New Utah law raises concerns for those who oppose Box Elder County data center plans

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• A new Utah law complicates plans for those who oppose Box Elder County's proposed data center.
• Critics worry about HB60's impact on engineers' consideration of "detriment to public welfare," which became law on Wednesday.
• Gov. Spencer Cox assured that the project's water use will be monitored closely in a post on X on Friday.

BRIGHAM CITY — A new Utah law could add to the challenges faced by several thousand people who wish to oppose plans for a hyperscale data center in Box Elder County.

Tameron Williams, who lives in Brigham City, is among the roughly 3,800 people who submitted official protests to an application by developers to transfer water rights for the project. However, those protests were thrown out Thursday when the developers withdrew their application.

"There is certainly a feeling that by waiting for things to calm down a little bit, that everything will go back to normal, and people will let it go," Williams explained. "I don't know if this one is going to be something that people let go. They're going to be keeping an eye out."

Farrah Pliley, of Tremonton, also intends to pay the $15 fee and file her protest again once the new water rights transfer application is submitted.

"We don't want the Stratos Project to come here, so we don't want them to have rights to our water," Pliley said. "What they say doesn't match any of the actual scientific studies that we found when it comes to data centers and AI, because everything that we're finding is opposite of what they are saying."

When they file again, however, they may have fewer grievances that can actually be considered by state engineers. HB60 became law Wednesday, as a way to expedite transfers of water rights into Great Salt Lake. Critics of the law worry that a provision that does not allow engineers to consider "detriment to public welfare," could have a negative impact in cases like this one.

Still, Williams is convinced that thousands of people will come together and try again to oppose the water rights transfer for the Stratos Project.

"I think that this is something that certainly crosses partisan lines as well in a state like Utah," he said. "We have been talking for at least the last five years about the Great Salt Lake being kind of in an existential place, right? And you know, it's been repeated that we need to get every single drop of water into the Great Salt Lake as possible."

Representatives with O'Leary Digital have argued that Project Stratos will use less water than what would have otherwise been used for agriculture on the same plots of land. On Friday, Gov. Spencer Cox tried to calm fears in a post on X, stating that the initial project size would not exceed 2,000 acres, and would use less than 1.5 gigawatts of power, adding assurances that the project's water use will be closely monitored.

"I have requested that the project developer publish a publicly available water plan that demonstrates to Utah DNR officials that no degradation occurs to the Great Salt Lake. All water use must be reported publicly, and in no event will the developer reduce water going to the Great Salt Lake," Cox said.

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The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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Great Salt LakeArtificial IntelligenceEnvironmentUtahNorthern UtahPolitics

Mike Anderson

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Mike Anderson often doubles as his own photographer, shooting and editing most of his stories. He came to KSL in April 2011 after working for several years at various broadcast news outlets.