Pimby: Please In My Backyard Again

During my early days at Microsoft, communities were embracing data centers, providing all sorts of incentives to bring infrastructure to their towns in the hope of jobs and economic development to follow. One can argue that to some extent this goal was met in most cases but the insatiable demand for AI and cloud services has strained relationships with many communities affecting their way of life and their perceptions of the impact on  resources such as water and the cost of electricity.   We can no longer assume that what worked before with communities will be acceptable at the scale we are at today, or even at the scale we will be at tomorrow.  Community pushback is no longer the exception but the rule, slowing development, and in some cases even stopping it.   As a result, many companies respond by providing a community service to benefit the area.

Additionally, over the past decade, hyperscalers have become more proactive and now have community organizations that liaise with local stakeholders to address community needs before projects reach a critical stage. However, scale breaks everything, and even the community teams are not thinking big enough to “grease” development. Figure 1 shows a framework for how we should be thinking about infrastructure development.

Our industry has been mired in the lower half of this chart.  How do we as an industry get more strategic and transformational in everything we do, but more specifically, how do we actually create an environment where communities actually ask “Please In My Back Yard (PIMBY).”   This concept is precisely the type of thinking that Microsoft’s Data Center R&D  team was considering a few years back, “How do we create a data center that brings abundant resources rather than consumption of resources?” The result is shown in the image below captioned “Microsoft Vision – The Datacenter of the Future.”

While this may seem far-fetched, it’s actually much closer than we think. In the “Nature-Positive Data Center” article published in Issue 15 of InterGlobix Magazine, we had touched on the notion of this with the Coast Guard Headquarters design that looks at a more integrated design with its surroundings, resulting in a design needing less climate control while replenishing the wetlands adjacent to it with water filtered through a “green roof”.  For me, this thinking is transformational: how can we harness nature to work with us mutualistically? How can we extend this thinking across other industries through partnerships and develop a system that provides and does not take?

So what are some possible examples of mutualistic ecosystem development:

1. Data centers help lower residential electricity rates.
2. Data centers create water abundance for communities.
3. Data centers transform infrastructure into destinations where people can enjoy nature.

There are many other similar possibilities if we look beyond our traditional boundaries, but for the sake of this paper, let’s briefly explore these three.

Data Centers Enable Lower Electricity Residential Rates

Gridcare recently wrote a groundbreaking paper that truly changes the game with how we should think about transformational partnerships with utilities (https://www.gridcare.ai/post/ai-data-centers-as-engines-of-affordability-and-capital-investment).  The key insight for this paper is “By spreading fixed grid costs across substantially more kilowatt-hours, these AI facilities become catalysts for lower rates and accelerated infrastructure investment.” With  load flexibility, data centers can unlock additional revenue from unused capacity, whether the  allocation is committed, or the reserve margin is set aside for black swan events.  This concept allows utilities to monetize unused capacity, providing revenue that can subsidize the residential rates.

As I mentioned before, Microsoft did this in Cheyenne in 2016, so there is precedent for doing exactly this.  However, the Gridcare paper advocates that instead of providing lower rates to the data center, provide the lower rates to the community and also invest in capital projects for grid enhancements or additional generation.   Imagine what communities will think if the development of data centers lowers their rates. The headline will be “ Data centers create energy abundance and reduce rates for residents!”

Data Centers Create Water Abundance for Communities

While creating water in abundance seems unachievable, one doesn’t have to look too far outside our industry to achieve it. My two recent articles in Issues 18 and 20 of InterGlobix Magazine—“Water: Thinking Beyond Our Own Industry” and “Short on Interconnection or Power Generation”, respectively—describein detail how strategically partnering with the agriculture industry can help us think outside of our own industry. As outlined in these articles, if we optimize only within the infrastructure industry and try to save water by eliminating evaporation, we are actually making the water problem worse since we are pushing the problem of water consumption elsewhere.  So instead, it may make more sense to continue water evaporation for cooling efficiency and replenish it through drip irrigation companies such as N-Drip, and by paying farmers to move from flood irrigation to drip irrigation.  But the beauty is that, because of its relatively low cost, you get huge savings on PUE. The company can overbuy replenishment by 50 to 100 percent, thus giving back to the community.  If this interests you, I recommend reading those articles. The headline in AZ will be: “Data center brings an abundance of water.”

Infrastructure as a Destination to Enjoy Nature

The final example shows how another industry made Microsoft’s vision for creating an ecologically invisible datacenter concept a reality, except in this case, it was the critical infrastructure of a different kind. This summer, I had the opportunity to tour Keppel’s desalination plant in Singapore.   Similar to datacenters, desalination plants are highly industrial and highly secure campuses across the globe. In Figure 2, the upper left corner shows a desalination plant in Perth, Australia, which operates at only 12 percent of the ecosystem performance that existed on the land before development. In other words, in the categories of Air Quality, Biodiversity, Soil Health, Water Quality & Quantity, and Well Being, the natural systems are degraded by 88 percent.  This is significant but also typical for most industrial development.

On the other hand, the upper right-hand corner shows a “Nature Positive” design that achieves 66 percent of the natural system’s performance while providing the same water desalination function.  In this case, the nature-positive design provides a destination for picnics, bike riding, and other outdoor activities while degrading the natural system by only 34 percent.  The transformational design quickly got approval from the Singaporean government. The headline in this case would read “Which design would you like to live next to?”  Clearly, both have the same technological function (water desalination), but the Singapore design integrates it with the community’s well-being.

Summary

We need to think beyond what we are trying to achieve today to drive a frictionless growth path that puts everyone ahead in the future.   And if you think this is a dream, the three examples show a transformational mindset on how we can make things much more sustainable, while lowering costs,  and what some companies are already doing to create a better world, while increasing speed to capacity (less permitting resistance), more efficient use of grid interconnection, lower residential electricity rates and an abundance of water.  These examples are just a few that I have had the good fortune to be a part of.  However, the opportunities to think this way are endless, and I am sure others have some great examples.  If so, please share with our industry, and/or feel free to reach out to me, showing how to think Bigger and have communities begging “PLEASE IN MY BACK YARD!”