach County commissioners will vote on a moratorium against large-scale datacenters. Several other counties in Florida have already adopted similar measures. Loyzelle, who was an elected official in the town of Cutler Bay south of Miami before moving to Arden nearly five years ago, said such moratoriums are necessary until regulations can be put in place to lessen the impact of hyperscale datacenters. “I would like to not see them at all. I know that’s not a reality. If there was to be one, it would have to be far away from homes because of the sound and the health impacts of air pollution,” she said. “But the water, I don’t think Florida could handle it anywhere with the water issues.”