Though I’m writing a larger article to be more specific about the issues of data centers, I wanted to get my interview with some of my neighbors about a possible data center landing in our town of Luther, Oklahoma, up on the website.
Recently, it’s come to our attention that our town had been approached by a company called Beltline Energy. They are headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and have been creating solar installations for a number of years. In fact, all their solar installations are referred to as “farms” and include information about how it was a “converted” from some kind of actual farm – timber farm, peanut farm, or simple agricultural property – and how the “conversion” was, “for this private landowner to create consistent, recurring lease revenue for 20+ years”. Because it’s always about money – not the environment and most certainly not about neighbors.
Apparently, Beltline Energy created some kind of application for their solar “farms” that they believe translates to running a data center so, guess what? Yes, they are wanting to “convert” their business to building data centers.
Just think, little Luther’s (the Census has us listed as under 2000 residents) farmland could be the guinea pig for Beltline Energy’s NEW data center model. That’s gotta be good, right? (insert eye-roll).
Now, let’s think further, this company doesn’t make their investor/investors available. On their website it says, “Beltline benefits from a single, well-capitalized development partner.” Who is that? Shouldn’t we be able to find out if we want? After doing a pretty thorough search of the internet, I couldn’t find anything about who was providing their funding source. More than likely taxpayers – in the way of a tax credit of some kind – will be at least part of the funding source.
As I said, I’m working on a larger article about data centers and I will write more about the ridiculous amount of taxpayer dollars some are getting, and the schemes being put in place to make sure these data centers are seeming to return an ‘investment’ to their surrounding community, when in actuality, it’s more a return to taxpayers what was taken from them for the initial tax break.
For now, below is a video of the Town of Luther meeting shot by local activist and donkey milk dairy owner, Saundra Traywick during which the ‘idea’ of the data center was broached. Terry Arps is the Mayor of Luther.
We attending Lutherites didn’t know at the time of this meeting that Mayor Arps had signed a non-disclosure agreement with Beltline before entering the meeting. It is interesting to hear him say numerous times how transparent and open this process will be. How transparent can a process be under an NDA?
Our video can be found on both our YouTube and Rumble channels, but I’ll embed it below for ease of viewing. Below that, I will embed the NDA and the emails resulting from the FOIA request. I will also leave you with the following list of concerns for ANY data center:
- How much water will it use?
- How much energy will it use?
- How much noise will it make? (The Mayor has suggested it will make less than the Red Bud Power plant less than a mile from many of our residences and the site to which the data center will be adjacent – sadly, that is often quite loud)
- Where will the money come from to build it?
- What are the regulations from the state or federal government surrounding anything having to do with the data center (spoiler: there are none)
- How exactly will the data center provide the money to the community they are promising? Is it just a refund on tax revenue offsets?
- Will there be any kind of pollution associated with the data center?
Obviously, there are many more questions, but below are the podcast and the documents as promised.
