Note to readers •This story is made possible through a partnership between The Salt Lake Tribune and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

Skeptics of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County are sweating about a lot more than its energy demands and potential toll on water supplies.

Turns out, it could create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology, said Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.

“I suspected it would not be good,” Davies said. “What I’ve found is it’s so much worse than I even thought it would be.”

News of the proposed sprawling data complex, dubbed the Stratos Project, became public last month. The project’s boosters say it will likely need 9 gigawatts of energy at full build — more than double the electricity currently used by the entire state of Utah. That energy will likely come from a pipeline carrying natural gas from Wyoming to Nevada, Oregon and California. The project’s developer, “Shark Tank” celebrity Kevin O’Leary, specifically chose Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley to build the complex because the pipeline spans it, state officials have said.

Davies has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations to better understand the shear scale of what’s proposed. And what he’s penciled out so far has him alarmed.

“Nine gigawatts, that’s a number that’s really challenging to get your brain around,” the professor said. ”Communicating the scale has been a real problem.”

The project will actually produce more than 9 gigawatts of energy, Davies explained, because anytime a gadget consumes power, it also produces energy in the form of heat, whether it’s a toaster, a car or a sprawling rack of computer servers.

All the heat the Stratos Project emits will add up to another 7 to 8 gigawatts of energy in the form of waste heat.

Typically, waste heat is generated far from the power plant itself, in homes, businesses or on roads where it dissipates.

But for the Stratos project, it will get dumped into the local environment of Hansel Valley, in the same geographic bowl as the power plant. That actually makes the data complex a 16 gigawatt thermal load project, the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day,” Davies said.

“What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies wondered. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high desert environment? A valley?”

The professor predicts dumping that much heat and energy into Hansel Valley will raise local temperatures by five degrees Fahrenheit during the day and up to 28 degrees at night.

“That’s the difference between Utah’s semi-arid climate and the Sahara Desert,” said Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University who has reviewed Davies’ estimates. “This would absolutely change the landscape.”

Evaporation would spike. The dewpoint could vanish, with devastating consequences on wildlife, plants and the fertility of land owned by other ranchers in the valley, the scientists said. Abbott suspects Hansel Valley would become another dust source on the Wasatch Front, in addition to the exposed and drying lakebed of the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

“I’m happy to be further educated. Maybe I’m getting something wrong here,” Davies said. “But that is kind of the point, right? You literally have a hyperscale project that is getting no due diligence.”

‘A radical amount of heat’

Box Elder County commissioners approved the project Monday after declining to hear public comment, noting they had no “control” over environmental concerns like water supplies and air quality. Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, along with Gov. Spencer Cox and Senate President Stuart Adams have been vocal supporters of the project.

Plenty of unknowns remain, however, including what kind of gas power plant O’Leary plans to build for his unprecedented computing project.

Data center developers in other parts of the state are turning to Caterpillar natural gas generators to produce their own power. Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and analyst with Utah Clean Energy, figures it would take around 3,600 of those industrial-scale generators to power Stratos — the equivalent of thousands of diesel engines idling around the clock.

“That’s going to release an enormous amount of heat,” Mitchell said.

The Stratos developers could also build a more traditional combined cycle gas turbine facility. A gas plant supplying 9 gigawatts of electricity would be about 7.5 times larger than PacifiCorp’s Lake Side Power Plant in Vineyard, which sits on around 40 acres.

“My understanding is that they’re citing non-disclosure agreements (and) proprietary technology,” Davies said. “That’s a red flag, suggesting this is essentially new technology. I can find no example of anything at any working scale that matches the promises they’re making.”

Based on statements made by the project’s boosters, including cryptic references to “sustainability” and treating water that’s sent to the neighboring Great Salt Lake, Davies suspects the Stratos Project will tap Allum-cycle energy production, a relatively new and unused technology that produces electricity with low emissions.

It burns natural gas in a pure oxygen environment, which reduces byproducts like nitrous oxides and sulfur. Those pollutants bake in the sun and become particulate pollution during winter inversions and ozone smog in the summer.

The primary byproducts created by the Allum process instead are carbon dioxide and water.

The problem is, Davies explained, the water comes out hot, at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Cooling it to a temperature that wouldn’t devastate the Great Salt Lake’s ecosystem — which already sits on the brink of collapse due to unsustainable water use upstream — becomes an expensive problem.

The simplest solution is air-cooling the water, but that’s difficult during the summer in the high desert. Davies estimates it would take around 400 acres of industrial-scale fans “blowing full tilt” to do the job. That adds to the energy demands and noise pollution.

The cheapest solution that would likely appeal to investors focused on maximizing profits is to pipe the hot water underground and use the aquifer beneath Hansel Valley to cool it.

“But again, it’s a radical amount of heat,” Davies said. “I don’t know what the ecological implications are, but I’m quite certain they’re extreme.”

The neighboring Great Salt Lake will likely hit another record low after a dismal snowpack followed by unprecedented spring heat.

“When I think about what’s going to lead to intergenerational prosperity in Utah, it is not a data center, it’s the beautify of our landscapes,” said Abbott, who also founded Grow the Flow, a nonprofit dedicated to refilling the lake. “If we’ve got this behemoth dumping heat, pollution and noise into the environment, we lose a big chunk of that.”

Davies also ran calculations on the Stratos Project in units of Walmart Supercenters. Its 40,000 acre-foot print is the equivalent of around 2,000 of those centers, but its energy footprint is around 2,000 Walmarts stacked 20 deep.

And while Cox has championed nuclear generation as the low-emissions solution to meet Utah’s energy demands, which are mostly expected to spike due to the surge of data centers getting built in the state, Davies has some bad news on that front, too. The thermal heat island effect could actually increase with a nuclear reactor instead of a gas plant, since fission is less efficient.

Read a summary of the professor’s estimates below.