More than 130 people packed a meeting room in Iron County’s Festival Hall Thursday evening to raise alarms and questions about a proposed data center and natural gas plant.

The open house hosted by BrightNight for the proposed Red Butte Energy Campus and Data Center lasted nearly four hours, with residents lining up to ask questions and share concerns about water, heat island effects, noise, air quality and energy use.

Tensions were high after southwest Utah residents saw the response to their fellow Utahns’ opposition to the hyperscale Stratos data center in Box Elder County. Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority approved the project in April, and the Box Elder County Commission voted unanimously last week to allow MIDA to create the project area. That project is backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary, who alleged that those who protested the Box Elder data center were “bused in.”

“I am a fourth-generation Cedar City resident, and I say that because of what happened last week in Box Elder,” said Kasen Graff. “I want to make it very clear I have not been bused in, I am not being paid by anyone or any foreign government to be here. I am here because I do not want this in my community.”

Chanel Borchardt-Slayton, a member of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, said it felt “very disheartening” that the company was not taking into account that the project would be on her tribe’s ancestral land.

“The land that you’re building this on is native land, and this is our history and our future,” she said.

This Red Butte project is not the only data center proposed in Iron County in recent months. The Iron County Planning Commission is considering the Antelope Data Center, a 640-acre project that also includes on-site natural gas generation, according to a report submitted to the county by developer Pronghorn Development LLC.

One resident who spoke thanked BrightNight for holding an open house, something they said Pronghorn Development has not done.

Another resident prefaced their questions by commending the company for its transparency.

“Other projects both here and in other parts of the state have been thrust upon the citizens with little to no interaction, and that makes everything involving this a very sore subject,” they said.

“If I were you, I would be very upset about that,” Erik Ellis, executive vice president of BrightNight’s southwest region, responded.

Residents were still not satisfied with some of the answers to their questions, though, and repeatedly said they felt like “an experiment” for new technology that reminded them of the harm families in the area had already experienced as downwinders from nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 1960s in Nevada.

BrightNight’s 2,600-acre project would include a natural gas power plant, battery energy storage system and data center, according to a conditional use permit proposal the company submitted to the Iron County Planning Department last week. The site includes privately owned parcels and land managed by the Utah Trust Lands Administration.

The project also includes a connection to the Kern River natural gas pipeline and an interconnection to Three Peaks PacifiCorp transmission line, according to the proposal.

Ellis said the company also has an active proposal to PacifiCorp for a 300 MW solar project in the area.

“It’s entirely possible that we could end up just building power generating facilities here with no data center campus,” Ellis said. “We could end up building solar, we could end up building solar and gas, we could end up building solar and battery storage and gas and data center. So there’s many things that are possible.”

The project is expected to need 1,900 acre-feet of water per year once the 1.5 GW site is fully built. The company plans to purchase water rights from the landowners or transfer water rights from nearby owners, the proposal said.

Water concerns

Residents repeatedly asked questions about the project’s water use and raised alarms about the lack of water in arid Iron County.

“Historically in southern Utah, there’s an overallocation of water rights here, and that’s why everybody’s so concerned,” one resident said. “We’ve seen developers come in that don’t understand that issue and say, ‘Oh, I own water rights. I should be good.’ That’s not the case here, unfortunately.”

The Red Butte project is located in the Beryl Enterprise area, where the Utah Division of Water Rights has managed groundwater depletions since 2012. The division required the area to adopt a groundwater management plan in 2012 after studies showed depletions exceeded how much water was recharging into the aquifer. Over the next 100 years, the division will reduce water rights in the area by 31,000 acre-feet.

The Antelope Data Center also seeks water from an over-tapped neighboring groundwater management area.

Pronghorn Development’s proposal says it hopes to use water from the Cedar Valley Water Conservancy, which provides water to Cedar City, Enoch and parts of unincorporated Iron County. If unavailable, the company says it will acquire water rights.

The Cedar Valley area, which includes Cedar City, has been depleting local groundwater supplies, and the Utah Division of Water Rights required the area to adopt a groundwater management plan in 2021. The division plans to cut nearly 30,000 acre-feet of water rights in the area by 2080.

Ellis said that the residents raised “some really good questions” about water issues but could not give them all the answers they wanted Thursday night.

“I want to do more research and come back and schedule a second meeting and have a conversation,” he said, “because I’m not in a position tonight to have that conversation. I’m not trying to dodge it.”

Rep. Rex Ship, R-Cedar City, who attended part of the open house, told The Tribune that the project would likely bring beneficial property tax revenues to the county, but he has concerns about water.

“It would probably be nicer if they build [data centers] in areas where they had plenty of water, along the Mississippi or back East,” he said. “We definitely need the data centers if we want to keep using new technology. I don’t think anybody wants to give up their cell phone or the cloud where they’re storing all their information.”

“I’d rather see our land being used for [agriculture],” he added. “But yet, I believe in private property rights too.”

Ellis told the crowded room that the water rights they plan to acquire are currently being used to grow alfalfa, which he said is “a relatively low-level economic use” that’s not “generating a lot of other benefits” for the community.

Overall, the comments and questions throughout the evening were overwhelming opposed to the Red Butte project.

“Why would you want to put a project where the community doesn’t want it?” one resident asked.