Title 15 Amendment Analysis for Spanish Fork

1. Executive summary

The choice for our community is the proposed data center versus the warehouse using the building's current zoning at its busiest. Against that alternative, the proposed data center is the measurably better option for the community: better on truck traffic, diesel exhaust, water, load on the city's power system and tax base, and worse on carbon and on-site heat. UPDATED

Beyond carbon and on-site heat, no drawback to the community was found in the facility as proposed. Neither is unique to a data center. Many other businesses do the same: vehicles, buildings and industrial facilities all emit heat, parking lots and roofs raise local temperatures, and every large user of natural gas emits carbon.¹³⁴²⁵ What sets this facility apart is its scale, which §4, §15 and §20 set out in full. Of the local effects, only sound and heat reach a neighbor, and the nearest residential lot line is about 1,300 ft away, property line to property line; the nearest house is roughly 1,500 to 1,800 ft.⁵³⁴³ UPDATED §20 now models sound at those homes as well as at a mile. Against the warehouse alternative, truck traffic falls from as many as about 4,200 truck trip ends a day, 128,600 a month, if the building runs as a parcel carrier's sort hub, which the zoning permits today,^1110343 to the 20 to 60 a month, 10 to 30 trucks, the applicant projects APPLICANT ONLY.⁷⁷ A trip end is one pass through the driveway, so each truck counts twice. Water use likely drops, from the 5 million gallons a year city staff reported to the applicant's 1 to 3 million.⁵¹⁷⁷ The 18 AUG text bars diesel engines for prime power, and the municipal grid serves none of the generation or computing load; only office, maintenance and similar portions may connect.⁵¹ The applicant also promised no diesel even for backup, and both 21 SEP drafts now write that into the ordinance: no diesel or dual-fuel engine for standby, backup, emergency or black-start power, except temporary portable equipment during construction or for emergency responders. The later draft goes further, allowing only non-combustion, electrochemical equipment such as fuel cells for primary generation and barring reciprocating engines, turbines and microturbines regardless of fuel.^77101102 UPDATED §6 sets out the alternative use side by side, §10 the air permit, §20 sound and heat.

The tax base is a community benefit. Roughly 90% of the levy goes to entities serving these same residents: Nebo School District takes 75.2%, about $28.8M in year one against the city's own $3.8M, on the applicant's stated $4B investment APPLICANT ONLY at the 2026 approved rate.^15595143 UPDATED Volition has separately offered more than $500,000 a year in direct community contributions, itself about ten times the city's share of the largest 2025 property tax bill found in Spanish Fork, the bill on the building Volition would occupy, and says the offer binds only once it is written into an executed agreement.⁵⁷⁷³⁷⁷ §13 carries the arithmetic, the depreciation curve, and the caveat that no development agreement is signed yet, though Volition has so far accepted every substantive suggestion from the community and from staff.

In the 18 AUG text, the performance standards do their job. Subsection O.6 caps noise at 65 dBA at any property line and 55 dBA at any residential zone boundary, at any hour, covering generation, storage and cooling equipment, measured under Chapter 9.32 without displacing its enforcement, and requires a sound verification test within 90 days of full operation.⁵¹ Evaporative cooling is banned outright, diesel prime power is excluded by definition, and the permitted emission rates are a zoning condition the city can enforce.⁵¹ UPDATED Both 21 SEP drafts replace the 65 and 55 dBA limits with Chapter 9.32's existing zone limits and no longer state the evaporative-cooling ban, but they require acoustic modeling at the nearest homes, verification testing, a heat study with monitoring and a water cap.¹⁰¹¹⁰² §8, §20 and Table A carry the detail.

One question was worth putting to the Council on 18 AUG, as a point of clarification. The amendment would apply to every applicant in the I-1 zone, at up to 450 MW per facility in both 21 SEP drafts.¹⁰¹¹⁰² The 18 AUG redline struck "approved as a conditional use" and "conditionally permitted" from every operative clause, while leaving the use heading pointing at "(see §15.3.08.060)", the Conditional Use Permit section that carries a public hearing and five findings.⁵¹¹¹ So the 18 AUG text read as administrative site plan review, and one stray cross-reference was the only thing suggesting otherwise. UPDATED Both 21 SEP drafts drop that cross-reference.¹⁰¹¹⁰² §9 sets out the redline in full.

2. Scope and sourcing

This report relies first on primary sources: city, county, state and federal records. Each claim went through an adversarial red-team review, and each cited source was checked individually, with exceptions noted in its entry. The ordinance text analyzed here comes from the 18 AUG Council packet, with page-level citations and color-verified redlines.⁵¹ UPDATED The city republished that packet on the afternoon of 18 AUG, 138 pages instead of 131, with a second round of edits to Exhibit A.⁵¹ This report was first written against the earlier posting. Where the republished text differs, the section now says which draft a statement describes, and packet page citations refer to the 138-page version. The two 21 SEP drafts come from the special meeting agenda posted 16 SEP.^100101102 The record is the city's minutes of the 04 AUG, 18 AUG and 01 SEP Council meetings (01 SEP still in draft) and the 05 AUG Planning Commission meeting, the applicant's 04 AUG, 18 AUG and 01 SEP presentations, and its 15 AUG community meeting.^{5176104105998977} The applicant's own materials from that meeting, its printed two-sided handout⁶¹ and the live project page its QR code resolves to,⁴ are treated as primary sources and audited in full. Parcel, tax, and receptor geometry come from the Utah County Assessor and Treasurer and from computation against the state's parcel polygons.^10575343 SELF-ATTESTED The author carried out field research directly: on-site visits to comparable operating facilities, in-person interviews with residents, employees and neighboring businesses, and uncalibrated sound level readings, all reported below with their limits stated.⁶⁰

Everything material here is fully sourced unless otherwise marked. Where a claim could not be confirmed against a primary document, it is marked UNVERIFIED. Where a physical observation was taken without professionally calibrated instruments, it is marked UNCALIBRATED and treated as corroboration only. Where the applicant has committed to something on the record but no signed instrument exists, it is marked COMMITTED, NOT EXECUTED: the commitment is taken as made in good faith, and nothing is final until the City and Volition sign and date a written agreement. Three markers were added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision: UPDATED marks a passage changed because the record moved after 17 AUG or because this revision corrected it; APPLICANT ONLY marks a figure or commitment that rests only on the applicant's own materials; SELF-ATTESTED marks the author's own account. The revision log lists every change, and the 17 AUG edition is kept unchanged at /title-15-amendment-analysis/2026-08-17/.

3. Bottom line

Volition describes a 250 MW compute load;⁷⁶ the air permit it has applied for would authorize 393.25 MW of nameplate, 1,210 fuel cells at 325 kW each.¹³ Both 21 SEP drafts would authorize up to 450 MW per generation facility at one data-center site citywide, and count a standalone generation facility as a site. UPDATED¹⁰¹¹⁰²

Under the 18 AUG text, the risk was that this zoning decision would be the only discretionary review any facility built under it would ever receive. UPDATED Utah's 2025 S.B. 132 created a "closed private generation system" category that appears to describe this design and exempts such systems from regulation as a public utility, though whether its definitions reach a site on the city's own power system is unconfirmed (§11); no interconnection means no utility review.¹² DAQ's air permit governs emissions and weighs no siting question.¹ Spanish Fork land use is the last discretionary review of where and whether a facility is built. That made one drafting question worth putting on the record: the amendment's redline struck conditional-use status from every operative clause but left the use heading citing the Conditional Use Permit section, so the 18 AUG text read as administrative site plan review with one stray cross-reference against it. §9 sets out the redline. UPDATED On 18 AUG the City Attorney confirmed the administrative reading: staff and the Development Review Committee review future site plans at public meetings, with no additional public hearings, and even a conditional use permit would be an administrative decision by the Planning Commission.⁷⁶ Both 21 SEP drafts drop the cross-reference and require a recorded development agreement for every facility and City Council approval of any Material Modification.¹⁰¹¹⁰²

Update, 22 SEP 2026

The 21 SEP drafts rewrite much of what this report analyzes

UPDATED On 16 SEP the city posted the agenda for a special Council meeting on Monday 21 SEP 2026. Item 9.1 is the Title 15 ordinance, with two new drafts: "Title 15 - CC 9-2-26 rev.2 Council edits," the changes the Council asked for on 01 SEP, and a second draft, v.2, which adds further edits from councilmembers, staff and the applicant.^100101102 The agenda records that on 01 SEP the Council "tabled the decision, giving the staff direction to refine the language."¹⁰⁰ Neither draft is adopted, and the Council can change either one on 21 SEP.

Labels O.1 to O.13 in the rest of this report refer to the republished 18 AUG text. The table below sets the later draft, v.2, against it; the numbers in parentheses are v.2's own subsection numbers, 1 to 24. Neither draft says which edits came from whom.

TABLE A

The two drafts differ in ways that matter. The Council-edits draft (rev.2) says approval of a maximum capacity does not authorize building or operating all of it at once, requires the decommissioning plan before commercial operation, and requires the development agreement before a building permit. v.2 lets site plan approval authorize the full approved capacity, moves the decommissioning plan to before permanent cessation, caps financial assurance at the owner's estimate, adds the excuse from the water cap, and moves the development agreement to site plan approval. v.2 also adds the combustion exclusion, the dispersion modeling, the yearly independent testing and the daily penalties, and widens the later water cap from humidification alone to cooling and humidification.¹⁰¹¹⁰²

Not in either draft: the $500,000 community contribution, a revenue floor, and a numeric heat limit, all of which would belong in the development agreement.¹⁰¹¹⁰² The 21 SEP agenda lists no development agreement item.¹⁰⁰

How to read the rest of this report now. Both drafts carry the same 450 MW cap and one-site limit,¹⁰¹¹⁰² and every maximum-case figure in this report is stated for one facility at 450 MW. Where a section analyzes the ordinance's wording, such as the 0.30 lb/MWh tier or the 65 and 55 dBA limits, it still describes the 18 AUG text and says so. The Council approved the amendment on 21 SEP subject to further changes to its text, and the report will be checked against the adopted text once it is posted. SELF-ATTESTED¹³⁵

4. What the amendment authorizes

Both 21 SEP drafts permit "not more than 450 megawatts of nameplate generating capacity, measured per Onsite Power Generation Facility," and no less than 50, at one data-center site citywide.¹⁰¹¹⁰² 450 MW is the cap in both drafts the Council acted on, 14% more than the 393.25 MW Volition has applied for.¹⁵¹⁴³ UPDATED See the 21 SEP drafts.

The figures below use Utah DAQ's own method. DAQE-IN163550001-26 estimates potential NOx, CO, VOC and CO2e emissions as the manufacturer's published rate times full nameplate times 8,760 hours.¹⁴³ Applying that arithmetic at the ordinance's own cap is the state's method at the city's number: an upper bound, as a potential-to-emit estimate is meant to be, not a forecast. UPDATED

TABLE 01

UPDATED Two rows need their basis stated. Water: 250,000 gal a year is the applicant's figure for cooling and humidification make-up, mostly humidification, after a separate one-time loop fill of about 500,000 gal, and the 450 MW column scales it; the applicant's figure for the whole site is about 1 to 3 million gallons a year, with the categories to be set at site plan.⁵¹⁷⁷ APPLICANT ONLY v.2 caps cooling and humidification water at 300,000 gal a year after the first year.¹⁰² Lake Side: the comparison uses EIA's 2024 and 2025 fuel and generation records, as the next paragraph explains.

One facility at the 450 MW cap would release half to nearly two-thirds of the heat Lake Side Power Plant, the 1,246.5 MW gas plant in Vineyard, rejects at full output, and would use 22 to 27 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year, 8 to 10% of all the natural gas Utah consumed in 2024.⁷⁹ The comparison is heat for heat, and it is conservative: a data center consumes its own electricity, so all of its fuel energy ends as heat on the site, while Lake Side exports its electricity and rejects the rest, about 1,319 to 1,376 MW-thermal at full output on its 2024 and 2025 EIA fuel and generation records. EIA reports fuel on a higher-heating-value basis and this report states the facility on a lower one, so on a single basis the facility's shares would be higher than printed.⁷⁸⁴³ UPDATED

The one-site limit counts standalone generation

UPDATED Subsection 22 allows one data-center site citywide at any time, counts a standalone generation facility as a site, and bars splitting a data center and its generation across parcels or approvals within one development to avoid the limit.¹⁰¹¹⁰² One question survives: the 450 MW cap is still measured per generation facility while the limit counts sites, and neither draft says one site may host only one facility. That is a question for the City Attorney before adoption.

Where this could go

Any parcel in the I-1 Light Industrial zone qualifies.^11101102 The amendment is citywide in application, not site-specific: the applicant requested a text amendment, not a rezone of one parcel. The next applicant need not be Volition or use Volition's equipment. Under the 18 AUG text it also need not carry any of the six covenants Volition volunteered: it needs only to meet the objective conditions in §15.3.24.090, and it is reviewed administratively.⁵¹⁷⁶ UPDATED Both 21 SEP drafts write several of those covenants into the text; see the 21 SEP drafts.¹⁰¹¹⁰²

How far that opens is itself a drafting question. UPDATED In the 18 AUG text the qualifying test is a performance standard, not a technology: generation must be Controlled-Emission Generation Technology, fueled by natural gas, renewable natural gas, hydrogen, biogas, propane or blends, emitting no more than 0.30 lb NOx/MWh. Equipment at or under 0.07 lb/MWh is "Ultra-Low Emission" and gets streamlined review; equipment between 0.07 and 0.30 lb/MWh needs Development Review Committee findings of full enclosure, acoustic compliance, and continuous emissions monitoring or annual source testing. Compression-ignition (diesel or dual-fuel) engines used for prime power are excluded by definition.⁵¹ The 17 AUG edition of this paragraph described the 05 AUG draft, which set a single 0.5 lb/MWh test, excluded reciprocating engines as a class, and closed its list of named technologies by striking "without limitation" and "recuperated microturbines."⁹⁰ The 18 AUG definition names no technologies at all, so that list question falls away, and spark-ignition gas engines with add-on controls are no longer excluded by name. Neither 21 SEP draft keeps a NOx rate in its definition: v.2 admits only non-combustion electrochemical equipment such as fuel cells, and rev.2 any stationary generation on the listed fuels except compression-ignition engines for prime power.¹⁰¹¹⁰²

What the 18 AUG text does constrain: generation must be Controlled-Emission Generation Technology, permanently islanded, non-evaporatively cooled, held to 65 dBA at the property line and 55 dBA at any residential boundary at all hours, with annual water use a permit condition, and subject to battery fire-safety review.⁵¹ No other Utah jurisdiction in Table 18 imposes any of those.

5. The local yardstick

What 450 MW looks like against everything already here

Every existing-source emissions figure here comes from Utah DAQ's reported emissions inventory: 256 facility-year records covering 61 Utah County facilities by DAQ ID, 2017 through 2025.⁹ Those are reported actual emissions; the data center figures are permit-basis estimates. UPDATED

Every Spanish Fork source in the state's emissions inventory

There are three in the inventory, which covers only the sources Utah's reporting rule, R307-150-3, requires to report; smaller permitted sources are not in it. UPDATED Grouping by DAQ facility ID rather than company name collapses two pairs that are the same plant under successive owners: DAQ_ID 10847, Sapa Extrusions and Hydro Extrusion USA, one facility whose listed street address changed from 1550 N Kirby Lane to 1550 Hydro Way in the 2022 record; and DAQ_ID 11789, Longview Fibre and WestRock Longview, one facility at 2200 North Main Street with identical coordinates in every year.⁹

TABLE 02

Hydro Extrusion is 81% of the NOx that Spanish Fork's inventoried sources report, and nothing else is close.⁹⁴³

Comparison of NOx

TABLE 03

Volition as proposed would be permitted for slightly less NOx a year than Provo's Utah Valley Hospital reports, 5.17 tons against 5.44; the data center's figure is a proposed permit estimate and the hospital's is its reported 2023 emissions.⁹¹ On NOx this technology is clean. One facility at the 450 MW cap would come to about 5.9 tons on DAQ's method: a little above the hospital, a third of what the city's aluminum plant reports, and about 1.4 times WestRock's 2023 emissions, which would make it the city's second-largest inventoried NOx source.⁹⁴³ UPDATED (Spanish Fork's own 33-bed hospital is not in the inventory, so the Provo hospital is the meaningful hospital comparator.)⁹⁵⁴

Every power plant inside Spanish Fork today runs on wind, sun or water; the city has no thermal power plant.⁶⁷⁸⁹ Its neighbors do. UAMPS Nebo in Payson reports about 9× the NOx estimated for one facility at the 450 MW cap, and PacifiCorp's Lake Side in Vineyard, 1,246.5 MW nameplate, reports 176 tons, 30× the 450 MW figure.^933347843 UPDATED Lehi, Springville and Payson run their own city plants, which reported 7.39, 3.37 and 0.57 tons of NOx in 2025.⁹

Every generator that already exists inside Spanish Fork

From the Utah Geological Survey electricity series, reproducing EIA Form EIA-860 filings. All capacities are AC. EIA lists only plants of 1 MW or more, so rooftop solar and a few small test turbines at the canyon mouth, whose output UMPA buys, are not counted.⁶⁷⁵ UPDATED

TABLE 04

The wind park runs nine 2.1 MW turbines and has averaged about a 27% capacity factor since 2009 on EIA's generation records, 25.5% in 2025; it is the only utility-scale wind generation in Utah County.⁸⁹¹⁴³ UPDATED The solar park is UMPA's, sold to residents through the city's SharedSolar program and built on a closed landfill.⁷²¹²² The hydro plant sits on Powerhouse Road: three units under the Strawberry Water Users Association, the oldest in service since 1937.⁶²³ Powerhouse Road serves the current warehouse site, and the city spent $220,000 straightening it for the roughly 60 trucks a day Fingerhut expected.¹⁶¹⁷ UPDATED

Only one of those three supplies Spanish Fork customers: the 4.0 MW solar park.⁷²¹ The wind park sells to PacifiCorp under a 20-year agreement.¹⁰⁶ The hydro plant is reported to sell to the South Utah Valley Electric Service District. UNVERIFIED Spanish Fork is not a Rocky Mountain Power city: it runs a municipal utility supplied wholesale by UMPA, whose largest single resource is market purchases, about 41% of its 2021 resource energy. UPDATED⁵

Nameplate against nameplate, with no assumptions: Volition as proposed is 14.8× all 26.5 MW of existing city generation, and one facility at the 450 MW cap is 17.0×.^185110243

Who uses the power, and what this would add

UMPA's plan reports Spanish Fork's retail electricity sales by customer class (FY2022 Customer Profile, p. xiii).⁵

TABLE 05

UMPA's filing names no customers, but it sets a ceiling. City staff called Hydro the city's largest single power user, at about 4 MW,⁵¹ and it and Mountain Country Foods almost certainly sit in the five-account Large Commercial class, which uses 48.02 GWh a year in total, so no one plant in it uses more than 48 GWh a year.⁵³⁵

TABLE 06

UPDATED At 75% of nameplate, one facility at the 450 MW cap would use about ten times the city's annual electricity and roughly 62× the Large Commercial class its largest industrial neighbors sit in, and its nameplate would be 17× every generator in the city.⁴³ On the applicant's own basis, 75% of its 250 MW computing load, Volition alone would use about 1,640 GWh a year at the racks, 5.5× the city, before cooling.⁵¹⁴³ APPLICANT ONLY That scale also explains the off-grid design: the city's system cannot carry any version of this facility without new substations and a transmission connection.⁵¹ The building's own leasing listing advertises 4,000 A at 480 V with roughly 6 to 8 MW of additional power available, against the 393.25 MW in Volition's air permit application.⁵⁵

Additional context

UPDATED NOx, along with particulates and sulfur dioxide, is where this technology wins; carbon, heat and gas are where it does not. Apart from Lake Side, none of these comparators comes close to the facility's CO2e, heat, or gas use at the cap. Lake Side, the one Utah County facility at comparable thermal scale, burns about 42 to 43 billion cubic feet of gas a year, well above the 22 to 27 billion one facility at the 450 MW cap would use, and rejects more heat than such a facility would release.⁷⁸²⁵⁴³

6. What is being proposed

Volition Industries, Inc. applied in JUL 2026 for a Spanish Fork Title 15 text amendment permitting data centers with on-site generation in the I-1 Light Industrial zone; its proposed text is dated 10 JUL 2026 and its justification statement 16 JUL 2026. UPDATED The target is the existing 1,054,000 sq ft former Fingerhut building at 4000 E US Highway 6, marketed since as Western Distribution Center and now as Canyon Logistics Center, at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon.^5510905117

The warehouse data

TABLE 07

First, the vacancy. 451,792 of 1,054,000 sq ft, about 43% of the building, is being actively marketed, which is what "partly occupied" means in this report and is the closest thing to a measured baseline that exists.⁵⁵

Second, the listing quantifies the grid constraint from the property's own side. The building is served at 4,000 A, 480 V, 3-phase, roughly 3.3 MVA, and its broker advertises 6 to 8 MW of additional power as available.⁵⁵ Volition's proposed 393.25 MW is ~50 to 65 times that headroom, and the 21 SEP drafts' 450 MW cap is about 55 to 75 times it.^110110243 UPDATED

Third, the dock doors. A building with dozens of dock-high positions was built for continuous trailer cycling, and the data center would use none of them.⁵¹ UPDATED

The alternative use, side by side

The counterfactual is this building in full warehouse use, which the current zoning allows, not an empty field.

TABLE 08

Truck traffic

Every truck figure below applies published ITE rates to the verified 1,054,000 sq ft: the weighted averages in ITE's 2016 high-cube warehouse study, and ITE manual rates as reproduced by two state transportation departments.^103414243 No traffic count for this building exists in any public record, so the figures describe a fully tenanted building, not present conditions. A trip end is one pass through the driveway: a truck arriving is one trip end, and the same truck leaving is another. UPDATED The only figures for today's use are the applicant's, and they disagree: 750 to 1,500 truck trips a month on its 18 AUG slides, 2,250 to 3,750 trucks a month on its 01 SEP slide. APPLICANT ONLY⁸⁹⁷⁷

ITE defines a high-cube warehouse as a building that typically has at least 200,000 sq ft and a ceiling height of 24 feet or more.⁴² This building has 1,054,000 sq ft and 36 ft of clear height, so it is high-cube, and Land Use Code 154 fits it better than the general Land Use Code 150 that warehouse traffic studies default to.⁵⁵ UPDATED Which high-cube use a buyer would run is unknown, and the zone permits all of them by right as "Trucking and Warehousing," so this revision states each at its highest published ITE rate and takes the busiest, a parcel hub, as the maximum.¹¹¹⁰³ The building was built as a catalog fulfillment center, and Fingerhut planned for about 60 trucks a day, far fewer than any of these rates; nothing in the zoning holds a future owner to that plan.¹⁶¹⁷ The building's owner told the Council on 18 AUG that funding had been obtained for a new Highway 6 interchange, and that the owners had considered expanded distribution and manufacturing uses that could bring substantially more truck traffic.⁷⁶ No state record found for this revision confirms the interchange's funding or schedule. UNVERIFIED

TABLE 09

Every rate is published by ITE, the industry's standard source for traffic estimates, and applied to the verified 1,054,000 sq ft; none is a count, because no count exists for this building or for a comparable Utah site. The parcel hub, cold storage, fulfillment and transload rates are the weighted averages in ITE's 2016 high-cube warehouse study; ITE publishes the same weekend as weekday rate for parcel hubs, cold storage and fulfillment centers, so those rows run 30.44 days a month.¹⁰³⁴¹ The general warehousing and transload rows use 21.75 weekdays and 8.69 weekend days, with weekend volume scaled by each code's published weekend-to-weekday ratio.⁴¹ The parcel hub and fulfillment rates each rest on a single site, which ITE judged insufficient to derive a usable rate, and the fulfillment count was taken in December; they are the published maximum, not a forecast.¹⁰³⁴³

UPDATED The 17 AUG edition used 36 dock-high doors as an independent physical check on these rates. That check does not hold. The 36 doors are those listed for the space on the market, the applicant counts 85 bays building-wide, and the listing says more can be added. The door count does not cap the use; floor area does, which is why every figure above is computed from the 1,054,000 sq ft.⁵⁵⁷⁷

APPLICANT ONLY Table 10 is the applicant's own description of the project, from its presentations and testimony. Nothing in it is independently verified except where DAQ's Intent to Approve or the ordinance text is cited.

TABLE 10

Scale in context: the whole city's peak electrical demand is roughly 90 MW. UMPA's Integrated Resource Plan, filed 30 NOV 2022, records Spanish Fork City's FY2021 annual peak at 74.10 MW against 297,313 MWh of annual energy requirements, with 14,468 customers, and forecasts that peak growing to 115.76 MW by FY2027 (IRP pp. 81 to 82).⁵ The ~90 MW figure used in the city record on 04 AUG sits between the two, so this report uses it as the current-era number and shows the FY2027 forecast alongside.⁵¹ Every scale multiple below survives either figure. UPDATED At the proposed 393.25 MW the facility's nameplate is ~4.4× the whole city's peak (3.4× the FY2027 forecast); at 250 MW of computing load, ~2.8×; at the 450 MW cap, ~5.0×, or 3.9× against the forecast.^15110110243

7. Where the procedural record stands

TABLE 11

The Planning Commission did not endorse this. It deadlocked. Its review of a text amendment is advisory, so the amendment went to the Council regardless.¹⁰⁵¹¹

Two councilmembers raised this question on 04 AUG

The city's minutes of 04 AUG, printed in draft in the 18 AUG packet and adopted on 18 AUG, record this exchange during the discussion item "Large Power Users, Island Power, and Data Centers," before the Volition presentation:⁵¹⁷⁶ UPDATED

The amendment reaching the Council on 18 AUG does not contain that review. UPDATED The Planning Commission asked for something different, a capacity cap and a two-site limit, and both are in the 18 AUG text.⁵¹ The applicant's own 10 JUL text made each facility a conditional use with its own public hearing; staff's 05 AUG redline replaced that with administrative review, and no packet states why.⁹⁰ On 18 AUG the question was answered in public. The City Attorney said that under this text future site plans receive administrative review by staff and the Development Review Committee, at public meetings, with no additional public hearings, and that "even if the use required a conditional use permit, the review would remain an administrative action handled by the Planning Commission rather than the City Council."⁷⁶ A conditional use permit would not have given the Council the legislative review the 04 AUG exchange was about. The Council then discussed writing more protections into the ordinance or requiring a development agreement of every applicant.⁷⁶

8. The ordinance, provision by provision

UPDATED Both 21 SEP drafts replace most of the provisions below; the 21 SEP drafts section compares them.¹⁰¹¹⁰² The 17 AUG edition of this section described two documents: the draft in the 05 AUG Planning Commission packet (pp. 62 to 65) for the performance standards, and the Exhibit A in the original 18 AUG posting for the capacity cap, the quota and the cross-references.⁹⁰ The Council's republished 18 AUG Exhibit A changed several provisions. Each item below now describes the 18 AUG text, cites its standards by their 18 AUG numbers, O.1 to O.13, and says where it changed.⁵¹

Strong in the 18 AUG text:

• UPDATED "Controlled-Emission Generation Technology", NOx ≤ 0.30 lb/MWh, with an "Ultra-Low Emission" tier at ≤ 0.07 lb/MWh that gets streamlined review. Anything else needs Development Review Committee findings of full enclosure, acoustic compliance, and continuous emissions monitoring or annual source testing (O.3). Compression-ignition (diesel or dual-fuel) engines used for prime power are excluded. Objective, numeric, verifiable.⁵¹ The 05 AUG draft offered two routes, CARB certification or a single 0.5 lb/MWh test, and excluded every reciprocating engine.⁹⁰ The 18 AUG text drops that class exclusion, so spark-ignition gas engines of the kind Novva runs in West Jordan and Joule Capital has permitted in Millard County are no longer excluded by name and would have to demonstrate 0.30 lb/MWh under Enhanced Review.³¹³² Bloom's ES 6.5 datasheet states 0.003 lb/MWh of NOx, a 100× margin under 0.30.³ (0.07 lb/MWh is also the CARB DG certification standard, the ceiling a unit must meet to be certified, not Bloom's rate.)³⁰
• O.6 Noise is the strongest performance standard in the document. Verbatim: sound "including generation equipment, Energy Storage Systems, and cooling equipment, shall not exceed 65 dBA at any property line of the site, and shall not exceed 55 dBA at the boundary of any residential zone, at any hour, measured in accordance with the procedures of Chapter 9.32 of this Code," and "Compliance with this subsection does not excuse compliance with Chapter 9.32."⁵¹ So it is a continuing limit, not a design target; it names cooling equipment; it adopts a measurement procedure; and it preserves the city's standing enforcement. Against the existing I-1 limit of 80 dBA day / 65 dBA night, a facility here must meet the city's nighttime standard around the clock. Volition wrote this.⁹⁰ UPDATED The 18 AUG text closed the one omission the 17 AUG edition found: it now requires sound verification testing by a qualified professional within 90 days of full commercial operation, with results to the Zoning Administrator. On a substantiated complaint the Zoning Administrator "may require" follow-up testing, which is discretion, not a duty.⁵¹
• UPDATED O.9 Water Use requires closed-loop, air-cooled or dry cooling and bars evaporative and once-through cooling for heat rejection, which is the most valuable protection in the document. It also requires an application to include "an annual water use estimate, by category of use" for review by the Public Works Director, and "the approved estimate shall be a condition of the permit." Landscaping is named as a use the subsection does not prohibit.⁵¹
• UPDATED O.5, permanent electrical isolation, no interconnection, parallel operation or export. The text carries a carve-out, first inserted in staff's 05 AUG redline: "Ordinary office, maintenance, custodial, and other similar portions of a facility may be connected to the Spanish Fork City electric system." The last phrase is open-ended, and nothing in the text defines it.⁹⁰⁵¹
• O.7 Air Quality requires the facility to "at all times operate within the emission rates demonstrated under subsection 3", making the emission rates a zoning condition the city can enforce, not merely a DAQ matter. UPDATED The 18 AUG text fixed the cross-reference to a subsection C that the renumbered draft no longer had, and it now holds facility-wide NOx potential to emit to the federal nonattainment major-source threshold, by federally enforceable limits in the DAQ approval order.⁵¹
• O.4 Energy Storage requires UL 9540 listing, UL 9540A large-scale fire test data, NFPA 855 compliance, and Fire Marshal review with an emergency response plan before certificate of occupancy.⁵¹

Both 21 SEP drafts carry a capacity ceiling, and it is the number to argue about. Subsection 2 of each reads "…a minimum of 50 megawatts and not more than 450 megawatts of nameplate generating capacity, measured per Onsite Power Generation Facility."¹⁰¹¹⁰² UPDATED Note the floor as well as the ceiling: nothing under 50 MW qualifies at all, so every facility the drafts authorize is a large one. §4 works through what that permits at the cap.

Still materially weak in the 18 AUG text:

• No heat or thermal standard of any kind. At 605–742 MW-thermal for the proposed 393.25 MW, and 692–849 at 450 MW, this remains the clearest substantive gap.⁴³ UPDATED The applicant's 01 SEP presentation promises a third-party, site-specific heat study before operation, with results published; that promise is not in the 18 AUG text.⁷⁷
• O.11 decommissioning: unchanged. Exhibit A still requires removal within 12 months of permanent cessation and says only that "The City may require a decommissioning plan as a condition of approval." No bond, no surety, no escrow.⁵¹ UPDATED The applicant's 01 SEP presentation promises a restoration plan with a cost estimate refreshed every three years, City step-in and lien rights, and an annual report covering "decommissioning security"; on 18 AUG the City Attorney described the draft development agreement as including financial assurance for decommissioning. No published document names an instrument, a surety or a secured amount, and none of it is in the 18 AUG text.⁷⁷⁷⁶
• UPDATED O.10, sewer discharge is not prohibited, only made subject to the city's pretreatment program under Chapter 13.24.⁵¹ The applicant told the Council on 18 AUG that the system "would not discharge cooling water into the City's drainage or drinking water systems."⁷⁶ The ordinance and that statement are not the same commitment, and only one of them is enforceable.
• UPDATED No GHG provision, and no regulator in this process will supply one. DAQ quantifies CO2e in the Intent to Approve, 1,434,855 tons a year, but sets no CO2e condition; the only related limit is the fuel cap, 23,836 million cubic feet of gas per rolling 12 months, which is full nameplate at the permitted heat rate.¹ A minor source needs no approval order for greenhouse gases at all under Utah Admin. Code R307-401-9.
• The by-right mechanism, the one item on this list worth a question on 18 AUG. UPDATED With the struck text removed, Exhibit A contains no "Conditional Use Permit", no "conditional use" and no "Planning Commission may impose", against four uses of "site plan application", at items 3 (twice), 6 and 9. All of those phrases are in the document, struck; the conditions clause in the applicant's July text (subsection L) is struck in full, and it is the only item in subsection O that was never given a number.⁹⁰⁵¹ The redline shows the removal was deliberate, striking conditional-use language from four separate clauses while leaving the heading's "(see §15.3.08.060)" cross-reference in place. §9 sets that out in full; both 21 SEP drafts resolve it.¹⁰¹¹⁰² UPDATED The City Attorney confirmed the administrative reading on 18 AUG.⁷⁶

UPDATED Of the six volunteered covenants, one is fully in the 18 AUG text: the noise limit (O.6). Four are partly there: electrical isolation, subject to a carve-out letting office, maintenance, custodial "and other similar portions" connect to the city system (O.5); diesel, excluded as prime power and ambiguous as standby, since the definition's fuel list and O.3 would exclude a diesel unit while O.12 preserves the codes governing emergency standby equipment; decommissioning, required without financial assurance (O.11); and water use, which becomes a permit condition at whatever estimate is approved rather than a fixed cap (O.9). Annual public reporting is missing. The applicant's 01 SEP presentation promises all six and more, but none of it is in an executed instrument, and no draft development agreement is on the 21 SEP agenda.^5177100

9. The best question on the agenda

Exhibit A still points to the hearing chapter

UPDATED Both 21 SEP drafts resolve this question. They add the data center uses to the I-1 zone's existing "Uses Subject to Conditions" list, which carries no hearing cross-reference, and never mention conditional use or §15.3.08.060, so nothing in either draft points to a hearing for approval (the 21 SEP drafts).^11101102 What follows describes the 18 AUG text. This was the strongest finding in the review, and no keyword search will surface it. It was found by following a cross-reference rather than searching for a phrase.

What Exhibit A contains, and what it does not

Exhibit A amends three sections: the definitions at §15.1.04.020, the I-1 use list at §15.3.16.120, and §15.3.24.090, where it adds subsection O, items 1 through 13. Read in full, two things are true at once.⁵¹ UPDATED

TABLE 12

So the 18 AUG text routes these facilities through site plan review, contains no Planning Commission conditioning authority anywhere, and still carries a heading that points at the Conditional Use Permit section, where the public hearing and the five mandatory findings live.¹¹ Whether that cross-reference imports those procedures or is inert decides whether any facility built under this text ever gets a hearing.

The packet contains two documents that describe different ordinances

The justification statement traveled in the same 18 AUG packet the Council was to vote from (pp. 128 to 132), and on four points it did not describe the Exhibit A this report analyzed. UPDATED The republished 18 AUG Exhibit A took up two of them, the last two rows below:⁵¹

TABLE 13

One more feature of the text analyzed on 17 AUG. The definition of Ultra-Low Emission Generation Technology read "includes, fuel cells, and linear generators meeting the foregoing standard." There was no "without limitation" and no other technology named, so as written the list was arguably closed and would have excluded a future ultra-low technology without a further amendment. The 05 AUG Planning Commission packet shows the cause: staff struck ", without limitation," and ", recuperated microturbines," from that list (p. 63).⁹⁰ UPDATED The 18 AUG definition of Controlled-Emission Generation Technology names no technologies, so this concern no longer applies.

The cross-reference itself

UPDATED Exhibit A as republished is the amendment in tracked changes. Read with the deletions taken out, the heading is "B. Uses Subject to Conditions (see §15.3.08.060)." §15.3.08.060 is Title 15's Conditional Use Permits section. It makes the Planning Commission the land use authority, provides that it "shall hold at least one (1) public hearing," and requires five mandatory findings before approval.¹¹⁵¹

Title 15 uses two established forms, and Exhibit A matches neither. A sweep of the code found 17 headings reading "Uses Subject to Conditional Use Permit (see §15.3.08.060)", where the cross-reference carries the hearing and findings machinery, and 13 separate bare "Uses Subject to Conditions" headings, none of which carries it.¹¹ UPDATED The 17 AUG edition gave 17 and 16; a recount of the codified text confirms 17 and gives 13, and the point stands. Exhibit A creates a third form that exists nowhere else in the code: the "Conditions" label attached to the Conditional Use Permit cross-reference. That is the anomaly, and it is a residue of the heading it replaced.

The redline settles what a string search could only suggest. The 05 AUG Planning Commission packet carries the amendment as tracked changes at pp. 62 to 65, and the republished 18 AUG Exhibit A carries the same result at pp. 122 to 123. UPDATED Rendered and read at the pixel level, because strikethrough does not survive text extraction, the drafters struck conditional-use language in four separate places and inserted "conditions" in three of them:⁹⁰⁵¹

TABLE 14

That is not drafting ambiguity. It is a deliberate, systematic removal of conditional-use status from every operative clause, and Exhibit A confirms the result.

The surviving "(see §15.3.08.060)" is therefore best read as residue of the heading struck around it, not as deliberate incorporation. The by-right reading is the likely one, and it is what the 18 AUG text would have enacted. Deleting the stray cross-reference was a one-line amendment that would settle it, and both 21 SEP drafts drop it.¹⁰¹¹⁰²

In the text analyzed on 17 AUG, two more dangling references pointed the same way. O.7 required operating within emission rates "demonstrated under subsection C", but the renumbered items 1 through 13 left no subsection C to point at, so the provision this report credited most hung on a reference to a subsection that did not exist. And O.13's two-site quota identified uses "as identified in §15.3.16.120(C)", after the same ordinance renumbered that subsection to (B).⁵¹ UPDATED The republished 18 AUG text fixed both, to "subsection 3" and §15.3.16.120(B). The heading's "(see §15.3.08.060)" was the one left in the 18 AUG text.

Why this was the right question and not a gotcha. There are two readings and they lead to opposite outcomes. UPDATED Utah courts try to give every word effect and avoid readings that make text superfluous (Turner v. Staker & Parson Cos., 2012 UT 30, ¶ 12), which favors incorporation: "(see §15.3.08.060)" imports the CUP section's procedures, every future applicant gets a Planning Commission hearing and findings, and the ordinance is far stronger than it appears. The competing reading treats the cross-reference as a drafting leftover, which is what the redline supports, and leaves the use purely administrative, with the entitlement running with the land and no future hearing.¹¹

UPDATED The republished text fixed both cross-references, and the City Attorney went further than either reading. On the record he said future site plans would be reviewed administratively by staff and the Development Review Committee, and that "even if the use required a conditional use permit, the review would remain an administrative action handled by the Planning Commission rather than the City Council," with future reviews at public meetings but no additional public hearings.⁷⁶ The minutes do not record him addressing the heading's cross-reference, which is still in the 18 AUG text. So the city's position on 18 AUG was that the outcome is the same either way, which is worth setting against §15.3.08.060(D)(2), still in the code today: "The Commission shall hold at least one (1) public hearing on the application."¹¹

That is why the question was worth asking.⁷⁶ Under the 18 AUG text the entitlement runs with the land, subject only to expiration, revocation or decommissioning under O.11 and O.13. The ask rested on the enacting text itself, which is why it held regardless of what anyone intended. UPDATED

10. The air permit is still not issued, and the comment window closed before any vote on adoption

On 17 AUG, Volition's website said "Permit Status: Approved,"⁴ its August handout said "Utah DEQ issued the permit in 2026,"⁶¹ and its 04 AUG Council deck said a permit "has been approved,"⁹⁹ as it told the Planning Commission on 05 AUG.¹⁰⁵ All three were wrong, and the state's own document says so in terms. UPDATED The applicant corrected itself on 18 AUG, telling the Council "we said it imprecisely and we're correcting it ourselves,"⁸⁹ and its project page now reads "Intent to Approve," under public review through 05 SEP, with formal approval "expected mid-September."⁴ Its 01 SEP presentation calls the permit "pending final issuance."⁷⁷ The comment period closed 05 SEP.² A check of DAQ's list of issued Approval Orders on 22 SEP 2026 found none for this site.⁹⁶

DAQE-IN163550001-26 is an Intent to Approve, issued 04 AUG 2026 by the Utah Division of Air Quality, signed by the Division's New Source Review Section Manager.¹ Its cover letter: "The attached document is the Intent to Approve (ITA)… The ITA is subject to public review. Any comments received shall be considered before an Approval Order (AO) is issued." And its Public Notice Statement: "Air pollution producing sources and/or their air control facilities may not be constructed, installed, established, or modified prior to the issuance of an AO by the Director… The proposed conditions of the AO may be changed as a result of the comments received."

TABLE 15

On 18 AUG the Council was asked to grant a by-right entitlement eighteen days before the air permit that governs the facility could become final, and three days before the deadline for the public to request a hearing on it.²²⁸ UPDATED The Council tabled the ordinance that night, and the comment period closed on 05 SEP with no Approval Order issued as of 22 SEP 2026.⁷⁶²⁹⁶

What the draft permit contains. UPDATED The Intent to Approve would authorize up to 1,210 solid-oxide fuel cell units at 325 kW each, 393.25 MW of combined nameplate, at a maximum heat rate of 7,127 Btu/kWh, using natural gas only. It is written to the equipment class, not to a manufacturer: it never names Bloom. SIC 4911 Electric Services, classified New Minor Source, with no applicable federal standards.¹ Its project description also says the array would generate "325 MW of electricity"; its equipment line, 1,210 units at 325 kW, is 393.25 MW, and its NOx, CO, VOC and CO2e totals all compute at 393.25 MW.¹⁴³

TABLE 16

UPDATED The tonnage figures are DAQ's estimate of potential emissions, not limits. DAQ's own table is headed "an estimate of the total potential emissions from the source," computed for NOx, CO and VOC as the manufacturer's rate times full nameplate times all 8,760 hours.¹⁴³ The conditions that would bind are narrower. Each unit must be certified to the datasheet rates for NOx, CO and VOC, and compliance with that condition is shown by keeping the manufacturer's emissions guarantee on file. The facility may use only natural gas, and no more than 23,836 million cubic feet of it in any rolling 12 months, metered daily. No condition sets a PM or SO2 rate, and no condition requires an emissions test. If a unit drifted above its published rate in service, nothing in the proposed permit would measure it.¹

And the handout's carbon figure is the permit's own.⁶¹ "Under 1.43M tons of CO2e a year at full build" is the Intent to Approve's 1,434,855 tons rounded, though the permit figure is a little over 1.43 million rather than under it.¹ Volition is publishing its own permit's potential-to-emit number, which is larger than this report's operating estimate of roughly 800,000 to 980,000 metric tons.⁴³ UPDATED That estimate applies a 75% capacity factor to the proposed 393.25 MW nameplate, which is this report's assumption; the applicant's own 75% referred to the 250 MW it called the facility's maximum, and on that basis the datasheet rates give about 510,000 to 620,000 metric tons before cooling and conversion losses.⁵¹⁴³ Both are correct at their stated basis. Quoting either without the basis is not.

11. Why the by-right question matters more here

Utah enacted S.B. 132 (2025), "Electric Utility Amendments", Laws of Utah 2025, ch. 318, effective 07 MAY 2025, creating Utah Code Title 54, Chapter 26. It defines a new category at 54-26-101(1):¹²⁴⁴

UPDATED That appears to describe this facility, at 2.5× the statutory threshold, and 54-26-504(2)(a) provides that such systems "are exempt from commission oversight or regulation as a public utility."⁴⁴ Whether the chapter reaches this site is unconfirmed. Its definitions turn on a "large load customer" in the service territory of a qualified electric utility, which in Utah means Rocky Mountain Power, and on a provider registered with the Public Service Commission; this parcel sits on Spanish Fork's own municipal power system.⁴⁴ Ask the applicant whether it has registered under 54-26-501 and which statute it relies on. A conventional power plant of this size in Utah passes through several independent public-interest gates; if the chapter applies, this one passes through almost none:

TABLE 17

Title 54 Chapter 26 is a Public Utilities framework, silent on municipal zoning; it neither preempts local land-use authority nor supplies a substitute for it.⁴⁴ So the entire public-interest review of a 393.25 MW industrial power plant reduces to one thing: the Spanish Fork zoning decision. The 18 AUG text of §15.3.24.090 converted that decision into a staff and Development Review Committee site-plan review at a public meeting, with no public hearing and, for Ultra-Low Emission equipment, no written findings.⁵¹⁷⁶ UPDATED Both 21 SEP drafts keep site plan review and add a development agreement for every facility and City Council approval of any Material Modification.¹⁰¹¹⁰²

This is not an argument that Volition is dangerous. It is an argument about where the only remaining valve is. The off-grid design that makes this project attractive is the same design that leaves the city as the only reviewer of where and whether it is built. Islanding is a benefit and a jurisdictional exit at once, and only one of those is in the deck. It also answers the rebuttal "the state and DAQ will regulate this anyway": for a closed private generation system, the state has chosen not to regulate it as a utility, and DAQ's air permit does not reach siting.¹²⁴⁴¹ UPDATED

And the exemption is not incidental to the design. It is contingent on it. 54-26-101(1) defines a closed private generation system as one that "is not connected to and operates independently from the transmission system of a qualified electric utility."¹² Interconnection is physically available: a 345 kV hub sits under a mile north of the parcel.⁴⁰⁴³ UPDATED Connecting would move the facility out of the closed category and into the chapter's "connected generation system" category, which is also exempt from regulation as a public utility but requires a connection contract approved by the Public Service Commission and interconnection under the transmission provider's FERC-approved tariff.⁴⁴

And the reporting backstop does not exist. S.B. 282 (2026) would have required an annual electricity- and water-consumption report from the large load customer to the host municipality; it failed and was never enrolled.⁴⁹ H.B. 585 (2026), which would have required data centers to disclose "the percentage self-generated" and "the type of generation facility and fuel source," also failed.⁵⁰ So no state law requires this facility to disclose its energy use or water; its air emissions are reported only through the state emission-inventory rules its draft permit invokes (condition I.7).¹ The "annual public reporting" covenant Volition volunteered, which the 18 AUG text omitted, has no statutory backstop. If it is not in the ordinance or the development agreement, it does not exist. UPDATED The applicant's 01 SEP presentation promises an annual report by 31 MAR covering capacity, water, air, noise and incidents, and says Title 15 will require it, and the City Attorney's 18 AUG summary of Volition's draft development agreement includes annual public compliance and economic reports; the 18 AUG ordinance text does not.⁷⁷⁷⁶ Both 21 SEP drafts now require an annual compliance report that the City makes public (subsection 21).¹⁰¹¹⁰²

Is by-right an outlier in Utah? No. It is the norm.

TABLE 18

UNVERIFIED The Bluffdale, Lehi, Utah County and West Jordan rows, and the Eagle Mountain row's code sections, rest on code reads not linked in this revision. Provo is not in the table: on 28 APR 2026 its council removed power generation as a permitted use for data centers and required non-evaporative cooling, and its March draft had barred islanded power plants.¹⁰⁸

Two conclusions follow, and they point in opposite directions.

1. On the mechanism, Spanish Fork is the Utah norm. Eagle Mountain and Bluffdale permit data centers administratively by a plain "P" in a use table; Lehi permits them by silence; Eagle Mountain moved toward this posture in 2024: on 03 SEP 2024 its Council voted 5 to 0 to repeal and replace its Industrial Zone chapter in an ordinance that, in staff's words, "eliminates the conditional uses in each chapter."⁸² UPDATED (The 17 AUG edition gave an ordinance number and title the minutes do not show.) The criticism that Spanish Fork is doing something procedurally unusual does not survive.

2. On the substance, Spanish Fork's 18 AUG text is the most regulated of the Utah jurisdictions in Table 18, by a wide margin. UPDATED Among them it is the only one with a megawatt cap, a citywide quota, a data-center-specific noise standard, a cooling-method restriction, an emissions requirement, an electrical-isolation mandate, a water condition, or a decommissioning provision. Eagle Mountain and Bluffdale host operating data centers under codes that impose none of those. Both 21 SEP drafts drop the 65 and 55 dBA limits and the stated cooling-method ban, keep the other six, and add a thermal-impact analysis, financial assurance and a public annual report.¹⁰¹¹⁰²

That is a credit to the process that produced it: the applicant drafted most of these standards, staff and the Planning Commission added the floor, the cap and the quota, and the result carries more protection than the code of any Utah city that already hosts data centers, before the first one arrived.⁹⁰⁵¹ The criticism that remains is not that §15.3.24 is weak by comparison. It is that its specific gaps are real. UPDATED The 17 AUG edition listed four: no heat standard, no post-construction noise verification, no decommissioning security, no potential-to-emit cap. The 18 AUG text closed two, adding a 90-day sound verification test and a facility-wide NOx potential-to-emit cap. It left no heat standard and no decommissioning security; the applicant's 01 SEP presentation promises a heat study and a restoration estimate with City lien rights, and its draft development agreement adds financial assurance for decommissioning, none of it in the 18 AUG text.⁵¹⁷⁷⁷⁶

One point of context. UPDATED Among jurisdictions that took up this question recently, Box Elder County adopted a moratorium¹⁰⁷ and Provo's April 2026 ordinance removed power generation as a permitted use,¹⁰⁸ while Eagle Mountain's use table, adopted in SEP 2024, predates the current wave.⁸² That distinction is real but weak, and should not lead. (The 17 AUG edition also named Saratoga Springs and Loudoun County; Table 18 shows Saratoga Springs has no provision at all, and the Loudoun item is not linked here.)

12. Four state-law facts the Spanish Fork record has not addressed

All four rest on statute or bill text read in full; three of the bills discussed failed. UPDATED

1. The fuel cells are already sales-tax exempt, and the rest may be too. Utah Code 59-12-104(80) exempts "sales of a fuel cell as defined in Section 54-15-102," unconditionally and independent of anything about data centers.⁴⁵ The Bloom array, plausibly the largest single equipment line in the project, is exempt on its own terms. Separately 59-12-104(84) exempts equipment bought by a "qualifying data center," which 59-12-102(111) defines as a facility that "(c) is a new operation constructed on or after July 1, 2016; (d) consists of one or more buildings that total 150,000 or more square feet." The 1,054,000 sq ft clears (d);⁵⁵ prong (c) is uncertain, since this is adaptive reuse of a building completed in 1995.¹⁶¹⁷ UPDATED (The 17 AUG edition cited subsection (109), renumbered (111) in the code effective 01 JUL 2026, and a 1998 date from the leasing listing.) A councilmember weighed an existing assessed value "of approximately $50 million" against "$4 billion in equipment investment" (04 AUG minutes, packet p. 70) with no offsetting entry, and sales and use tax on a $4B purchase is not a rounding error.⁴⁵⁵¹ The applicant's 18 AUG slides set Meta's state sales-tax exemption against Volition's "full tax paid from block one"; the fuel cells are exempt under 59-12-104(80) either way.⁸⁹

None of this contradicts the applicant's statement that Volition "had not requested tax incentives" (04 AUG minutes, packet p. 68).⁵¹ These exemptions are automatic, and H.B. 507 (2026) provides at 11-41-202(2)(e) that "a sales and use tax exemption described in Section 59-12-104 does not constitute an incentive."⁴⁵⁴⁸

2. Utah's only data-center disclosure law is keyed to water, and this design sits under it. H.B. 76 (2026) created Utah Code 73-5-8.3, requiring that "before a land use authority… approves a land use application for a new large data center, the land use authority shall notify" the Divisions of Water Rights and Water Quality and the water provider.⁴⁷ "Large data center" is defined by annual withdrawal of 75 acre-feet or more. Volition's 250,000 gal/yr is 0.77 acre-feet. Two orders of magnitude below the trigger.⁵¹ UPDATED That figure is the applicant's annual cooling and humidification make-up. Its own whole-site figure, 1 to 3 million gal/yr, is 3 to 9 acre-feet, still an order of magnitude below. APPLICANT ONLY⁷⁷

Read both ways: it is real evidence for the closed-loop design, and it means the state's only data-center notification regime does not reach this project. 73-5-8.3 expressly contemplates "generation by the operator of the large data center of energy to power a specific facility," so the statute knows self-generation exists and still gates on water. Combined with the failure of S.B. 282 and H.B. 585: no Utah statute requires this facility to report its energy use, self-generation, or water.⁴⁷⁴⁹⁵⁰

3. An NDA with the city would now be a protected record. S.B. 318 (2026) would have barred cities, counties and state agencies from signing NDAs with prospective data centers and voided any signed after it took effect. It failed and was never enrolled. H.B. 507 did the opposite, amending 63G-2-305(2)(b) to protect "confidential economic development information… that takes the form of a nondisclosure agreement between a person and a governmental entity exploring an economic development opportunity."⁴⁶⁴⁸ The Volition representative told Council conversations began "around October or November" (p. 65), roughly nine months before the application surfaced.⁵¹ UPDATED Any such NDA can now be classified as a protected record, though the city may still release it when the public interest in access is at least as strong (63G-2-201(5)(b)).

4. A mechanism now exists to divert the tax base being promised. H.B. 507 also enacted Title 63N, Chapter 3a, Part 4, creating "Regionally Significant Zones with Energy Implications." Under 63N-3a-402(3)(b) a zone proposal may include a request to "(i) capture up to 60% of the property tax increment… and (ii) divert up to 100% of personal property tax revenue" generated within it.⁴⁸ Most of the $40M/yr would be personal property tax on equipment.⁵¹ From 06 MAY 2027 a municipality may generally "not offer an incentive for a large load data center that is not located within a zone,"⁴⁸ pushing large projects toward the mechanism. The zone and incentive rules reach only a "large load data center," which requires both qualifying-data-center status and a large load customer, and both are uncertain here (fact 1 and §11).⁴⁸ UPDATED The applicant has already proposed the other route. Its 18 AUG slides describe a "post-performance property-tax co-investment (Title 17C CRA)" to be proposed to each taxing entity separately. A tax-increment rebate is an "incentive" under H.B. 507 (11-41-201), and an agreement or community reinvestment survey resolution adopted before 06 MAY 2027 is grandfathered (11-41-202(3)).⁸⁹⁴⁸ So the fiscal case Council was shown treats the $40M as settled public revenue, while the applicant proposes rebating part of it and state law contains a pathway to route more of it elsewhere. Ask Nebo School District, Utah County and the city whether they have been approached, and for what share.

13. The $40M/year does not mean what the room heard

The year-one arithmetic is sound, and the city keeps about a tenth of it.¹⁵ The figure is gross, and gross is what an applicant quotes. None of the three corrections below challenges Volition's honesty. Its project page names "the largest share flowing to Nebo School District" and says the tax will decline "as personal property depreciates."⁴ APPLICANT ONLY They are corrections to what the room is likely to have heard.

Correction 1: 90% of it is not the city's

Utah County Assessor, parcel 67:228:0003, Tax Area 150.¹⁰ The combined approved rate for tax year 2026 is 0.009563:¹⁵

TABLE 19

$4B at the 2026 approved rate is $38.3M a year gross before depreciation, roughly $3.8M/year to Spanish Fork City, and about $37.1M in year one if all of it is generation equipment at 97% good. On the applicant's rounded $40M, the city's share is $4.0M.⁴³ UPDATED (The 17 AUG edition applied the shares to the rounded $40M.) The rest is real public revenue and Nebo School District is a legitimate beneficiary. The 04 AUG presentation gave no city figure.⁹⁹ The applicant's 18 AUG slides put about $4.0M a year to the city on a ~$44M total, which would need about $4.6B of taxable value, and its 01 SEP deck says most goes to Nebo schools.⁸⁹⁷⁷⁴³ All of these figures are gross, before any community reinvestment rebate (§12).

One commitment worth pinning down, from the video Volition played to Council on 04 AUG APPLICANT ONLY: the minutes record the video as saying Volition would "dedicate a portion of site revenues" to the communities that host its facilities (packet p. 65).⁵¹ UPDATED A revenue share is stronger than a flat $500,000 floor, because a percentage scales with the facility and a flat figure does not. Ask which form the development agreement takes.

The tax base is a community benefit, not a city line item

Nebo's share alone is nearly five times Spanish Fork City's entire annual property tax revenue from every parcel in the city, $5,885,340.⁵⁹⁴³ UPDATED At 2018 to 2019 Utah high-school costs of $77.5M to $145M, that share alone would build one every three to five years.⁷⁴ Nebo School District and Utah County have a direct and substantial interest here, and neither has appeared in the record.

The direct community contribution is larger than it sounds

Volition has offered more than $500,000 a year in direct community contributions, which the 04 AUG minutes record as coming "from company and client revenues" (packet p. 68).⁵¹ UPDATED Its 01 SEP presentation calls this a "$500K/yr community floor," with the contribution "binding only when included in the executed agreement."⁷⁷ Against what the city collects today:

TABLE 20

The proposed contribution by itself is about ten times the city's share of the largest 2025 property tax bill found, and about twice what the city receives from the eleven taxpayers in Table 22 combined.⁵⁷⁷³⁴³ UPDATED That is before a dollar of property tax.

Correction 2: the $40M likely excludes tenant servers, and it depreciates slowly

UPDATED The $4B figure most likely excludes the servers. Volition's own project page states the investment covers "retrofit, fuel cells, electrical, fire, security, and engineering,"⁴ and its CEO told the Council on 18 AUG that the projections exclude customers' computing equipment.⁷⁶ APPLICANT ONLY The 04 AUG minutes, though, record the $4B as "power generation, electrical, and computing equipment," so the class split is unconfirmed.⁵¹ If the tenant installs the servers, that equipment is additional taxable value, in an amount nobody can state. The CEO also said revenue could be lower at a smaller build.⁷⁶ Treat $40M/year as the applicant's full-build projection, with tenant equipment as possible upside.

Whether the servers are in the $4B changes which depreciation curve governs, and on the applicant's description it runs in the proposal's favor. Utah Admin Code R884-24P-33 sets percent-good schedules by class, and two classes behave completely differently:¹⁴

TABLE 21

(Each column models the full $4B in that class, at the 2026 combined rate of 0.009563.)¹⁴¹⁵⁴³

UPDATED On the applicant's description, Volition's $4B sits mostly on the durable side.⁴ APPLICANT ONLY Fuel cells and electrical gear are generation equipment, and the retrofit is real property, reassessed at market rather than run down a percent-good schedule.⁶⁷ If the compute is the tenant's, little of the $4B is Class 12, and generation equipment on the Class 27 schedule holds 74% of its value at year ten.¹⁴

Two things push the same direction. The Volition representative told Council the Bloom equipment could undergo "a phased upgrade approximately seven or eight years after installation" (packet p. 69).⁵¹ APPLICANT ONLY UPDATED Replacement equipment enters the roll as new, resetting the curve, and each tenant compute refresh re-enters it at 62% good.¹⁴

One thing not to do: do not net the sales-tax exemption against the property tax. 59-12-104(84) is a sales and use tax exemption only. It does not touch property tax.⁴⁵

Correction 3: what $40M/year means against what these businesses pay

This is public record, and it should be quoted rather than computed. Utah County publishes the tax actually billed on every parcel, by year; 2025 is the most recent complete year.⁵⁷ UPDATED Table 22 is eleven established commercial taxpayers, not a ranking. The largest 2025 parcel bill found in Spanish Fork is on the building Volition would occupy: $495,862 on one parcel, and $558,808 across its six parcels, close to the $561,000 the applicant's 18 AUG slides give for current taxes.⁵⁷⁸⁹ At least 24 other parcels paid more than the smallest bill in the table. The table shows real-property bills only; these businesses also pay personal property tax on equipment.¹⁴

TABLE 22

These eleven commercial taxpayers paid $2,483,765 between them in 2025. Volition's claimed $40M is sixteen times all of them combined, though the comparison sets mostly personal property against real-property bills, so it overstates the gap.⁵⁷⁴³ UPDATED

The hospital is not the benchmark it looks like: the city's most valuable property pays less than several smaller businesses, an effective 0.001734 against the 0.009632 to 0.009918 other parcels pay, reflecting the standard Utah charitable exemption.⁵³⁵⁷⁵⁸ UPDATED

The city's own revenue

Spanish Fork City's audited FY2025 statements report total property tax revenue of $5,885,340, against $5,741,117 the year before.⁵⁹ That is the whole city: every home, every business, every parcel.

TABLE 23

Two true statements, and the Council needs both. Volition's gross claim is 6.8× the city's entire property tax revenue, which is why the number sounds unreal in a Council chamber. But the realistic municipal benefit is roughly $3.8M a year, which would raise the city's own property tax revenue by about 65%, a large benefit, and smaller than the headline by a factor of ten. For scale, $3.8M is roughly 75× the city's share of the largest 2025 bill found, about $50,760, on the building Volition would occupy. UPDATED (The 17 AUG edition gave $4.0M, 68% and 120× against WestRock, computed on the rounded $40M.)¹⁵⁵⁹⁴³ Setting $40M beside $5.9M compares a total against a share.

Two rates are in play and are not interchangeable: the 2026 approved rate of 0.009563 for projections, and the 0.009632 actually applied to 2025 bills for comparisons against real billed dollars.¹⁵⁵⁷⁷³ At the 2026 rate $4 billion produces $38.3M before depreciation, so $40M is close as a gross full-build figure.⁴³ UPDATED

The assessed-value baseline checks out, the acreage in testimony does not

A councilmember put the property's existing assessed value at "approximately $50 million" (packet p. 70).⁵¹ That is confirmed: $50,898,400 total assessed for 2026, owner of record WDC Industrial Utah Owner LP.¹⁰ UPDATED An $81,000,000 figure in the parcel abstract is a trust deed securing a loan, not a sale price.¹⁰

The Volition representative told Council the building "sat on approximately 25 acres."⁵¹ The Assessor record shows 69.478641 acres, corroborated at 69.50 by computing the area of the state's parcel polygon.¹⁰⁵³⁴³ UPDATED ~23–25 acres is the single-story footprint, not the parcel, leaving roughly 44 acres of open ground for the fuel-cell field, transformers, switchgear and cooling plant. It was the testimony that was wrong, not the plan.⁵⁵ But note what else 44 acres means: the parcel could hold nearly the full 450 MW cap. At the density of the one sourced comparable, a 72.9 MW Bloom array on about 6.4 acres in Hilliard, Ohio, 450 MW would need about 40 acres, nearly all of the open ground.¹⁰⁹⁴³ UPDATED (The 17 AUG edition attributed that density to Bloom and said the parcel could hold the full entitlement twice over; no Bloom or applicant document states the density.)

14. How Utah County property taxes are calculated

Every argument above about the $40M, and most of the neighborhood argument about property values, runs through one statutory mechanism. Getting it right changes what the Council should say about revenue.

The chain, step by step

TABLE 24

That answers a common objection, that assessors cannot possibly drive every street in the county. They do not, and the statute never asks them to. Values move through mass appraisal and Commission-ordered factoring applied to geographic areas; a parcel-level review comes at least once every five years, and the statute does not require anyone to walk the property.⁶⁷⁶⁸⁹³ UPDATED

The certified tax rate is the whole answer

Utah property tax is revenue-based, not rate-based.⁶⁹ The statute is blunt:

Revenue is fixed first. The rate is whatever number produces it. A taxing entity may not levy above its certified rate, except during a truth-in-taxation exemption period, unless it advertises, mails notice, and holds a public hearing.⁷⁰

When values rise across a taxing entity, its certified rate comes down, and Spanish Fork's own records show it. Four large commercial parcels, four owners, five consecutive years, all in Tax Area 150 carry an identical effective rate to six decimals in every year, because the rate belongs to the tax area and not the parcel; a fifth parcel in a different area returns a different rate, which confirms the reading:⁷³

TABLE 25

The rate fell 14.2% in four years. Nobody voted for a tax cut. That is Truth in Taxation operating as written.⁷³⁶⁹

So why did an announcement next door not raise your taxes

Because rising value alone does not raise your bill. What raises your bill is your value rising faster than the average inside your taxing entity, or the entity voting an increase after a noticed hearing.⁷⁰ The same parcels show it:⁷³

TABLE 26

Each gained between a third and nearly three fifths in taxable value, and none saw its bill rise anywhere near that much. The gap is the certified rate falling underneath them.⁷³

Three consequences to carry to the podium: a new landmark, temple, park, school or data center does not raise your taxes by existing, only by making your property appreciate faster than the average inside your taxing entity; an announcement is not evidence of value, since the annual update runs on current market data and factoring on assessment studies, so a change appears only once transactions demonstrate it;⁶⁷⁶⁸ and the common error is reverse attribution: people see the bill move, look at what changed nearby, and connect the two, when the bill moved because of a countywide ratio study and a divisor.

The finding that matters for this amendment

New growth is deliberately excluded from the certified rate denominator. The statute subtracts eligible new growth from the value the prior year's revenue is divided by, and "locally assessed new growth" expressly excludes any change in value "as a result of factoring in accordance with Section 59-2-704, reappraisal, or another adjustment."⁶⁹ It captures new construction, not market drift. Two consequences follow, and the room needs both:

One provision worth an ask. UPDATED Section 59-2-924 already keeps one class of high-value equipment out of the certified rate on both sides of the fraction, the revenue and the value: semiconductor manufacturing equipment.⁶⁹ That is not a tax exemption. The equipment is still assessed and still billed; it is left out of the formula that sets everyone's rate, which is the closest thing in the statute to an answer for fast-depreciating equipment.

15. Claims that fail

APPLICANT ONLY UPDATED Claims 1 to 4 come from the applicant's 04 AUG Council and 05 AUG Planning Commission presentations. The 04 AUG deck is posted with the city's meeting notice, but the posted file omits slide 08, the emissions comparison table, and the 05 AUG deck is not posted, so figures from slide 08 and the 05 AUG deck rest on copies the city has not published.⁹⁹ The Planning Commission's 05 AUG minutes record claims 1 and 3 (pp. 38 and 35).¹⁰⁵

TABLE 27

The carbon numbers these claims are measured against

Bloom's 04 FEB 2026 datasheet for the ES 6.5 publishes 679–833 lb CO2/MWh, and that printed figure reconciles to 0.1% with the datasheet's own heat rate through EPA's standard natural-gas carbon factor.³²⁵⁴³ Utah DAQ's Intent to Approve puts the facility's potential CO2e at 1,434,855 short tons per year, 1,301,679 metric tons (DAQE-IN163550001-26, 04 AUG 2026).¹⁴³ At 75% of the proposed nameplate the figure is ~796,000–977,000 metric tons/yr.⁴³ UPDATED The 75% is the applicant's own average utilization, given for a 250 MW maximum (04 AUG minutes, packet p. 69); applying it to 393.25 MW is this report's assumption.⁵¹ Methane in a solid-oxide fuel cell yields CO2 as its primary carbon product: suppressing combustion eliminates thermal NOx, not carbon.¹⁴³ Upstream methane leakage adds roughly 120,000–197,000 metric tons CO2e (100-year basis) at the proposed 393.25 MW and 75% load.⁴³ UPDATED (The 17 AUG edition gave 76,000–125,000, computed at 250 MW.)

The estimate is more likely low than high. In the one field record found, reported by NBC Bay Area's Investigative Unit, Delaware installations averaged 823 lb CO2/MWh over 24 months against Bloom's advertised 773 (25 JUN 2015), and a separate installation, AC Transit, held the advertised rate only for the first three of 22 months.⁵² UPDATED That is a decade old and predates this platform, and 823 sits inside the ES 6.5's published 679 to 833 band, so it does not show the datasheet understates.³ It shows field averages landing near the top of the band rather than the middle, which makes the midpoint used above the optimistic end. Even at 823 lb/MWh Bloom still beats the Utah grid, which EIA puts at 0.601 metric tons CO2/MWh for 2024, about 1,325 lb/MWh.²⁷ The criticism is the gap between marketing and measurement, not the absolute number.

1. CO2 equal to "three to four diesel trucks"

The answer depends on scope, and the claim states none. On total facility CO2 the permit's 1,301,679 metric t/yr against 3–4 trucks at 158 t each (an assumed 100,000 miles a year at 6.46 mpg, and EPA's 10.21 kg CO2 per gallon of diesel) fails by roughly 2,060–2,750×.¹²⁵⁴³ On criteria pollutants alone, the basis a Volition representative described to the Planning Commission (minutes p. 38),¹⁰⁵ the comparison can come out small, but that basis leaves out the permit's own CO2e row. UPDATED On 18 AUG the applicant conceded the point: "we understated it, and we've since corrected it on the record: about 1.43 million tons a year at full build."⁸⁹ (The 17 AUG edition used 11.08 kg per gallon, 171.5 t per truck and 1,900–2,500×, and converted criteria pollutants to CO2-equivalent with indirect warming values that no single authority publishes; that reading is withdrawn.)

One carbon claim holds up, with one qualification. The 04 AUG deck's "lowest-available carbon at this scale" is right against on-site engines and against the grid, and it is the framing Volition should have used.⁹⁹ UPDATED Against a modern combined cycle it is close: Lake Side's own filings work out to about 0.373 to 0.381 t/MWh on gross generation, so the fuel cells lead by 8 to 10% at their midpoint and not at all at end of life.⁷⁸²⁵⁴³

TABLE 28

All figures are in metric tons.⁴³ UPDATED The applicant's own slide calls the two about the same per megawatt, the conservative end of this calculation.¹³¹⁸⁹ Both things are true at once: this adds roughly 886,000 metric tons of CO2 to Utah County that does not exist today, and it is the lowest-carbon way to run that compute given what actually gets built.⁴³ Telling a council it equals four trucks throws away a real advantage.

2. The emissions comparison table

APPLICANT ONLY Slide P-08 puts a "natural gas reciprocating engine" at ~59,700 tons NOx/yr with no capacity, capacity factor, or basis stated. Utah's own permit for Novva's 235.6 MW of exactly that equipment and its 37 diesel backup generators (DAQE-AN160660003-24) totals 51.28 tons/yr, which scales to ~86 tons at this facility's 393.25 MW. The slide's figure matches EPA's AP-42 factor for an uncontrolled lean-burn gas engine running at full load all year at 393.25 MW, 57,900 to 61,100 tons; Novva's permitted engines carry selective catalytic reduction.¹³¹⁴³ The "Utah grid average ~2,600" row has no stated basis at all.

The defensible claim is ~10× fewer tons of NOx than West Jordan and ~45× fewer than the Millard County facility, about 17× and 100× per megawatt,³¹³² with 0.29 tons a year of hazardous air pollutants against Novva's 31.6, and no purchased offsets.¹³¹ UPDATED Inflating that to ~11,500× replaces a verifiable advantage with an indefensible one and hands critics the easiest attack in the record.⁴³

3. "Equal to 4–5 semi trucks per year"

APPLICANT ONLY The slide states no basis, and the two available fleet baselines differ by roughly 20×.⁴³ Slide 11 of the 04 AUG Council deck, in the copy posted with the city's meeting notice, puts its truck fleet at ≈2 metric tons NOx and ≈50 kg PM2.5/yr (420,000 truck-miles, 65,000 gallons of diesel; 4.76 g NOx/mi and 0.119 g PM2.5/mi, internally consistent).⁹⁹⁴³ Against the facility's 5.17 short tons NOx and 0.12 short tons PM2.5:¹

NOx: 4,690 kg ÷ 2,000 kg = 2.3×
PM2.5: 109 kg ÷ 50 kg = 2.2×⁴³

Two pollutants, computed independently, agree: the facility is roughly 2.2–2.3× the truck fleet the applicant's own deck describes, not four or five trucks out of it. That is a finding about the slide, not about the site. The deck labels its fleet as today's distribution use but estimates it from the building's 36 loading bays,⁹⁹ and it cannot be read as the fully tenanted warehouse this report compares against: the building is partly occupied today, about 30% by the applicant's own count, with present truck traffic at 750 to 1,500 truck trips a month on its 18 AUG slides or 2,250 to 3,750 trucks a month on its 01 SEP slide, so any baseline anchored to current operations answers a question nobody is voting on. APPLICANT ONLY⁵⁵⁸⁹⁷⁷ The comparison that matters is the proposed data center against the busiest warehouse use the current zoning allows, and that one is computed from ITE rates in §6 rather than taken from the applicant. On that basis a parcel hub in this building would run up to about 128,600 truck trip ends a month, and the data center, by the applicant's projection, 20 to 60.⁴³⁷⁷ UPDATED

4. "~13 W/m²" of heat

APPLICANT ONLY UPDATED The 13 matches the applicant's own figure of about 553 MW-thermal at full load spread across Spanish Fork's land area: 41.98 km² in the 2020 Census file gives 13.2 W/m².⁸⁹⁴³ Over the verified 69.5-acre parcel that same heat is about 1,970 W/m², and this report's 605–742 MW-thermal gives ~2,150–2,640 W/m² over the parcel and 13 to 18 across the city, depending on which year's city boundary is used.¹⁰⁴³ As a city-scale comparison the number is coherent. Printed beside "Max of +5°F on-site," it invites the wrong inference: over the parcel the heat runs about 165 to 205 times the city-wide figure.⁴³

5. The Novva proof point

UPDATED The Volition representative told the Council on 04 AUG that the closest comparable facility was in Utah and "used Bloom fuel cells for both primary and backup power" (packet pp. 70 to 71),⁵¹ and the next day cited to the Planning Commission a Utah facility where Bloom technology provides about 50 MW (minutes p. 38).¹⁰⁵ The 17 AUG edition recorded that answer as naming Novva, with Oracle as tenant, the largest single-site Bloom deployment in existence; no posted record names the facility. UNVERIFIED Utah DAQ's approval order for Novva refutes the premise: 72 gas engines, 37 diesel generators, zero fuel cells.³¹ The Oracle and Bloom project is Oracle's "Project Jupiter," up to 2.45 GW of Bloom fuel cells in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, announced in APR 2026.²⁴

But the correction runs in two directions. UPDATED A 72.9 MW Bloom array for an Amazon data center in Hilliard, Ohio, approved by the Ohio Power Siting Board in SEP 2025, is described by the City of Hilliard as the largest of its kind in North America; the largest operating fuel cell plant of any make is the 78.96 MW Shinincheon Bitdream plant in South Korea, most of it Doosan phosphoric-acid units, running since OCT 2021.¹⁰⁹¹¹⁰ At the proposed 393.25 MW, Spanish Fork would be 5.0× Shinincheon, and 5.7× at the 450 MW cap.⁴³ The same 04 AUG answer carried a caveat that was accurate: the comparable "was not a Volition facility," and shared only "the same general contracting and engineering team" (packet p. 71). The premise was not, and by 18 AUG the applicant's own slides described Novva as grid power plus gas engines and diesel generators, and listed no fuel cells. On 18 AUG it also acknowledged that no data center this size has run entirely on fuel cells without a grid connection.⁵¹⁸⁹⁷⁶

16. Property values

Four studies bear directly on this and none says what either camp claims. The strongest evidence finds no negative effect and often a positive one, while the study conducted nearest a proponent's interest has the weakest numbers of the four.

The best study says proximity is associated with higher prices, not lower

George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis modeled 2023 BrightMLS home sales across Northern Virginia using a hedonic regression that explains 86.7% of price variance.⁶² Its data center result:

TABLE 29

The sign is what matters here: homes farther from a data center are worth less, not more. The authors state it plainly: "The analysis fails to demonstrate statistical evidence that proximity to a data center negatively impacts housing values."⁶² And they anticipated the obvious objection. Because data centers often sit on industrial land, controlling for industrial proximity might absorb the penalty, so they re-ran the model with the industrial variable removed. The data center coefficient stayed negative at −$9,745, R² down only slightly, to 0.864. The effect survives the objection.⁶²

Two more studies point the same direction

Priest, Not In My Back Yard! The Effects of Data Centers on Housing Prices matches Virginia air-permit issuances to ZIP-level house price indices in a difference-in-differences design and reports effects "economically small and slightly positive," with confidence intervals that rule out substantial declines.⁶³ The full text is behind a CAPTCHA that blocked three attempts, so only the abstract is verified. Treat it as supporting, not decisive.

NBER Working Paper 35194 (Alvarez, Argente, Chow and Van Patten, MAY 2026, revised SEP 2026) uses a shift-share instrumental-variable design across US counties. UPDATED The revision reports that "house prices and electricity prices also have positive point estimates, although they are less precisely estimated."¹⁸ (The 17 AUG edition quoted coefficients from the May version that the revised paper no longer reports.) Two limits matter. It is an NBER working paper and explicitly not peer-reviewed, and it is county-level, so it describes what happens to a county's housing market, not what happens to the house across the street.

The study that complicates the picture is the industry's own

Integra Realty Resources examined homes within 1.5 miles of four Indiana data centers from 2021 to 2026, and presented the analysis in support of a zoning variance a developer later won.⁶⁴ UPDATED Values rose near all four sites, but near three of the four they rose less than the county: at Microsoft LaPorte the 1.5-mile increase of +42% lagged the county's +48%, and the favorable picture rests largely on Amazon New Carlisle at +49% against +32%. The method is also thin: estimated Zillow values for 20 homes near the four sites. This is weak evidence in either direction, and it is worth citing mainly because it is the proponent-side study and it does not clearly support the proponent-side claim.⁶⁴

What none of this settles

Every study above measures conventional data centers. None measures one with a 393 MW on-site power plant. Heat, gas throughput and continuous generation noise appear in none of these samples.

The argument specific to this site

The counterfactual here is not farmland. It is an operating one-million-square-foot distribution warehouse, and that matters for these coefficients.⁵⁵ GMU's industrial-distance penalty is $47,523, three times the data center coefficient and opposite in sign.⁶² The industrial penalty should already be reflected in homes near this site, because the site is already industrial.

One finding worth carrying to the podium

The same NBER paper also finds positive but imprecise effects on electricity prices, which it describes as effects "that emerge later."¹⁸ UPDATED A competing study reaches the opposite conclusion: Watten, Bistline and Blanford estimate that data centers caused average US retail rates to fall modestly between 2015 and 2024, though they caution that "future supply constraints could reverse the effect."⁶⁵ Two of the three authors are at the Electric Power Research Institute, which the Council should weigh.

The literature is unsettled on ratepayer impact, and this is the one dimension where the Spanish Fork proposal is unusually well positioned. A facility that takes no grid power for its generation or computing load, with only its office and maintenance portions connected, cannot raise Spanish Fork ratepayers' bills through the mechanism either study is measuring.⁵¹ UPDATED That is a real advantage and the applicant has not made enough of it.

17. Claims that hold up

• NOx 5.17 tpy is the draft permit's potential-to-emit estimate, and it is exactly Bloom's datasheet rate at full output. 0.003 lb/MWh × 393.25 MW × 8,760 h = 5.17 tpy, matching DAQE-IN163550001-26 to 0.05%.¹³⁴³ The same is true of CO (22.39) and VOC (17.22). The draft permit assumes 100% capacity factor, which is conservative, but it carries no margin above the vendor's published specification.¹ VOC at about three times NOx follows the datasheet's own rates; it is not an error.³
• The 04 AUG slide's "<65 dBA," "noise at 10 ft per unit," is Bloom's datasheet figure, "<65 dBA @ 10 ft (3 m)," measurement distance included, and Volition disclosed the limitation itself, to the Council, in print. The footnote on that slide reads: "PER-UNIT SPEC FROM DATASHEET; ARRAY-WIDE ACOUSTIC MODELING AND AN ENFORCEABLE NOT-TO-EXCEED LIMIT ARE BEING COMMISSIONED BEFORE FINAL APPROVAL."⁹⁹³ APPLICANT ONLY UPDATED The 18 AUG text requires an acoustic analysis with the site plan application and a verification test within 90 days of full operation;⁵¹ both 21 SEP drafts keep the analysis, add tonal and low-frequency sound, and test after each phase.¹⁰¹¹⁰²
• Water arithmetic, 500,000 gal fill ≈ 2.5 households and 250,000 gal/yr ≈ 1.2, at the 155 gal/person/day the applicant's 04 AUG deck attributes to the Central Utah Water Conservancy District APPLICANT ONLY⁹⁹ and the Census's 3.59 persons per household for Spanish Fork.⁸³⁴³ UPDATED (The 17 AUG edition computed 2.6 and 1.3 at the Utah County figure of 3.39 persons per household the deck cited; the applicant's slide said two households and one.)
• Heat on site, as the applicant now states it. UPDATED The 17 AUG edition tested the earlier figures from the 05 AUG Planning Commission meeting, where the minutes record 5 to 6 degrees next to the property and under one degree at about a quarter mile.¹⁰⁵ On 18 AUG the applicant gave up to about nine degrees on site under certain conditions and under one degree before about half a mile.⁷⁶ At the proposed scale this report computes 4.3 to 5.3 °F on site at 5 m/s and 10.8 to 13.3 °F in a 2 m/s drainage flow, which brackets the applicant's nine degrees: the revised disclosure sits inside a defensible range, where the earlier figure matches only a steady breeze.⁴³
• UPDATED "Less than half of what Lake Side Power Plant produces" UNVERIFIED held at the 250 MW rack load. At the proposed 393.25 MW it is about half at the begin-of-life heat figure, 49 to 51%, and fails at end of life, 60 to 62%, once both are on the same heating-value basis, of the 1,319 to 1,376 MW-thermal Lake Side rejects.^1784351
• ~$40M/yr at full build, arithmetically close. $4B × 0.9563% = $38.25M before depreciation. UPDATED⁷⁷¹⁵⁴³
• UPDATED The applicant acknowledged on 04 AUG that the facility could not accurately be described as zero-emission (packet p. 67), and its 18 AUG slides say "we do not claim zero carbon." Volition volunteered both when it would have been easy not to.⁵¹⁸⁹ (The 17 AUG edition quoted two phrases that appear in no posted record.)
• Minor-source permitting is legally correct. Utah County is Marginal ozone nonattainment, so NNSR is 100 tpy, and the claimed figures clear both PSD and NNSR.¹³ No R307-421 offset applies. UPDATED R307-421 reaches this facility by location, as a new source of NOx in Utah County, and R307-421-3 then requires offsets only from 25 tons a year of NOx or SO2; the facility would be permitted for 5.17 and 0.01.¹ The 17 AUG edition called the offset question open; it is not.²⁹
• Zero operational water for Ultra-Low Emission equipment is sourced, not asserted, to the Bloom Energy Server 6.5 datasheet and, through the applicant's justification statement, the Mainspring Linear Generator datasheet APPLICANT ONLY, and the 18 AUG text's O.9 requires the annual water estimate to be submitted for review by the Public Works Director, which makes the number a condition of the permit rather than a slide.³⁵¹ UPDATED Both 21 SEP drafts go further, with a metered cap of 600,000 gallons in the first year, fill included, and 300,000 a year after.¹⁰¹¹⁰²
• The applicant's claim that the amendment is "more protective than the current code, which has no standard for this use at all" (packet p. 130) is fair, and §11 shows why: Eagle Mountain approved its data centers under an industrial chapter with no data-center standards. UPDATED⁵¹⁸²

The strongest fact in the proposal came from city staff, not the applicant

The city manager, answering the Mayor on 04 AUG, supplied a number the applicant did not:

UPDATED 1 to 3 million gal/yr against ~5,000,000 gal/yr is a 40 to 80% reduction in site water use, on the applicant's own whole-site figure APPLICANT ONLY, and the cooling and humidification make-up alone, 250,000 gal/yr, is 95% below today's use.⁴³⁵¹⁷⁷ The baseline comes from city staff rather than the applicant. The applicant's 18 AUG slides cited it as "about 15 million gallons a year," three times the minutes' figure, and its 01 SEP deck gives about 5 million, metered.⁸⁹⁷⁷ Two related items deserve the same credit:

• Contaminated coolant is not going to the sewer. The Volition representative, on the record: the water would be "removed into tankers, treated, and transported to an authorized waste facility rather than discharged into the local wastewater system" (p. 67). Every draft, 18 AUG and both 21 SEP, permits sewer discharge under the city's pretreatment program, which is looser than what the applicant committed to, the same pattern that runs through this whole review.^51101102
• A councilmember built the right kind of condition. If the facility ever needed hundreds of millions of gallons it would require water infrastructure the site does not have, so prohibiting infrastructure expansion makes the water cap physically self-enforcing rather than trust-dependent (p. 70).⁵¹ That is the best piece of reasoning by any official in the record and a template for every other condition in this ordinance.

One caveat: the ~5M gal/yr figure is a staff statement in minutes, not a metered record. UPDATED The applicant's 01 SEP presentation calls it metered, but no billing record is public.⁷⁷ Ask for the parcel's municipal water billing history, a routine GRAMA request that either confirms the best argument in the proposal or undercuts it.

18. The company

As of 20 FEB 2025, volition.eco described a business that funds and builds microgrids, "fuel cells, energy servers, solar panels, battery storage," for commercial properties and residential communities; in AUG 2024 it offered solar, HVAC, air filtration and batteries. No mention of data centers anywhere. The Internet Archive holds no later capture of the site's pages, so the data center identity is at most 19 months old. UPDATED¹¹¹

TABLE 30

UNVERIFIED The prior-identity and employee rows, and the website row's 12 AUG reading, are not linked to a public source in this revision.

UPDATED The applicant told the Planning Commission the project was "fully capitalized,"¹⁰⁵ but no SEC filing shows the capital behind a ~$4B claim.⁵¹ The gas lateral alone is about $14M by the applicant's own account. APPLICANT ONLY⁷⁷⁸⁴ (The 17 AUG edition gave a capital ratio of about 1:1,430 on a $2.8M figure that does not hold.)

Two claims need qualifying. "500+ MW of team experience" and the Novva overlap are on the record: the 05 AUG Planning Commission minutes have the Volition representative saying the development team "has collectively built more than 500 megawatts of data centers, including the Novva facility."¹⁰⁵ But the only company material this review found gives the figure as "over 500MW in new development in the works", a forward pipeline, not a track record, and no named Novva executive matches the team: unverified, not disproven. UNVERIFIED The pipeline claims thin out: the representative named potential sites in San Jose and Austin,¹⁰⁵ and nothing was found for either; "Stockman Flats" is a real place: Spanish Fork created three Public Infrastructure Districts there at owner petition on 21 APR 2026, but the record carries no MW figure, no data center reference and no Volition mention.¹¹⁵

The counter-case. Bloom Energy is the named supplier in the city record: Volition would buy the fuel cells under a long-term Bloom service agreement, and says it has secured inventory.⁵¹¹⁰⁵ Volition's website has offered, since at least JUL 2023, solar, batteries and other equipment installed on customers' properties at no capital cost to them, and by FEB 2025 fully funded microgrids that sell the energy at fixed rates for 20 to 30 years. That business is adjacent to the hardest part; the data center half is what is new.¹¹¹ Adaptive reuse reduces execution risk, the build is phased,⁷⁷ and the company volunteered enforceability: its own July text proposed conditional use review with a public hearing for every project, which staff's 05 AUG redline replaced with administrative review.⁹⁰ UPDATED

The problem is not bad faith. It is capitalization and track record, against a permanent entitlement.

19. The tenant chain

Spanish Fork City → Volition Industries, no operating facility, no capital raise in any SEC filing, no SPV named → Nscale (alleged), $14.6B valuation, $140.6M revenue and a $1.02B net loss in H1 2026, $103B contracted backlog → an undisclosed end customer ^{1161171058451}

UPDATED Nscale's public materials do not mention Spanish Fork or Volition: not its site list, newsroom, trade press or 18 SEP 2026 IPO filing, whose subsidiary list names Utah only in "Nscale GPU Holdings Utah, LLC" and "Nscale GPU Utah, LLC," with no site.¹¹⁶ Pre-signing NDAs are standard, so this is not evidence of fabrication. It means the city has no independent corroboration of the tenant on a project whose entire economic case depends on one.

UPDATED Nscale's two largest contracts are now with Microsoft and Anthropic, up to about $44 billion each, and OpenAI withdrew from its Stargate UK and Stargate Norway partnerships with Nscale in APR 2026.¹¹⁶ The 05 AUG Planning Commission minutes record the Volition representative saying neither Anthropic nor OpenAI was currently planning for the facility, although discussions had occurred.¹⁰⁵ (The 17 AUG edition recorded Microsoft and OpenAI, which no posted record carries.) That does not identify this site's sub-tenant. The closest structural precedent is public: Ionic Digital Inc. → Nscale → Microsoft at Ward County, Texas, a 126-month triple-net lease for 234 MW, where Ionic Digital's SEC filing states "We currently have only one customer" and warns explicitly about Nscale nonperformance.¹¹⁸¹¹⁹ Same chain shape, with the difference that Ionic is public and discloses the risk.

The commitment to bar "U.S. government surveillance work or private surveillance companies" is almost certainly sincere and almost certainly unenforceable.⁵¹ The city has no privity with the sub-tenant's sub-tenant, GPU workload content is not externally verifiable, and no public record of a municipality enforcing such a restriction was found. Better to ask for an audit right than accept a promise.

20. Sound and heat

The nearest residential lot line is about 1,300 ft from the property boundary, to the west; the nearest house itself is roughly 1,500 to 1,800 ft away.⁵³⁴³ UPDATED (The 17 AUG edition gave 1,298 ft without stating that it runs property line to property line.) The nearest homes are about a third of a mile away, not a mile. And because the amendment applies citywide, the receptor that matters is the nearest home to whichever I-1 parcel an applicant selects.

Heat is not perceptible at a mile, is not modeled here at the nearest homes, and has no numeric limit in any draft; sound level at the nearest homes depends on where the equipment sits on the parcel; sound character is the real exposure, which the 18 AUG text did not address and both 21 SEP drafts now require the acoustic analysis to model.^43101102 UPDATED

Heat

605 to 742 MW-thermal at the proposed 393.25 MW is a real quantity that disperses fast: on-site temperature rise falls from 4.3 to 5.3 °F at 5 m/s to 1.6 to 2.0 °F at 30 mph, and at a mile it is negligible.¹⁴³ UPDATED The 17 AUG edition printed 3.0 °F and 1.1 °F, which came from a smaller 417 MW-thermal illustration rather than the proposed scale. The applicant's own figures moved on 18 AUG to up to about nine degrees on site under certain conditions and under one degree before about half a mile, replacing the 5 to 6 degrees next to the property and under one degree at about a quarter mile it gave the Planning Commission on 05 AUG.⁷⁶¹⁰⁵ Nobody will feel this at a mile. This report does not compute the rise at the nearest houses, about a third of a mile away, and the applicant's own figure, under one degree only beyond about half a mile, does not rule out a rise of a degree or more there. The applicant also gives total heat at full load as about 553 MW-thermal APPLICANT ONLY; at the proposed 393.25 MW that would take about 71% efficiency, above Bloom's published 65%, so it appears to describe a smaller load, and the range here uses Bloom's published efficiencies.⁸⁹³⁴³ In the 18 AUG text the gap is regulatory, not physical: its §15.3.24.090 contains no thermal standard at all, no modeling requirement and no measurement.⁵¹⁴³ The applicant's 01 SEP presentation promises a third-party, site-specific heat study before operation.⁷⁷ UPDATED Both 21 SEP drafts now require a thermal-impact analysis before site plan approval, with conditions that "shall include ongoing monitoring at the facility and locations off-site," but neither sets a numeric limit.¹⁰¹¹⁰²

Sound level

UPDATED At a receptor one mile away, 1,210 modules give 15 to 40 dBA against a 30 to 40 dBA rural night ambient. The nearest houses are much closer, 1,500 to 1,800 ft from the property line, and there the same model gives roughly 25 to 51 dBA if the fuel cells sit on the side of the parcel nearest the homes, and about 19 to 45 dBA if they sit on the far side.⁴³ Where the equipment will sit on the parcel is not known. That ambient floor is not quiet in practice. SELF-ATTESTED A rail crossing sits directly across US-6 from the nearest residential receptors and its horn sounds through the day and night, which is the loudest recurring sound most of these homes already live with. The 25 dB spread is what the public record supports, not either endpoint, and it covers everything from inaudible to clearly present. Treat every figure as a lower bound: inverting a "<65 dBA @ 10 ft" spec as a point source is wrong for a cabinet 29 feet long, and finite-line and ISO 3744 treatments give 84.5 and 90.6 dBA sound power against the 82.7 used.³⁴³ The 18 AUG text's O.6 set 55 dBA at the residential zone boundary at all hours; both 21 SEP drafts drop it and apply Chapter 9.32, whose nighttime limit at residential boundaries the 18 AUG text called equivalent.^51101102

The cooling plant, not the fuel cells, is the likely dominant source.⁴³ UPDATED Most data centers are loudest when they occasionally run generators; at Vantage in Loudoun County the constant noise comes from gas turbines.⁸⁵ The 18 AUG text bars diesel prime power and both 21 SEP drafts bar backup diesel as well, which removes the loudest source,^51101102 but cooling runs around the clock. Residents of Sturtevant, Wisconsin filed a class action in 2026 over the Mount Pleasant data center, calling its noise "not only excessive, but consistent and pervasive" and blaming HVAC and diesel generators.¹²⁰

In the 18 AUG text, the binding number is stricter than the criticism suggests. Its O.6 sets 65 dBA at the property line and 55 dBA at any residential zone boundary, at all hours, against the existing I-1 limits of 80 dBA by day and 65 dBA at night.⁵¹ UPDATED By day that is 15 dB tighter, about a two-thirds cut in perceived loudness; at night it matches today's limit, so the city's nighttime standard applies around the clock. The number is good, and the enforcement is better than this report first stated. O.6 binds "at any hour", expressly covers cooling equipment, adopts the Chapter 9.32 measurement procedures, and adds that "compliance with this subsection does not excuse compliance with Chapter 9.32."⁵¹ The limit is continuing and independently enforceable, not a design target. UPDATED The 18 AUG text also added what the 17 AUG edition found missing: a sound verification test within 90 days of full commercial operation, and it lets the Zoning Administrator require follow-up testing on a substantiated complaint.⁵¹ UPDATED Both 21 SEP drafts remove the 65 and 55 dBA limits and apply Chapter 9.32's zone limits, with the most restrictive limit at a zone boundary. They require the acoustic analysis to model tonal and low-frequency sound and predict levels at the nearest existing residences, with testing after each phase to show those levels are not exceeded; see the 21 SEP drafts.¹⁰¹¹⁰²

Field observations at an operating comparable, 14 AUG 2026 UNCALIBRATED SELF-ATTESTED

On 14 AUG 2026, between roughly 16:00 and 18:00, the author visited the Novva Data Center in West Jordan, interviewed six people and took uncalibrated phone-based sound readings.⁶⁰

Method: perimeter roads driven twice, clockwise, at a constant 18 MPH on cruise control, only the passenger window open, microphone pointed at the property. Constant speed holds the car's own noise steady, which is what makes the relative comparisons meaningful even though the absolute level is not. Readings approximate property-line distance, though the road-to-fence setback was not recorded.⁶⁰

What was found. Readings ran approximately 65 dB, but wind, truck traffic, construction and neighboring commercial activity were audibly louder than any data center equipment at every point. All six interviewees reported no noise issues, all six volunteered that neighboring activity is louder than the site, and all six said they had never known the diesel generators to run and knew of no outage.⁶⁰ The site's permit allows generator testing only between 07:00 and 19:00.³¹ UPDATED

The six were two residents living directly across the street, two employees of the neighboring construction supplier, a security guard at that business, and Novva's own guard. Five of the six have no interest in defending the site, and the two most probative are the residents, the closest available analogue to the receptor this ordinance protects.⁶⁰

Novva achieves this with no acoustic barrier at all: wrought iron fence around the entire property, which provides no meaningful attenuation.⁶⁰ No one can claim a barrier is doing the work, and this report's own finding that barriers could buy back 5 to 15 dB describes headroom that has not been needed.⁴³

On sound character, the field evidence cuts against this report

Asked specifically about tonality, the answer was that nothing was annoying about the quality of the sound. It simply sounded like fans running.⁶⁰ Broadband fan noise is the benign case. A narrow-band whine or hum is what generates complaints, and none was reported.

That matters because tonality is one of the strongest arguments in this report, and a field observation at an operating facility does not support it. Three limits keep it from settling the question: no spectral measurement was taken, a moving vehicle with an open window masks subtle tonality, and a daytime visit says nothing about nighttime audibility at distance. But it is evidence, it points against the concern, and it belongs in the record even though it weakens a point made elsewhere here.

What would decide whether it is noticed

A decibel limit cannot capture the failure mode that generates complaints. A narrow-band tone is picked out of a quiet background far below the level at which broadband noise registers. Measured studies frame the propagation question. Beside motorways and railways, where the source sits near the ground, downward refraction raised levels 3 to 4 dB(A) at 150 to 250 m against neutral conditions, and upward refraction cut them by as much as 5 to 10 dB(A).¹²¹ Two years of measurements 1.1 to 2.0 km from a Swedish wind farm found the median level varied by 6 dBA with refraction conditions, by 14 dBA over snow, and by 14 to 17 dB in the 125 Hz octave band; about 400 and 600 m from the turbines, no clear effect showed.¹²² Detection rises at night: a year of measurements at homes 0.9 to 3.5 km from three South Australian wind farms found the turbines' amplitude modulation two to five times as often at night as by day, in more than half the night within 1.3 km and about a quarter of it at 3.5 km, least often upwind.¹²³ A receptor at one mile sits at 1,609 m; the nearest homes are about a third of that distance. UPDATED (The 17 AUG edition said refractive focusing tops out around +6 dB. That misread a 1985 study of one wind turbine, which reported focusing of 25 dB or more over terrain.¹²⁴)

The wind is mostly protective, and the geometry matters more than this report first stated. Five years of KSPK ASOS observations, the Iowa Environmental Mesonet archive for station SPK from 24 APR 2021, put the canyon drainage flow moving toward about 310° at night.⁴³ The nearest homes, in Spanish Fork, bear roughly 255 to 279° from the site, about 30 to 55° off that axis; a second group, newer homes in Mapleton with lot lines about 486 m to the north-northeast, sits 65 to 75° off it. Neither group is squarely downwind after dark.⁵³⁴³ Homes to the northwest sit closer to the drainage axis than the nearest homes do, which is where nighttime exposure would concentrate if it occurs at all.

At 30 mph, wind through trees, fences and eaves puts local ambient at about 50 to 60 dBA. UNVERIFIED That is at least 10 dB above the top of the facility's modeled 15 to 40 dBA at one mile, and around the top of its range at the nearest homes.⁴³ UPDATED At a mile that is complete masking. The worst case is not the windy nights but the opposite: wind-farm acoustics has known for decades that complaints cluster where the ground is calm while the source region is windy. The condition most likely to make this facility audible is light drainage flow around 2 to 5 m/s under a shallow stable layer, fast enough to carry sound and benefit from refraction, too slow to mask it. UPDATED The 17 AUG edition called that condition narrow; the recent measurements cited above show night-time refraction can move levels at 1 to 2 km by well over 6 dB.

21. What would have to be true

TABLE 31

Note the pattern: every adverse outcome is about the ordinance, not the applicant.

Two of them already happened in this building

Fingerhut built this structure, and the record is contemporaneous press rather than inference.¹⁷ The 04 AUG minutes record the Volition representative identifying the site as "the approximately one-million-square-foot former Fingerhut building."⁵¹

TABLE 32

Deseret News, 20 OCT 2003 carries the 520/800 employment figures and the 163 acres; 30 OCT 2001 carries the $70M, "never fully opened," and the 100-of-250 layoffs.¹⁶¹⁷ UPDATED The $220,000 road figure, the 60 trucks a day and the $10.4 million wage projection appear in both articles; the rest appears in only one.

One conflict, now settled: the 2003 article places the former plant on 163 acres against the assessor's 69.478.¹⁷ Three independent records agree on the smaller figure: the Assessor at 69.478641, the broker's flyer at 69.9, and this review's own computation of the state parcel polygon at 69.50.¹⁰⁵⁵⁴³ The 163-acre figure describes something other than this parcel, most likely a larger original assemblage, and should not be used for buffer or expansion arguments.

Where the national record lands

The closest structural analogue is xAI "Colossus," Memphis, per NAACP v. X.AI Corp., No. 3:26-cv-00074 (N.D. Miss., filed 14 APR 2026): "Neither xAI nor CTC Property LLC applied for or received any air permits prior to constructing and beginning to operate these sixteen gas turbines" (¶197), reaching "thirty-five turbines for a total generating capacity of 421.4 MW" by 31 MAR 2025 (¶198).⁹²

Why it transfers: a self-generating AI data center, the configuration Spanish Fork is being asked to authorize by right, where the failure was process rather than technology. Why it does not: xAI ran combustion turbines. Its unpermitted Southaven, Mississippi turbines have a potential to emit of about 1,700 tons of NOx a year from 495 MW, about 0.78 lb/MWh, roughly 260 times the rate in Volition's draft permit. These are allegations in a filed complaint, not adjudicated findings.⁹²⁴³ The transferable point is narrower. UPDATED At Colossus 1 in Memphis the turbines ran without air permits until the operator obtained a permit for a different configuration, with an 87 ton-a-year NOx limit. The NAACP's Clean Air Act citizen suit targets the second plant, 27 turbines and 495 MW at Southaven.⁹² Where a federal statute supplies a hook, residents can sue. In Spanish Fork, air is DAQ's and siting is the city's. Under the 18 AUG text, whose only scheduled post-construction check for fuel cells like these is a noise test, the city has few triggers to pull; v.2 of the 21 SEP drafts adds yearly independent testing of noise, water and air.¹⁰²

The Utah record cuts the other way. KSL measured ~70 dB about one block from Aligned's West Jordan campus (10 JUL 2026), with residents describing loud blowers that Aligned attributes to backup generators it says sit mostly idle.²⁶ UPDATED This review found no enforcement action, notice of violation or citation against Aligned, and no documented complaint of any kind about Novva. Residents complain; nobody has been cited. Expect Volition to make that point, and it is fair.

The "broken siting promises" narrative does not survive verification

A public commenter alleged a documented national pattern of data centers breaking siting commitments. A dedicated search across Northern Virginia, whose Loudoun County holds the world's largest concentration of data centers,⁸⁵ found no agency finding and no adjudicated violation against any named operator on any of those grounds. Every noise case traced there ends one of three ways: the county measured and found no exceedance, the conduct was legally exempt, or the facility held a valid permit.

At Vantage II in Sterling, the closest Virginia analogue, with eight gas turbines running 24/7, a county supervisor citing staff readings said the average "has never exceeded 55 dBA" at the adjacent residential property.⁸⁵ UPDATED At AWS / Great Oak, a 1989 exemption for air-conditioning equipment meant, in a homeowners' coalition's words, that "the County has no legal ability to control noise at any level from data center cooling equipment," though a resident's meter read 67.4 dB.¹²⁵ And "Chesterton" is not a Virginia case: a $1.3 billion proposal in Chesterton, Indiana was withdrawn on 10 JUN 2024, before any approval.¹²⁶ (The 17 AUG edition cited Spanish Fork's own Title 15 for all three, which supports none of them.)

The one fully adjudicated case points somewhere else entirely. The Prince William Digital Gateway rezonings, about 1,760 acres and 22.2 million sq ft, were declared void ab initio because the County Board violated Virginia's public-notice statute: a legal ad was drafted, never confirmed by the newspaper's deadline, and never ran.¹⁹

The project is dead: finality came from QTS withdrawing its Supreme Court filing on 02 JUL 2026, not from the opinion.¹²⁷ A 22.2-million-square-foot approval was undone by a newspaper ad that did not run.¹⁹

Two conclusions follow, and they pull against each other.

1. The adversarial case against operators is weaker than the public conversation suggests. Where noise is measured by an authority with jurisdiction, exceedances mostly are not found.
2. The failures that get remedied are failures of local process. Digital Gateway died over notice.¹⁹ Great Oak went 18 months without relief, most of it under a county noise ordinance that exempted cooling equipment from its nighttime limits.¹²⁵ Vantage's turbines entered without additional review because Loudoun's zoning definition swept "associated utility infrastructure" inside the term "data center",⁸⁵ structurally similar to what §15.3.24 does in combining data center and generation into one administratively approved use.

The lesson is not "watch the applicant." It is that the ordinance is the only thing that will still be here in ten years.

22. Five arguments not to make

An adversarial review should disarm bad arguments as well as find good ones. Each of these circulates in data center opposition, and each would be corrected in the room.

1. "Data centers lower nearby property values." The verifiable literature does not support it, and the strongest study finds the opposite (§16).⁶²⁶³¹⁸ The legitimate version of this concern is a question, not a claim: no study has measured a data center paired with a 393 MW on-site power plant.¹ Ask which coefficient this facility fits. Do not assert the answer.

2. "$120 billion in off-balance-sheet AI financing, per the Bank for International Settlements." Misattributed. The figure is from the Financial Times, 24 DEC 2025; the BIS Quarterly Review feature on AI financing returns zero matches for it.⁸⁶ BIS economists did call these structures "shadow borrowing", under the usual disclaimer that the views are the authors' own.⁸⁶ Moody's $662 billion, the five largest hyperscalers' data center lease commitments not yet on their balance sheets, is the better number.¹²⁸ The concern is real; the citation is not, and attributing it to BIS invites a correction that discredits the point.

3. "The project will be abandoned and stick the city with stranded infrastructure." This review found no documented case of a US municipality left with stranded infrastructure by a data center bankruptcy. Kearney, Nebraska's city manager stated Compute North's payments "are paid in full,"¹²⁹ and Cyxtera's facilities were bought and kept running.¹³⁰

4. "Ratepayers will subsidize this." The critique applies to grid-connected large loads, whose grid upgrades can fall to ratepayers.⁸⁷ The islanded design answers it rather than illustrating it: the 18 AUG text requires permanent electrical isolation, and both 21 SEP drafts state that approval does not obligate the city or its utility customers to subsidize project-specific energy infrastructure.^51101102

5. "The fuel cells and the compute load will expose neighbors to electromagnetic fields." The distances defeat this before the technology matters. UPDATED An NIEHS booklet, reproducing Bonneville Power Administration values calculated 1 m above ground, puts the mean field from a 230 kV line at 57.5 mG beneath the line, 19.5 mG at the approximate edge of the right-of-way, 7.1 mG at 100 ft and 1.8 mG at 200 ft, and says that at 300 ft, at average demand, many lines produce fields similar to typical household background.³⁶ The nearest residential lot line is about 1,300 ft away, and ICNIRP's public reference level for 60 Hz magnetic fields is 200 µT, or 2,000 mG.⁵³³⁷ For scale, the same federal booklet puts the median hair dryer at 300 mG at six inches.³⁶

And this facility has no transmission line at all. The 18 AUG text's O.5 requires permanent electrical isolation with no interconnection, parallel operation or export, and both 21 SEP drafts define the generation facility as operating in electrical isolation, so the grid-tie infrastructure that produces the fields in every one of these studies is absent by design. Only ordinary office and maintenance portions may connect to the city system.^51101102 UPDATED

The area's existing 60 Hz environment is set by transmission the facility has nothing to do with. Four 345 kV circuits, two 138 kV circuits and nine 115 kV lines end at the Spanish Fork substation under a mile north of the site, and more 115 kV segments cross the area.⁴⁰ UPDATED A residence across the street from a heavily loaded transmission line sits in a measurably higher power-frequency field than a home 1,500 ft or more from a facility with no line at all.³⁶⁴³ State that carefully if at all. "You are already exposed to more" reads as dismissive and invites the reply "so you concede there is exposure." The affirmative version needs no comparison: there is no transmission line, and a few hundred feet from a line the field is at household levels. A knowledgeable objector would raise one technical point: magnetic field scales with current, electric field with voltage, so a line's kV rating does not by itself establish its magnetic field, and a heavily loaded 115 kV circuit can exceed a lightly loaded 345 kV one.³⁶

The professional literature on data centers and EMF runs in the opposite direction from the concern. A 2025 article in CIGRE's journal ELECTRA is about transmission lines interfering with data centers, not data centers emitting toward neighbors, and the design reference it cites, TIA-942-C Annex F, recommends keeping the data hall itself below 37.5 mG to protect the equipment.³⁸ That is an immunity specification for servers, not an emission limit for residents.

One argument the record hands the Council

Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law recommends financial assurance, such as bonds, for data center decommissioning, and names two local ordinances: Susquehanna County and Smithfield Township, Pennsylvania.⁸⁷ UPDATED In the 18 AUG text the decommissioning provision is the weakest in the ordinance; both 21 SEP drafts now require financial assurance.^51101102 Volition has filed no Form D under its current or former name, against a $4 billion build.⁸⁴⁸⁹ The applicant told the Council on 18 AUG that decommissioning could cost more than $30 million.⁷⁶

Both drafts now require financial assurance, but v.2 caps it at the owner's own estimate and ties it to hazardous materials on site at cessation. Sizing it to actual removal cost is where the Council can be handed a solution instead of a problem, and it survives every optimistic assumption about Volition, because it matters most if Volition cannot or does not pay.

23. Where this report is incomplete

Three national cases were run down and each is narrower than its reputation. Cheyenne is real but is not about Meta's operations: the Board of Public Utilities issued a Notice of Significant Noncompliance on 02 JUL 2026 to Goat Systems LLC, whose address is 1 Meta Way, over Cupriavidus gilardii contamination tied to construction-phase fill-and-flush discharge, with a $10,000 administrative fine. Goat Systems paid the fine under protest and appealed on 13 JUL, disputing which entity held the permit. No ruling was found as of 21 SEP.¹³¹ UPDATED Chandler and Mesa are negatives: this review found no citation in either, and both cities responded with prospective ordinances.¹³² The Dalles was a public-records fight, not a water-use violation: the city sued to overturn an order to disclose Google's water data, then settled before any ruling.¹³³ No water violation was found against Google there. Do not cite The Dalles as an operator violation.

Unverified and not to be stated to the Council: the public commenter's broken-promise claims beyond the Northern Virginia set, which was retrieved and largely refuted; and a second public commenter's BIS / $120B claim, traced and misattributed: the figure is the Financial Times'.⁸⁶

Known limits on the numbers here:

• The noise model's source term is the weakest link. UPDATED KSL's ~70 dB "about a block away" at Aligned is a different facility with different equipment, so it cannot test the Bloom source term.²⁶ The finite-line and ISO 3744 treatments are the reason to read every noise figure here as a lower bound, and the property-line study as the only authority.⁴³
• The per-truck comparison depends on an assumed 100,000 mi/truck-year that appears in no document. On the 04 AUG deck's own basis, about 3,500 trucks a month at a 10-mile round trip, the comparison is far worse for the claim.⁹⁹ Without a stated basis, the claim cannot be evaluated. The fleet-level figure (2.2 to 2.3×) tests the slide only against its own numbers and is not a site comparison. APPLICANT ONLY UPDATED⁴³
• No traffic count for this building exists in the public record, by the city, the applicant or this review. Every truck figure in this report is calculated here from published ITE rates against the verified 1,054,000 sq ft, not measured and not taken from the applicant.^41425543 Present truck volume is unmeasured, and the applicant's own figures for it disagree, so the comparison throughout is the proposed data center against the fully tenanted warehouse, not against current conditions.⁸⁹⁷⁷ Two limits on the calculation: ITE rates are national averages, and the highest rest on few sites, the parcel hub and fulfillment rates on one site each in ITE's 2016 study; and the tenant is unknown.¹⁰³ UPDATED Because no count exists for this building or a comparable Utah site, this revision states each warehouse type at its highest published ITE rate and takes the busiest use the zoning allows by right, a parcel hub, as the maximum, rather than the fulfillment use the building was built for.¹¹
• The depreciation curve applies R884-24P-33, a personal property schedule. A building retrofit is real property and depreciates differently.¹⁴ The pro forma request stands; the curve is illustrative.
• The CO2 method's agreement with Bloom's own datasheet is circular, same stoichiometry, same efficiency range.²⁵ The independent check is agreement with Novva's regulator-issued Utah permit: within 1% at the engine's published 45.5 to 45.9% efficiency, once both figures are in metric tons.³¹⁴³ UPDATED (The 17 AUG edition claimed 1% agreement, comparing a metric figure with a short-ton one.)

Emissions at the proposed nameplate and the cap, in a high operating case. At the CARB DG certification standard of 0.07 lb/MWh, the rate a unit must meet to be certified and 23× Bloom's published 0.003 lb/MWh, at an 85% capacity factor: UPDATED³³⁰

250 MW × 8,760 h × 0.85 × 0.07 lb/MWh ÷ 2,000 = 65 tons/yr
393.25 MW × 8,760 h × 0.85 × 0.07 lb/MWh ÷ 2,000 = 102 tons/yr
450 MW × 8,760 h × 0.85 × 0.07 lb/MWh ÷ 2,000 = 117 tons/yr

for scale, at Bloom's published 0.003 lb/MWh, 450 MW gives 5.0 tons/yr⁴³

Both the proposed nameplate and the ordinance cap cross the 100 tpy NNSR major-source threshold for this Marginal ozone area.¹³ ⚠ But be careful with this one: it requires a unit emitting at the CARB certification standard, 23× Bloom's published rate, so it is an argument about what the ordinance would permit a future applicant to build, not a prediction about this equipment.³ UPDATED The 18 AUG text also admits Controlled-Emission equipment up to 0.30 lb/MWh under Enhanced Review; at that rate 100 tpy is crossed at about 90 MW at 85% load, or about 76 MW at full-time potential to emit, and 450 MW reaches about 503 tpy.⁴³ UPDATED A potential-to-emit cap in the code is what forecloses this, and the republished 18 AUG text adds one: O.7 caps facility-wide NOx potential to emit below the major-source threshold by federally enforceable limits in the DAQ order. Both 21 SEP drafts keep that ceiling by requiring a minor-source permit.^51101102 (The 17 AUG edition, written against the earlier text, said the Justification Statement wrongly claimed such a cap existed.)

Two things the ordinance is sometimes accused of, which it does not do: it does not permit unlimited merchant power plants (generation must be "scaled to serve" on-site load, and the definition bars offsite sale, in the 18 AUG text's O.2 and in both 21 SEP drafts), and it does not lack a receptor-located noise limit (the 18 AUG text's O.6 sets 55 dBA at any residential zone boundary; the 21 SEP drafts drop that figure and rely on Chapter 9.32, which applies the most restrictive limit at the boundary between land-use categories).^51101102

UPDATED One fiscal item the 17 AUG edition raised does not hold. Spanish Fork levies the municipal energy sales and use tax at 6%, but Utah Code 10-1-305(2)(b)(iv) requires every such ordinance to exempt the sale or use of taxable energy whose primary use is producing taxable energy. Gas used to generate the facility's own electricity falls inside that exemption, so it is not a revenue source for the city.⁸⁸ The 17 AUG edition called it plausibly comparable to the city's property tax share, on a stale 250 MW, 10 Bcf basis; at 393.25 MW and 75% load the gas is about 14.5 to 17.8 Bcf a year, and the exemption applies regardless.⁴³

24. About the author

Revision log

What changed on 22 SEP 2026

Changes are marked UPDATED in place, and smaller corrections are explained there; the main ones are listed here. Overtaken means true on 17 AUG but since moved by the record; Corrected means wrong. The 17 AUG edition and its appendix stay unchanged at /title-15-amendment-analysis/2026-08-17/. This revision went through adversarial checks on 14 and 15 SEP 2026.

Overtaken by the record since 17 AUG

• The Council tabled the ordinance on 18 AUG, voted 4 to 1 on 01 SEP to put it off two more weeks, when it also put off the development agreement, and on 21 SEP approved it subject to further changes to its text, directing staff to prepare an overlay zone to replace it (§1, §7, §10).
• Two new drafts were posted on 16 SEP for 21 SEP and are set against the 18 AUG text in the 21 SEP drafts section. On 18 SEP every maximum-case figure was restated for their 450 MW cap and one site, removing the two-site column from Table 01 and the two-site bars and rows from Figures 01, 02, 09 and 12 and Tables 03 and 06. Discussion of the ordinance's wording still describes the 18 AUG text.
• The 18 AUG packet was republished that day, 138 pages instead of 131. Its Exhibit A adds a 0.30 lb/MWh Controlled-Emission standard with a 0.07 Ultra-Low tier, a 90-day sound verification test and a facility-wide NOx potential-to-emit cap, fixes two dangling cross-references, and excludes compression-ignition engines for prime power in place of all reciprocating engines. Standards are cited as O.1 to O.13, and page citations follow the 138-page packet (throughout).
• The City Attorney confirmed administrative site plan review with no additional public hearings; even a conditional use permit would be decided administratively by the Planning Commission (§1, §3, §4, §7 to §9, §11, §21).
• The applicant's 18 AUG and 01 SEP presentations add unexecuted commitments, marked as the applicant's, and propose a community reinvestment (CRA) property-tax rebate (throughout; §12, §13).
• The applicant's web pages, the air permit (comment period closed 05 SEP, no Approval Order as of 21 SEP), the applicant's on-site heat estimate (now up to about nine degrees) and the NBER paper (revised SEP 2026) have all moved (§10, §16 to §18, §20).
• The statement of interest records the author's support at the 18 AUG and 01 SEP meetings (§24).

Corrected

• Carbon: gas engines emit 0.438 metric t/MWh, not 0.483 short, so Bloom is about 22% cleaner at its midpoint, not 29%; the "three or four trucks" claim fails on total CO2 by 2,060 to 2,750×, an understatement the applicant conceded on 18 AUG; the criteria-pollutant CO2-equivalent reading is withdrawn; upstream methane and the coal bar, now EIA's 1.048, are restated (§15, §23).
• Air: the Intent to Approve's tonnages are potential-emission estimates, not limits; its only compliance test for the rates is a manufacturer's guarantee; it names no manufacturer and lists 0.29 t/yr of hazardous air pollutants, not none; R307-421 applies by location, but offsets start at 25 tpy; the Novva method check now compares metric tons with metric tons and agrees within 1% at the engine's published efficiency (the 17 AUG edition's 1% compared a metric figure with a short-ton one), and the Novva comparison is about 700×, not 1,100× (§6, §10, §15, §17, §23).
• Building and traffic: completed in 1995 and never fully opened, not built in 1998; the warehouse alternative is now the busiest by-right use, a parcel hub, up to about 4,200 truck trip ends a day and 128,600 a month, every figure in trip ends; Fingerhut planned for about 60 trucks a day; the dock-door check is withdrawn (§1, §5, §6, §12, §15, §23).
• Water: 250,000 gal/yr is the applicant's annual cooling and humidification make-up, after a one-time fill of about 500,000 gal; its whole-site figure is 1 to 3 million, a 40 to 80% reduction; household size is 3.59, not 3.39 (§1, §4, §6, §12, §17).
• Money: the $40M breakdown uses the 2026 approved rate, city about $3.8M (+65%, not +68%); Table 22 is eleven established taxpayers, not the eleven largest; the offered contribution is about ten times the city's share of the largest 2025 bill found, on the building Volition would occupy, not 15× WestRock's; $40M is a full-build projection, not a floor; the "swap out and retrofit" prepayment is withdrawn; Truth in Taxation makes the facility's revenue additive only in its first year; the semiconductor provision is not a tax exemption; the municipal energy tax is not a revenue source (§1, §13, §14, §17, §23).
• Scale and heat: Lake Side is 1,246.5 MW nameplate and rejects 1,319 to 1,376 MW-thermal on EIA data; 75% of nameplate is this report's assumption, not the applicant's; on-site warming is 4.3 to 5.3 °F at 5 m/s at the proposed scale, not 3.0; the applicant's 13 W/m² is its 553 MW over the city's area; the wind park's capacity factor is about 27%, not 33.52%; nine 115 kV lines end at the substation, not roughly a dozen; UMPA market purchases are about 41%, not 52%; a 450 MW facility would use 8 to 10% of Utah's natural gas (§4, §5, §15, §17, §20, §22).
• Sound and fields: noise is now modeled at the nearest homes, about 25 to 51 dBA with the equipment nearest them; O.6 is 15 dB tighter than today by day only, about a two-thirds cut in loudness, not a halving around the clock; retesting on a complaint is discretionary; the EMF figures are Bonneville Power Administration's, not WHO's, and 57.5 mG is beneath a 230 kV line, not beside it; refractive focusing is not capped at +6 dB, a misreading of a 1985 study (§1, §8, §20, §22).
• Procedure and law: the Planning Commission's 5 to 1 motion sought a power threshold and a two-facility quota, not discretion or a heat study; the 04 AUG councilmembers raised Council review without asking for it; the canon against surplusage favors incorporation, not the reverse; S.B. 282's duty fell on the large load customer; Chapter 26 may not reach a site on a municipal utility; the $2.8M capital figure is withdrawn for want of a source, and no Form D exists; the Memphis citizen suit targets a different plant (§7, §9, §11, §12, §18, §19, §21, §22).
• Sourcing and labels: one covenant is fully in the text and four partly, not five of six; the $500,000 is offered, not committed; the data center's trucks are the applicant's 10 to 30 a month, not none; the 05 AUG Planning Commission deck is not posted; quotations and out-of-state facts in no linked record are now sourced, withdrawn or marked UNVERIFIED.
• Smaller fixes: the nearest residential lot line is stated lot line to lot line, and the nearest houses separately; §22 lists five arguments, not four; dates follow DD MMM YYYY; the biography, the author's own account, now matches his current record (§24).
• Citations: about 30 footnotes that did not fully support their sentences were replaced or removed; sources 76 to 135 are new; several links moved or became more specific.

Not changed, and why. The by-right finding, the NOx inventory figures, the property-value studies other than the NBER paper, and the tax-chain statutes were re-derived and hold. The 14 AUG field visit is the author's own account.

Sources

Where every number comes from

135 sources, each linked back to the sentence that uses it: 134 external sources and one entry for this report's own calculations. Sources 1 to 75 are numbered as they first appeared in the 17 AUG edition; sources 76 to 135 were added in the 21 and 22 SEP revisions, several replacing citations that did not support the sentence they were attached to. Every web link was re-checked on 21 SEP 2026. The SSRN housing-price paper returns 403 behind a CAPTCHA, so only its abstract is verified, and the report uses it as supporting evidence only; the LoopNet listing refuses automated checks, and the broker's flyer now backs its figures. Acta Acustica and the Better Business Bureau also refuse automated checks; both open in a browser. Two entries have no web address: the applicant's printed handout and the author's field observations. The Planning Commission transcript is the author's, but the recording it was made from is public.

1. ↩ Utah DAQ, Intent to Approve DAQE-IN163550001-26, New Spanish Fork Power Generation Facility, issued to Volition Industries, Inc. on 04 AUG 2026 and signed by the Division's New Source Review Section Manager daqpermitting.utah.gov
2. ↩ Utah DAQ, public notice DAQE-NN163550001-26, dated 06 AUG 2026 and authorized for publication in The Daily Herald that day; comments due 05 SEP 2026 daqpermitting.utah.gov
3. ↩ Bloom Energy Server datasheet, ES 6.5, document 1016932-20260204, FEB 2026 bloomenergy.com
4. ↩ Volition Industries, project page for Spanish Fork, the applicant's live public page and one of the two materials distributed at its 15 AUG 2026 community meeting, the other being the printed handout (source 61), whose QR code resolves here. Captured 15 AUG 2026 and last modified 31 AUG 2026; on 21 SEP 2026 it still read "Intent to Approve" and carried the wording quoted in §13 volition.eco
5. ↩ Utah Municipal Power Agency, FY2022 Integrated Resource Plan, 30 NOV 2022 (Spanish Fork customer profile and load tables, printed pp. xiii to xiv, PDF pp. 81 to 82; resource table p. 30) wapa.gov
6. ↩ Utah Geological Survey, Table 5.6, Hydroelectric Power Plants in Utah, reproducing EIA Form EIA-860, data through 2024 geology.utah.gov
7. ↩ Utah Geological Survey, Table 5.7, Solar Power Plants in Utah, reproducing EIA Form EIA-860, data through 2025 geology.utah.gov
8. ↩ Utah Geological Survey, Table 5.8, Biomass, Wind, and Other Power Plants in Utah, reproducing EIA Form EIA-860, data through 2024 geology.utah.gov
9. ↩ Utah DAQ Air Emissions Inventory, live ArcGIS FeatureServer query filtered to Utah County, retrieved 15 AUG 2026 (256 facility-year records, 61 facilities by DAQ ID and 71 company names, reporting years 2017 to 2025) services1.arcgis.com
10. ↩ Utah County Assessor, parcel 67:228:0003 property record utahcounty.gov
11. ↩ Spanish Fork City, Title 15 Land Use, archived codified text, 130 pp., latest amendment Ord. No. 14-19, 09 JUL 2019. It predates the amendment and does not contain it: "data center," "Onsite Power Generation," "megawatt" and "55 dBA" each appear zero times. It is cited only for provisions already codified, principally the I-1 Light Industrial zone, §15.3.16.120, which lists "Trucking and Warehousing" as a permitted use, and the Conditional Use Permit section, §15.3.08.060, whose subsection (C) lists five mandatory findings and whose (D)(2) reads "The Commission shall hold at least one (1) public hearing on the application." The amendment text is in the 18 AUG Council packet (source 51). cms.spanishfork.org
12. ↩ Utah S.B. 132 (2025), enrolled, creating the statutory category closed private generation system le.utah.gov
13. ↩ EPA Green Book, Utah nonattainment and maintenance status by county (Utah County: Southern Wasatch Front, 2015 8-hour ozone, Marginal; PM10 redesignated to maintenance 27 MAR 2020) www3.epa.gov
14. ↩ Utah State Tax Commission, 2026 Recommended Personal Property Valuation Schedules, 01 NOV 2025, contained in Utah Admin. Code R884-24P-33 files.tax.utah.gov
15. ↩ Utah County Treasurer, Utah County Approved Tax Rates for Tax Year 2026, by tax area (Tax Area 150, Spanish Fork City, combined 0.009563) utahcounty.gov
16. ↩ Deseret News, “Fingerhut to sell Sp. Fork facility,” 30 OCT 2001 deseret.com
17. ↩ Deseret News, “Gigantic Spanish Fork center taking big steps,” 20 OCT 2003 deseret.com
18. ↩ Fernando E. Alvarez, David Argente, Joyce Chow and Diana Van Patten, Data Centers and Local Economies in the Age of AI: A Shift-Share Approach, NBER Working Paper w35194, MAY 2026, revised SEP 2026 (the 56-page file dated 15 SEP 2026). Updated 22 SEP 2026: the report now relies on the revised version nber.org
19. ↩ Court of Appeals of Virginia, published opinion in the Prince William Digital Gateway rezoning appeals, Record No. 1584-25-4 and three others, 31 MAR 2026 vacourts.gov
20. ↩ Utah Public Notice 1101855, Spanish Fork City Council agenda, 18 AUG 2026, item 7.3 utah.gov
21. ↩ Spanish Fork City, Power & Light, Net Metering page, which carries the city's "SharedSolar Information" video spanishfork.gov
22. ↩ Skyline Electric, Spanish Fork Solar Farm project record (4.7 MW, ~12,000 panels, 27 acres, built on a closed landfill) skyline.us
23. ↩ U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Strawberry Valley Project history, Eric A. Stene, 1995 usbr.gov
24. ↩ DataCenterDynamics, “Oracle to deploy up to 2.45GW of Bloom fuel cells at New Mexico data center,” 28 APR 2026 (Project Jupiter, Doña Ana County) datacenterdynamics.com
25. ↩ EPA, GHG Emission Factors Hub, 2025 edition, Table 1 (natural gas 53.06 kg CO2/MMBtu, HHV) epa.gov
26. ↩ KSL.com, "Some data center companies are working to be 'good neighbors,' but is it enough?" 10 JUL 2026: a KSL meter read 70 decibels about a block from Aligned's West Jordan campus ksl.com
27. ↩ U.S. Energy Information Administration, State Electricity Emissions dataset (Utah 2024, Total Electric Power Industry, All Sources: 21,120,098 metric tons CO2; 21,168 metric tons NOx) with net generation of 35,133,906 MWh from EIA's Utah Electricity Profile 2024, Table 1 eia.gov (emissions) eia.gov (Utah profile)
28. ↩ Utah Admin. Code R307-401-7, Public Notice (30-day comment period; hearing request within 15 days of legal notice) law.cornell.edu
29. ↩ Utah Admin. Code R307-421, Permits: PM10 Offset Requirements in Salt Lake County and Utah County. R307-421-2 applies it to new or modified sources of sulfur dioxide or oxides of nitrogen located in Salt Lake or Utah County, and to sources elsewhere whose impact on them exceeds a modeled threshold, "greater than 1.0 microgram/cubic meter for a one-year averaging period or 3.0 micrograms/cubic meter for a 24-hour averaging period." Updated 22 SEP 2026: R307-421-3 then sets the offset tiers, 1:1 for a source emitting 25 to 50 tons a year of NOx or SO2 and 1.2:1 at 50 tons or more, so a source under 25 tons needs none. The 17 AUG entry said no 50 tons-per-year figure appears in the rule; that was wrong. R307-421-5 makes the rule effective on EPA's PM10 redesignation, which for Utah County came on 27 MAR 2020 (EPA Green Book), so it governs now law.cornell.edu (R307-421-3) law.cornell.edu (R307-421-2)
30. ↩ California Air Resources Board, Distributed Generation Certification Program (certification standard 0.07 lb NOx/MWh, 17 CCR 94203(b); Bloom Executive Order DG-058). Updated 22 SEP 2026: linked to the regulation text as well as the program page law.cornell.edu (17 CCR 94203) ww2.arb.ca.gov
31. ↩ Utah DAQ, Approval Order DAQE-AN160660003-24, Novva West Jordan, 19 DEC 2024 (72 gas reciprocating engines at 3,271.8 kW each, 235.6 MW; 37 diesel generators; 51.28 tpy NOx, 997,261 tpy CO2e, 31.6 tpy HAPs) daqpermitting.utah.gov
32. ↩ Utah DAQ, Approval Order DAQE-AN162810001-26, Joule Capital Partners, Fillmore, Millard County, 22 JAN 2026 (69 gas engines at 3,392 hp, ~175 MW, and 69 diesel emergency engines; 230.12 tpy NOx, 865,632 tpy CO2e, New Major Source) daqpermitting.utah.gov
33. ↩ PacifiCorp, thermal generation fleet, which lists Lake Side 1 and 2, natural gas, in Utah pacificorp.com
34. ↩ UAMPS, generation projects (Nebo Power Station, Payson, 140 MW combined cycle) uamps.com
35. ↩ Mountain Country Foods, Utah operations: three plants in Spanish Fork, at 195 E 1600 N, 2102 N Main Street and 1804 N 300 W mcfoods.com
36. ↩ National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIH, EMF: Electric and Magnetic Fields Associated with the Use of Electric Power, Questions & Answers, JUN 2002. Transmission-line chart, p. 37, sourced to Bonneville Power Administration, 1994: typical fields 1 m above ground, the magnetic values being means calculated for 321 lines at 1990 annual mean loads niehs.nih.gov
37. ↩ ICNIRP, Guidelines for Limiting Exposure to Time-Varying Electric and Magnetic Fields (1 Hz to 100 kHz), Health Physics 99(6):818-836, 2010. General-public reference level for 50/60 Hz magnetic fields: 200 microtesla (Table 4, p. 827) icnirp.org
38. ↩ Salim Bassam and Soham Ghosh, “EMF Consideration for Data Centers Near Transmission Lines: Corridor Width Recommendations,” CIGRE ELECTRA No. 341, AUG 2025, citing TIA-942-C Annex F and IEC 61000-4-8 electra.cigre.org
39. ↩ IEEE Std 519-2022, Standard for Harmonic Control in Electric Power Systems (5% voltage THD at points of common coupling from 1 to 69 kV); EN/IEC 61000-6-4, emission standard for industrial environments. The link is IEEE's catalog page; the standard itself is paywalled standards.ieee.org
40. ↩ U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD), Electric Power Transmission Lines feature service, queried 17 AUG 2026 for the envelope around Spanish Fork (23 circuits returned; owners, kV ratings and terminal substations as attributed in the layer). Parcel centroid and bearing computed from the Utah LIR parcel polygon for 67:228:0003. Updated 22 SEP 2026: the 17 AUG envelope was not recorded. Re-run on the box linked here, about 3.2 miles east to west and 4.1 miles north to south around the Spanish Fork substation, the layer returns 22 circuits: four at 345 kV, two at 138 kV and sixteen at 115 kV, the same named 345 kV and 138 kV circuits. Of the 22, 15 name the Spanish Fork substation as a terminal: all four at 345 kV, both at 138 kV and nine at 115 kV services1.arcgis.com
41. ↩ New Jersey Department of Transportation, ITE trip generation rates and equations as used by the NJDOT Highway Access Permit program (rates current as of 21 APR 2023). Land Use 150 Warehousing weekday daily 1.58×(X/1000)+45.54, weekend daily (X/1000)×0.15; Land Use 154 High-Cube Transload and Short-Term Storage weekday daily (X/1000)×1.40, weekend daily (X/1000)×0.94; Land Use 155 High-Cube Fulfillment Center, Land Use 156 High-Cube Parcel Hub and Land Use 157 High-Cube Cold Storage, weekend daily rates equal to weekday (8.18, 7.75 and 2.12 per 1,000 sq ft) nj.gov
42. ↩ Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, Warehouse Trip Generation technical memorandum, JUN 2024, comparing counts at 15 warehouse sites (14 analyzed) with the ITE Trip Generation Manual, 11th Edition: Table 2 (ITE LU 150 truck rate 0.54-0.64 per 1,000 sq ft), Table 4 (ITE LU 154 truck rate 0.22), Table 8 (trucks 20% of daily trips at sites of at least 1,000,000 sq ft), Table 15, p. 15 (ITE LU 155 truck rates of 0.23 non-sort and 0.19 sort per 1,000 sq ft, against 0.14 observed at two Pennsylvania fulfillment centers), and ITE's LU 154 high-cube definition, at least 200,000 sq ft with a ceiling of 24 ft or more (p. 7) pa.gov
43. ↩ Derived for this report. Every derived figure is computed in the calculations appendix alongside this report, with inputs cited and each step shown. Emission figures use Utah DAQ's own method, the manufacturer's published rate times full nameplate times 8,760 hours, as DAQE-IN163550001-26 builds its potential-emission estimates, with rates from the Bloom ES 6.5 datasheet: bloomenergy.com
44. ↩ Utah Code Title 54, Chapter 26, Large-Scale Electric Service Requirements, enacted by S.B. 132 (Laws of Utah 2025, ch. 318; the 17 AUG edition misnamed the bill S.B. 318). Section 54-26-504(2)(a) exempts closed private generation systems from Public Service Commission oversight or regulation as a public utility le.utah.gov
45. ↩ Utah Code 59-12-104, sales and use tax exemptions (subsection (80), fuel cells; subsection (84), qualifying data center equipment) le.utah.gov
46. ↩ Utah Code 63G-2-305, protected records, as amended by H.B. 507 (2026), which added subsection (2)(b), including nondisclosure agreements at (2)(b)(ii) le.utah.gov
47. ↩ Utah Code 73-5-8.3, Reporting by large data centers (enacted by H.B. 76, 2026): notice to state water regulators before a land use authority approves a new large data center, and a water-use report from the operator before construction le.utah.gov
48. ↩ Utah H.B. 507 (2026), enrolled, including 11-41-202(2)(e) le.utah.gov
49. ↩ Utah S.B. 282 (2026), introduced, proposed 54-26-603 annual electricity and water reporting le.utah.gov
50. ↩ Utah H.B. 585 (2026), introduced, proposed data-center generation and fuel disclosure le.utah.gov
51. ↩ Spanish Fork City Council agenda packet, 18 AUG 2026, published to the city's Diligent Community agenda portal. Updated 22 SEP 2026: the city republished the packet on the day of the meeting, 138 pp. (Last-Modified 18 AUG 2026, 1:48 p.m. MDT), with a second round of edits to Exhibit A; this report was first written against a 131-page posting that is no longer available, and page citations now refer to the 138-page version. Cover page: "CITY COUNCIL Agenda Tuesday, August 18, 2026 at 6:00 PM." Contains the draft 04 AUG 2026 Council minutes (quotes cited at pp. 60 to 71), the ordinance at pp. 119 to 120, the redlined Exhibit A at pp. 121 to 126, and the staff memo at p. 127. The Council adopted those minutes on consent that evening, with the quoted passages unchanged (source 76, p. 6). spanishfork.community.diligentoneplatform.com
52. ↩ Scott Pham, Vicky Nguyen and Liz Wagner, "Bloom Energy Quietly Revises Emissions Estimates," NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit, 25 JUN 2015. Reports a 24-month Delaware average of 823 lb CO2/MWh against Bloom's then-advertised 773, and the datasheet revision to a 735-849 range that followed. Separately, on an AC Transit installation the cells held the advertised rate for only the first three of 22 months and averaged 825.31 lb CO2/MWh; that is a different system, so the two figures should not be combined. nbcbayarea.com
53. ↩ Utah AGRC Parcels_Utah_LIR statewide parcel layer, live ArcGIS FeatureServer. Used for boundary-to-receptor distances and bearings. Paged in full for PARCEL_CITY='SPANISH FORK' (20,000 records; the link shows the first 2,000) and deduplicated by parcel, re-run 21 SEP 2026: 17,120 distinct parcels, $8,048,680,000 total market value, of which 370 commercial parcels carry $1,337,302,400. services1.arcgis.com
54. ↩ Intermountain Health, About Spanish Fork Hospital: "The 33-bed facility," opened APR 2021, just off I-15 north of U.S. Highway 6 intermountainhealthcare.org
55. ↩ Leasing listings for Canyon Logistics Center, 4000 E US Highway 6, Spanish Fork (former Fingerhut building): the broker's page and flyer (Newmark Mountain West), and LoopNet. 1,053,555 sq ft; up to 451,792 sq ft available (46,944 sq ft of it office), divisible to 196,249; 36 dock-high doors; grade-level doors, three in the flyer's specification table (two 9'x10', one 12'x14') and one in its bullets; 36 ft clear; 45'x45' columns; 69.9 acres; 4,000 A, 480 V, 3-phase, with about 6 to 8 MW more available. ESFR sprinklers per the LoopNet listing, which blocks automated checks. Updated 22 SEP 2026: the 17 AUG entry gave one grade door, 45'x46' columns and a 1998 build year from the LoopNet listing; the flyer's specification table gives three grade doors and 45'x45', and the building was completed in 1995 (source 17) mwcre.com (broker listing and flyer) loopnet.com
56. ↩ Utah County Assessor, property records by serial number, source of the owner-of-record names and 2025 market values in the taxpayer table (for example serial 27:015:0090, Hydro Extrusion USA LLC, $21,984,800; its owner history also lists Sapa Extrusions, 2016 to 2018, and Cressona Aluminum, 2011 to 2015) utahcounty.gov
57. ↩ Utah County, Real Property Tax Detail, the tax billed and paid on each parcel each year. The report uses tax year 2025, the most recent complete year; 2026 records show $0.00 because bills have not been issued. Example: serial 26:051:0129, IHC Health Services, General Taxes $217,857.17, paid in full 02 DEC 2025 utahcounty.gov
58. ↩ Utah Code 59-2-1101, property tax exemptions (effective 01 JUL 2026): (3)(a)(iv) exempts property a nonprofit entity owns and uses exclusively for religious, charitable or educational purposes, and (1)(a)(i) sets the charitable standard for nonprofit hospitals le.utah.gov
59. ↩ Spanish Fork City, audited basic financial statements, fiscal year ended 30 JUN 2025: property tax revenue $5,885,340 (statement of activities, p. 15), against $5,741,117 the year before (management's discussion and analysis, p. 8). Updated 22 SEP 2026: the city moved the document when it changed web platforms; linked at its new address govstack.com (spanishfork.gov)
60. ↩ Field observations by the author, 14 AUG 2026, Novva Data Center, West Jordan, with drive-by observation of the Utah Data Center (Bluffdale) and Meta Eagle Mountain. Six interviews. Uncalibrated phone sound readings taken as a controlled mobile transect: perimeter roads driven twice, clockwise, at a constant 18 mph on cruise control, passenger window only, microphone aimed at the property, so readings are at about property-line distance. Conditions cool, about 70 °F, windy, recent rain, about 16:00 to 18:00. Marked UNCALIBRATED throughout. original observation, no web source
61. ↩ Volition Industries, two-sided printed handout distributed at the 15 AUG 2026 community meeting, photographed by the author. Both sides transcribed verbatim and audited; the author holds the photographs and transcription (sha256 prefixes: side A 9bf3c49e41b19142, side B ef3d34a6fba14bda). Its QR code resolves to the project page (source 4). original observation, no web source
62. ↩ Keith Waters and Terry Clower, Data Centers and 2023 Home Sales in Northern Virginia, Center for Regional Analysis, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, AUG 2025. Table 1, hedonic regression on 2023 BrightMLS sales: R² 0.8672; distance-to-data-center coefficient −$15,886 (t = 31.106, p < 0.001), distance-to-industrial +$47,523; reduced model without the industrial control retains a negative data center coefficient of −$9,745 (R² 0.864) cra.gmu.edu
63. ↩ Alex Priest, Not In My Back Yard! The Effects of Data Centers on Housing Prices, SSRN 6314620, written 27 FEB 2026, posted 16 MAR 2026, 36 pp. Difference-in-differences on Virginia air-permit issuances matched to ZIP-level house price indices; effects "economically small and slightly positive," with confidence intervals that "rule out substantial price declines." Abstract verified; full text CAPTCHA-blocked on three attempts. papers.ssrn.com web.archive.org (abstract, 13 SEP 2026)
64. ↩ Integra Realty Resources analysis as reported by WVPE, "Study: property values near data centers grew less than county," 14 APR 2026, citing Mirror Indy: estimated Zillow values, 2021 to 2026, for 20 homes within a mile and a half of four Indiana data centers (the article does not say whether per site or in total), presented in support of a developer's zoning variance. Values rose less than countywide near three of the four sites, including Microsoft's in LaPorte, +42% against +48%; the exception was Amazon's near New Carlisle, +49% against +32% wvpe.org
65. ↩ Asa Watten, John Bistline and Geoffrey Blanford, Have Data Centers Raised Your Electric Bill? Causal Evidence from the United States, arXiv 2606.19777, 18 JUN 2026. Instrumental-variable estimate that data centers caused average US retail electricity rates to fall modestly from 2015 to 2024, with the caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect. Two of the three authors are at the Electric Power Research Institute. arxiv.org
66. ↩ Utah Code 59-2-103, Rate of assessment of property, Residential property (effective 01 JUL 2025). Subsection (2): all tangible taxable property assessed and taxed at a uniform and equal rate on the basis of fair market value as valued on 01 JAN. Subsection (3): residential property allowed a residential exemption equal to a 45% reduction in value. Subsection (5): no more than one acre of land per residential unit may qualify le.utah.gov
67. ↩ Utah Code 59-2-303.1, Mandatory cyclical appraisals (effective 07 MAY 2025). Subsection (2)(a): the assessor shall annually update property values based on a systematic review of current market data, using a mass appraisal system (2)(b) jointly certified with the Commission (2)(c). Subsection (1)(a)(ii): the system must be able to update all parcels each year and must annually update all residential parcels. Subsection (3)(a): the assessor shall complete a detailed review of property characteristics for each property at least once every five years le.utah.gov
68. ↩ Utah Code 59-2-704, Assessment studies, Sharing of data, Factoring assessment rates (effective 01 JAN 2026). Subsection (1)(a): the Commission annually conducts and publishes studies of the relationship between assessed value and market value in each county. Subsection (2)(a): the Commission orders each county to adjust or factor assessment rates using the most current studies. Subsection (2)(b): factoring "may include an entire county, geographical areas within a county, and separate classes of properties." le.utah.gov
69. ↩ Utah Code 59-2-924, Definitions, Report of valuation of property to county auditor and commission, Transmittal by auditor to governing bodies, Calculation of certified tax rate (effective 06 MAY 2026). Subsection (1)(i): "Certified tax rate" means a tax rate that will provide the same ad valorem property tax revenue for a taxing entity as was budgeted by that taxing entity for the prior year. Subsection (4)(a): the rate is prior-year budgeted revenue divided by the adjusted aggregate taxable value computed under (4)(b), which subtracts eligible new growth at (4)(b)(iv). Subsection (1)(t)(ii)(A): "locally assessed new growth" does not include a change in value as a result of factoring in accordance with Section 59-2-704, reappraisal, or another adjustment. Subsections (1)(b)(ii)(D) and (1)(d)(ii)(A): semiconductor manufacturing equipment is excluded from both ad valorem property tax revenue and aggregate taxable value. Subsections (2) and (3): valuations go to the auditor before 01 JUN, and the certified rate goes to each taxing entity by 13 JUN le.utah.gov
70. ↩ Utah Code 59-2-919, Notice and public hearing requirements for certain tax increases, Exceptions, Audit (effective 06 MAY 2026). Subsection (2): a taxing entity may not levy a tax rate that exceeds its certified tax rate unless it meets the requirements of the section, which include a public statement of intent, mailed notice, a published advertisement (online and as a class A public notice) and a public hearing le.utah.gov
71. ↩ Utah Code 59-2-919.1, Notice of property valuation and tax changes (effective 01 JUL 2026). Subsection (1): on or before 22 JUL each year the county auditor shall notify each owner of real estate on the assessment roll. Subsection (2)(a): mailed 10 or more days before the board of equalization meets and before the taxing entity holds its hearing on a proposed increase. Subsection (2)(c): the notice must state the assessor's value, the taxable value, appeal instructions, and the appeal deadline le.utah.gov
72. ↩ Utah Code 59-2-1004, Appeal to county board of equalization (subsection (3)(a): application on or before the later of 15 SEP or 45 days after the Section 59-2-919.1 notice) le.utah.gov
73. ↩ Utah County Land Records, parcel valuation and tax records, tax years 2021 to 2025, retrieved 16 AUG 2026 and re-checked 21 SEP 2026, for five owners: four in Tax Area 150 (Spanish Fork City), Hydro Extrusion USA 27:015:0090, Nature's Sunshine Products 24:046:0067, Costco Wholesale 47:308:0001 and Longview Fibre / WestRock 26:049:0009, and one control in Tax Area 151 (Spanish Fork W/SPRV Drain District), Young Living Essential Oils 56:032:0001. Effective rate is Net Taxes divided by Total Valuation for each parcel-year. The four Tax Area 150 parcels return the same rate to six decimals every year, 0.011230 in 2021 and 0.009632 in 2025, and the control returns a different rate every year, so the rate belongs to the tax area, not the parcel. Example record: utahcounty.gov
74. ↩ Marjorie Cortez, "Utah high schools could soon cost $145M each in 'era of intense construction inflation'," Deseret News, 01 DEC 2019. Reports Utah high school construction and rebuild costs including Farmington High at $77.5M (2018), Mountain Ridge High at $82M plus $5M furnishings (2019), and planned or rebuild costs of $145M for Cyprus High, $145M for Timpview High, over $119M for Hillcrest and more than $113M for Brighton. These are 2018 to 2019 figures; the article reports costs up "nearly 50% in recent years." deseret.com
75. ↩ Spanish Fork City Planning Commission, public meeting of 05 AUG 2026, applicant presentation and questions, from the meeting's auto-captioned recording, transcribed in full by the author (transcript held by the author, 16 AUG 2026). A Volition representative, during the Title 15 item: "I live in Provo and we intend to headquarter here in this building if we move forward with this project." Two limits apply. The captions carry no speaker labels, so this report treats the transcript as a lead, not as evidence, and rests nothing on it alone. And the statement is conditional: an intention, not a commitment, in no filed document; Volition's address in the DAQ Intent to Approve remains 421 W Rivers Edge Drive, Provo. The city's recording, "Planning Commission | August 5, 2026," is public on the Spanish Fork City YouTube channel youtube.com
76. ↩ Spanish Fork City Council, adopted minutes of 18 AUG 2026 (Utah Public Notice file 1483997). The City Attorney on administrative review of future site plans and on Volition's draft development agreement, p. 11; the applicant on cooling water, p. 12; on the absence of any fuel-cell-only, off-grid data center this size, p. 13; on 250 MW of critical load, about 394 MW of nameplate, the 18 AUG text's cap as a "regulatory buffer," a decommissioning cost above $30 million and projections that leave out customers' computing equipment, p. 22; on heat, p. 23; the building's owner on funding for a new Highway 6 interchange and on the distribution and manufacturing uses the owners had considered, p. 13; the motion to table item 7.3 to 01 SEP, p. 24. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision utah.gov
77. ↩ Volition Industries, presentation to the Spanish Fork City Council, 01 SEP 2026 (Utah Public Notice file 1484055, posted 03 SEP 2026), eight slides. Source of the applicant's revised commitments (slides 03, 04C and 04D), its water, truck, jobs and tax figures (slide 05A) and its community contribution terms (slide 03). The applicant's own statements, not a city record; slides 04A2 and 04D note that Title 15 and the development agreement "remain proposed/draft until adoption and execution." Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision utah.gov
78. ↩ U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electricity Data Browser, Lake Side Power Plant (plant code 56237). Nameplate 1,246.5 MW across six generators in two combined-cycle units, net summer capacity 1,176 MW (EIA-860M, JUN 2026). EIA-923 fuel use and gross generation: 43,726,489 MMBtu for 6,226,665 MWh in 2025 (48.6% efficient) and 45,133,093 MMBtu for 6,286,570 MWh in 2024 (47.5%), so at full nameplate the plant rejects 1,319 to 1,376 MW-thermal. EIA states fuel at higher heating value and this report states the facility at lower heating value, which understates the facility by about 11%, so the comparison is conservative. Replaces the PacifiCorp fleet page, which gives no capacity or heat rate. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision eia.gov
79. ↩ U.S. Energy Information Administration, Natural Gas Consumption by End Use, Utah: total consumption 276,500 million cubic feet (276.5 Bcf) in 2024. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision eia.gov
80. ↩ U.S. Energy Information Administration, "How much carbon dioxide is produced per kilowatthour of U.S. electricity generation?": coal 2.31 lb CO2/kWh in 2023, 1.048 metric tons per MWh. Replaces an uncited 1.002. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision eia.gov
81. ↩ Saratoga Springs Land Development Code, Chapter 19.04, Establishment of Land Use Zones and Official Map, §19.04.03(2): "If a use is not listed as a permitted use in the applicable zone, it is not permitted and is strictly prohibited," with a New or Unlisted Business Use application available to an applicant. Replaces a misattached citation. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision saratogasprings-ut.gov
82. ↩ Eagle Mountain City Council, approved minutes of 03 SEP 2024 (Utah Public Notice file 1173915), item 14.D, repealing and replacing Chapter 17.40 Industrial Zone and amending Chapters 17.20 and 17.38; as presented by staff, the amendment "eliminates the conditional uses in each chapter" and creates a land use table of permitted, special and prohibited uses; passed 5 to 0, p. 9. Replaces a misattached citation. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision utah.gov
83. ↩ U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts, Spanish Fork city, Utah: persons per household, 2020 to 2024, 3.59. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision census.gov
84. ↩ U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR company search for Form D filings, checked for "Volition Industries" and the prior name "Energi," last on 21 SEP 2026: no Form D under either. Updated 22 SEP 2026: this entry first cited a CB Insights profile reporting $13M raised; that profile describes an unrelated San Francisco industrial-parts company also named Volition, and it is withdrawn. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision sec.gov
85. ↩ Loudoun Now, "Sterling Residents Raise Alarms Over Off-Grid Data Center," 16 APR 2026, quoting the district's county supervisor on staff noise readings at Vantage: "The average of the noise readings to determine if there is a noise violation has never exceeded 55 dBA at the residential property adjacent to Vantage." Replaces a misattached citation. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision loudounnow.com
86. ↩ Bank for International Settlements, BIS Quarterly Review, March 2026, "Financing the AI infrastructure boom: on- and off-balance sheet borrowing" (16 MAR 2026). Contains no "$120 billion" figure; the figure traces to Financial Times reporting of 24 DEC 2025. Replaces a misattached citation. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision bis.org
87. ↩ Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School, "Decommissioning Data Centers: Avoiding Stranded Assets", Climate Law Blog, 06 AUG 2026; and Susquehanna County, PA, Ordinance 2026-03, a data center amendment to its subdivision and land development ordinance, dated 29 DEC 2025 on its face after a 05 JAN 2026 hearing, requiring financial security equal to net decommissioning cost plus 10%, as a bond or other financial assurance delivered before construction begins. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision columbia.edu susqco.com
88. ↩ Utah Code 10-1-305, municipal energy sales and use tax, exemptions: (2)(b)(iv) requires each ordinance to exempt "the sales or use of taxable energy to a person if the primary use is for use in compounding or producing taxable energy"; 10-1-303(13) defines taxable energy as gas and electricity. Spanish Fork's 6.000% rate appears in the Utah State Tax Commission's "Other Sales Tax Rates and Fees" table, effective 01 JAN 2026. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision le.utah.gov tax.utah.gov
89. ↩ Volition Industries, presentation to the Spanish Fork City Council, 18 AUG 2026 (Utah Public Notice file 1478035, "Presented Slides"), 22 slides, including its technical responses to Council and its site comparison, water, heat, tax and community-contribution slides. The applicant's own statements, not a city record. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision utah.gov
90. ↩ Spanish Fork City Planning Commission agenda packet, 05 AUG 2026 (Utah Public Notice file 1467389): the applicant's application and proposed text dated 10 JUL 2026 (p. 62); staff's redline of that text (pp. 62 to 65), which strikes the conditional-use language and strikes ", without limitation," and ", recuperated microturbines," from the technology list (p. 63); and the applicant's justification statement dated 16 JUL 2026 (pp. 66 to 70), which says every project would still need "its own conditional use permit, its own public hearing" (p. 70). Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision utah.gov
91. ↩ U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electricity Data Browser, Spanish Fork Wind Park 2 (plant code 56751): net generation in each full year from 2009 to 2025 ranged from 39,991 MWh (2012) to 49,052 MWh (2019), with 42,217 MWh in 2025. Against 18.9 MW for 8,760 hours, that is a 24 to 30% capacity factor, about 27% on average. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision eia.gov
92. ↩ NAACP v. X.AI Corp., No. 3:26-cv-00074 (N.D. Miss.), complaint filed 14 APR 2026, ¶¶ 4, 197, 198, 203, 204 and 214. Allegations, not adjudicated findings. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision earthjustice.org
93. ↩ Utah Code 59-2-1317, tax notice: under subsection (2)(b)(iii) the notice must state "that the property may be subject to a detailed review in the next year"; under (7)(a) the treasurer provides it on or before 01 NOV. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision le.utah.gov
94. ↩ FOX 13 News, "Data center company ponders moving on after Spanish Fork leaders delay Title 15 vote," 02 SEP 2026: "Spanish Fork City leaders decided not to amend Title 15, at least for another two weeks." A press account; the city's draft minutes of 01 SEP give the count (source 104). Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision fox13now.com
95. ↩ Spanish Fork City website, site-wide notice, retrieved 16 SEP and still posted 21 SEP 2026: the Council meeting originally scheduled for 15 SEP "has been rescheduled to Monday, September 21 at 6 pm." Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision spanishfork.gov
96. ↩ Utah Division of Air Quality, Air Quality Permitting Notices, Approval Orders issued, checked 15, 17, 21 and 22 SEP 2026 (946 entries on 22 SEP, the latest issued 18 SEP 2026): no Approval Order for Volition Industries or its Spanish Fork site. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision daqpermitting.utah.gov
97. ↩ Smithfield Township, Monroe County, PA, Ordinance No. 268, data center curative amendment, in the 10 JUL 2026 draft the Board of Supervisors adopted on 12 AUG 2026 (minutes, p. 4): the decommissioning agreement "shall include a bond or letter of credit for one hundred and twenty-five (125%) percent of the cost for decommissioning," with the estimate refreshed after the first year and every fifth year (§27-511(22)N(3)). An earlier draft, No. 265, was set for a 22 APR 2026 hearing, but that meeting adjourned without business. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision smithfieldtownship.com (ordinance) smithfieldtownship.com (12 AUG minutes)
98. ↩ Utah Public Notice 1104803, Spanish Fork City Council amended agenda, 01 SEP 2026: under New Business, item 10.1, the Title 15 data center ordinance, and item 10.2, consideration of the development agreement with Volition Industries, Inc. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision utah.gov
99. ↩ Volition Industries, "Spanish Fork Sustainability Briefing," presentation to the Spanish Fork City Council, 04 AUG 2026 (Utah Public Notice file 1471217, posted 06 AUG 2026 with the 04 AUG meeting notice). Source of the truck-fleet baseline (slide 11), the water arithmetic (slide 09), the permit "has been approved" statement (slide 07) and the tax and jobs figures (slide 14). The posted file has 16 pages and omits the slide numbered 08. The applicant's own statements, not a city record. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision utah.gov
100. ↩ Spanish Fork City Council, special meeting agenda, 21 SEP 2026 (Utah Public Notice 1109425, posted 16 SEP 2026), item 9.1: "On September 1, 2026, the City Council further considered the proposed amendments and tabled the decision, giving the staff direction to refine the language." The city's agenda portal carries the attachments; on 21 SEP it added a third to item 9.1, the ordinance's signature form with Exhibit A left blank. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision utah.gov spanishfork.community.diligentoneplatform.com
101. ↩ "Title 15 - CC 9-2-26 rev.2 Council edits", draft ordinance attached to item 9.1 of the 21 SEP 2026 Council agenda, 8 pp., shown in tracked changes, posted 16 SEP 2026. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision spanishfork.community.diligentoneplatform.com
102. ↩ "Title 15 - Council, SM, Staff, applicant v.2", draft ordinance attached to item 9.1 of the 21 SEP 2026 Council agenda, 9 pp., posted 16 SEP 2026. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision spanishfork.community.diligentoneplatform.com
103. ↩ Institute of Transportation Engineers, High-Cube Warehouse Vehicle Trip Generation Analysis, prepared for the South Coast Air Quality Management District and NAIOP, OCT 2016, Table 5 (p. 13), weighted average daily trips per 1,000 gross sq ft: parcel hub 10.638 all vehicles and 4.007 trucks, 0.982 of them five or more axles; cold storage 0.836 trucks (nine sites); fulfillment center 0.717 trucks (one site, counted in December); transload and short-term storage 0.454 trucks (91 sites). The parcel hub and fulfillment rows rest on one site each, and the study recommends more data for both. The district's own link returned 404 on 21 SEP 2026; the link here is the Internet Archive's 04 JUN 2025 copy of that file. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision web.archive.org (SCAQMD copy)
104. ↩ Spanish Fork City Council, draft minutes of 01 SEP 2026, 123 pp., attached to consent item 7.1 of the 21 SEP 2026 special meeting agenda. Item 10.1, the Title 15 ordinance: motion to continue for two weeks, passed 4 to 1 on a roll call, pp. 118 to 119; item 10.2, the Volition development agreement, tabled for two weeks by the same 4 to 1 roll call, pp. 119 to 120. The city replaced the file on 21 SEP with a corrected version (cover date; a speaker attribution on p. 114); the pages cited are unchanged. Draft until the Council adopts them. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision spanishfork.community.diligentoneplatform.com
105. ↩ Spanish Fork Planning Commission, minutes of 05 AUG 2026, 52 pp., attached for adoption to item 3.1 of the Commission's 02 SEP 2026 agenda. Title 15 item, pp. 50 to 51: a motion to recommend adding a power-output threshold and a quota of two facilities passed 5 to 1, its maker clarifying that it added language only and was not a recommendation to approve; one commissioner said heat impacts should also be addressed and a different commissioner seconded (p. 50); the motion to recommend approval then failed 3 to 3, so no recommendation was forwarded. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision spanishfork.community.diligentoneplatform.com
106. ↩ Deseret News, "Into the wind: State's first wind farm selling power to PacificCorp grid," 29 AUG 2008: the nine-turbine, 19 MW Spanish Fork wind park is "selling electricity to PacifiCorp," and "The plant's power-sales agreement with PacifiCorp is for 20 years and at an undisclosed rate." Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision deseret.com
107. ↩ KSL.com, "Box Elder County Commissioners approve data-center moratorium; Stratos project exempt," 10 JUN 2026: the commissioners unanimously approved a 180-day moratorium on new data centers that day; the Stratos project is exempt. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision ksl.com
108. ↩ Provo City, data center overlay amendments. The Planning Commission's Report of Action of 25 MAR 2026 (Utah Public Notice file 1411989) covers a draft removing power generation as a permitted use, which provided that "Independent 'islanded' power plants are prohibited" and that data centers "must use non-evaporative cooling methods"; the Commission recommended denial 5 to 0. The Municipal Council adopted Ordinance 2026-13, amending the power generation, evaporative cooling and environmental reporting requirements for data centers, on 28 APR 2026 (Utah Public Notice 1076547). The Daily Herald (29 APR 2026) reports that the 5 to 1 vote removes power generation as a permitted use, which caps data centers at 50 MW because UMPA requires larger ones to generate their own power, and requires non-evaporative cooling. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision utah.gov (Report of Action) utah.gov (ordinance notice) heraldextra.com
109. ↩ City of Hilliard, Ohio, "Data Center Fuel Cells FAQs": a 72.9 MW solid oxide fuel cell facility of 228 Bloom Energy units on about 6.4 acres of Amazon's 142-acre data center campus, built, owned and run by AEP Ohio to serve Amazon; the Ohio Power Siting Board approved it on 22 SEP 2025, with operation projected for SEP 2027. And Signal Ohio, "Lawsuit aims to block Ohio Amazon data center's 228 'fuel cells'," 09 FEB 2026: "The city has described the fuel cell project as the largest of its kind in North America." Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision hilliardohio.gov signalohio.org
110. ↩ Doosan Fuel Cell, news release, 02 NOV 2021: the Shinincheon Bitdream Fuel Cell Power Plant in Incheon, South Korea, opened on 26 OCT 2021, is "the world's largest plant with a total capacity of 78.96MW," and Doosan supplied 124 of its units at 440 kW each (58.96 MW). Doosan's product page lists the 440 kW PureCell Model 400 under PAFC, its phosphoric acid fuel cells. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision doosanfuelcell.com (release) doosanfuelcell.com (product)
111. ↩ Internet Archive, Wayback Machine captures of volition.eco, 23 JUL 2023, 26 AUG 2024 and 20 FEB 2025. The 2023 and 2024 pages offer solar, clean HVAC, air filtration and batteries installed on customers' properties "with no capital expense." The 2025 page says "Volition builds Microgrids on commercial properties and residential communities worldwide," that it "fully funds the installation and maintenance," that its systems "integrate fuel cells, energy servers, solar panels, battery storage," and offers "predictable rates for the next 20-30 years." None mentions data centers. The archive's capture index, checked 21 SEP 2026, holds no later capture of the site's pages; a separate green bond portal on a subdomain was captured on 17 MAR 2025 and shows only its title. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision web.archive.org (2023) web.archive.org (2024) web.archive.org (2025)
112. ↩ Volition Industries website, checked 21 SEP 2026: the About page says "Our data centers deliver up to 250 megawatts of power"; the /compute page promises "hundreds of megawatts, delivered in months"; the /speed page says each site is "engineered to scale into hundreds of megawatts." The applicant's own statements. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision volition.eco (About) volition.eco (/compute) volition.eco (/speed)
113. ↩ Better Business Bureau, business profile for Volition, 1850 W Ashton Blvd, Lehi, checked 21 SEP 2026: rating A+, not BBB accredited, 0 complaints closed in the last three years. The BBB site refuses automated checks; the profile opens in a browser. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision bbb.org
114. ↩ TechBuzz News, "Volition Announces Board of Directors," 16 SEP 2024, the company's announcement: four directors, a senior vice president of acquisitions at Realty Income, a managing director of Alpheus Water Fund I, an operating partner at Altamont Capital Partners, and the founder of BidFax and Buzzsaw.com, both acquired by Autodesk. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision techbuzznews.com
115. ↩ Notice of Impending Boundary Action, Stockman Flats Public Infrastructure District No. 2, filed with the Lieutenant Governor of Utah: the Spanish Fork City Council adopted Resolution 2026-07 on 21 APR 2026, creating three Stockman Flats Public Infrastructure Districts on a petition carrying the consent of all surface property owners; the governing document describes about 295 acres of industrial-zoned land. The filing gives no megawatt figure and mentions neither data centers nor Volition. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision entitiesandboundaries.utah.gov
116. ↩ Nscale Limited, Form S-1 registration statement, filed with the SEC on 18 SEP 2026 (accession 0001193125-26-395475), with its preliminary prospectus and Exhibit 21.1. As of 31 AUG 2026, $103.4 billion of active and contracted total contract value; revenue of $140.6 million and a net loss of $1,020.1 million for the six months to 30 JUN 2026; statements of work with Microsoft for up to about $43.8 billion through DEC 2033, and agreements of 25 AUG 2026 with Anthropic for up to about $44.6 billion; "In April 2026, OpenAI withdrew from the Stargate Norway and Stargate UK partnerships." Exhibit 21.1 lists Nscale GPU Holdings Utah, LLC and Nscale GPU Utah, LLC, both Delaware companies. Neither document mentions Spanish Fork or Volition. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision sec.gov (S-1) sec.gov (Exhibit 21.1)
117. ↩ CNBC, "Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6 billion valuation," 09 MAR 2026: a $2 billion Series C at a $14.6 billion valuation, led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries, with Nvidia participating. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision cnbc.com
118. ↩ Ionic Digital Inc., prospectus (Form 424B4), filed with the SEC on 28 JUL 2026 (accession 0001185185-26-003152): "We currently have only one customer in our digital infrastructure business"; in OCT 2025 it agreed with Nscale on "a 126-month 'triple-net' lease" of its Ward County, Texas property, with 234 MW currently leased; and "If our customer failed to perform under the lease for any reason," its ability to earn revenue there "could be materially adversely affected." The filing mentions Microsoft only as holding an option from Nscale on more power at the site from 2027. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision sec.gov
119. ↩ Nscale, press release, 15 OCT 2025: Nscale "will deliver approximately 104,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs in a ~240MW hyperscale AI campus in Texas, supporting the phased delivery of NVIDIA AI infrastructure services to Microsoft," and "The site is leased from Ionic Digital." Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision nscale.com
120. ↩ WPR, "Microsoft sued over noise complaints at new Mount Pleasant data center facility," 02 JUL 2026: three Sturtevant residents filed a class action in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin on 01 JUL 2026; the complaint calls the noise "not only excessive, but consistent and pervasive" and attributes it to "diesel generators and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, including chillers, cooling towers, air-handling units, and condenser fans." Allegations, not findings. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision wpr.org
121. ↩ Dieter Hohenwarter, Erich Mursch-Radlgruber and Christian Kirisits, "S-shaped dependence of the sound pressure level in outdoor propagation on the effective sound speed gradient," Acta Acustica 6, 13 (2022), open access (CC BY 4.0), published 12 APR 2022. Measurements at motorways and railways, 100 to 500 m from the source: "In the distance range between 150 m and 250 m, the meteorological influences cause a level increase of 3–4 dB(A) for downward refracted sound rays (favourable sound propagation) compared to a situation without meteorological influence," and "a maximum sound level attenuation of 5–10 dB(A)" for upward refraction. Figures from the published abstract; the journal's site refuses automated checks and opens in a browser. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision doi.org (Acta Acustica)
122. ↩ Olof Öhlund, Wind Turbine Sound Propagation in the Atmospheric Boundary Layer, licentiate thesis, Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, 2014; its measurement paper was published as Öhlund and Larsson, "Meteorological effects on wind turbine sound propagation," Applied Acoustics 89 (2015), 34–41. Two years of continuous acoustic and meteorological measurements at two Swedish wind farms: 1,060 to 1,970 m from the turbines the median level varied by 6 dBA across refraction conditions without snow cover and 14 dBA with it, and by 14 dB (17 dB over snow) in the 125 Hz octave band; at about 400 and 600 m no clear meteorological dependence was seen (abstract and pp. 21 to 23). Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision diva-portal.org (Uppsala University)
123. ↩ Phuc D. Nguyen, Kristy L. Hansen, Peter Catcheside, Colin H. Hansen and Branko Zajamsek, "Long-term quantification and characterisation of wind farm noise amplitude modulation," Measurement 182 (2021), 109678; open copy on arXiv (2206.02543). A year of measurements at three homes 890 m, 1.3 km and 3.5 km from three wind farms in South Australia: nighttime prevalence of amplitude modulation "approximately 2 to 5 times higher than the daytime prevalence"; within 1.3 km it occurred during more than 50% of the night against 25% of the day, and at 3.5 km during about 25% of the night against 3% of the day; it was least common upwind. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision arxiv.org
124. ↩ N. D. Kelley, H. E. McKenna, R. R. Hemphill and others, Acoustic noise associated with the MOD-1 wind turbine: its source, impact, and control, Solar Energy Research Institute, SERI/TR-635-1166, FEB 1985. Cited as history only. §6.4 (pp. 168 to 171): amplification from "thin" atmospheric layers "probably did not exceed 6 dB," while refraction and terrain focusing produced "far-field enhancements in excess of 25 dB," confirmed by measurement; §9.3 (pp. 225 to 226): the focusing "is capable of raising local incident levels to more than 25 dB above the figure expected from the spherical spreading of the source alone." Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision osti.gov
125. ↩ Great Oak reporting. DataCenterDynamics, "Prince William residents complain of 'catastrophic noise' from data centers," 19 JUL 2022: the county "specifically excluded air-conditioning noise from regulation in a 1989 ordinance," and the residents' groups wrote that "the County has no legal ability to control noise at any level from data center cooling equipment." Prince William Times, "Residents turn up the volume on data center noise complaints," 31 AUG 2022: a Great Oak resident's reading of 67.4 decibels; an ordinance that exempts data center air-conditioning units from nighttime limits; and AWS's statement that a third-party study found average noise below the daytime limit. Prince William Times, "Supervisors crack down on data center noise but enforcement remains unclear," 02 MAR 2023: the Board removed the nighttime exemption for non-residential air-conditioning. Prince William Times, "Amazon tones down its data center noise after residents sound the alarm," 23 OCT 2023: 18 months after residents began to hear the noise, Amazon's engineering work had cut it by 10 decibels. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision datacenterdynamics.com princewilliamtimes.com (AUG 2022) princewilliamtimes.com (MAR 2023) princewilliamtimes.com (OCT 2023)
126. ↩ DataCenterDynamics, "Application for $1.3bn data center in Chesterton, Indiana, withdrawn," 14 JUN 2024: Provident Realty Advisors withdrew its proposal for a $1.3 billion data center campus, and its annexation request, notifying town officials on 10 JUN 2024. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision datacenterdynamics.com
127. ↩ WTOP, republishing InsideNoVa, "Digital Gateway data center project dies after final developer withdraws appeal," 02 JUL 2026: QTS withdrew its legal challenge at the Supreme Court of Virginia that day, ending the project. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision wtop.com
128. ↩ Fortune, "Moody's flags $662 billion risk at the heart of the data center build-out by just 5 companies," 25 FEB 2026: a Moody's Ratings report finds the five largest U.S. hyperscalers hold $662 billion in data center lease commitments that have not yet begun and sit off their balance sheets, equal to 113% of their adjusted debt; a Moody's analyst calls them "yet to be on the balance sheet" rather than avoided through structuring. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision fortune.com
129. ↩ NTV News, "Kearney's Compute North facility not impacted by company's bankruptcy filing," 26 SEP 2022: the Kearney facility was not in the filing, and the city manager said, "All the payments that they owe to the city of Kearney are paid in full at this time." Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision nebraska.tv
130. ↩ DataCenterDynamics, "Brookfield completes $775m deal for bankrupt Cyxtera," 16 JAN 2024: Brookfield bought most of the bankrupt provider's assets and merged it with its Evoque colocation brand into a company with more than 50 locations. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision datacenterdynamics.com
131. ↩ Goat Systems, LLC, notice of appeal and request for reconsideration to the Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities, 13 JUL 2026, as posted by WyoFile. It appeals a Notice of Significant Noncompliance for the Meta Cheyenne data center that the Board issued to Goat Systems on 02 JUL 2026 over Cupriavidus gilardii found at two water reclamation facilities and at the site's discharge point; gives Goat Systems' address as 1 Meta Way; says the site's contractor, not Goat Systems, held the temporary authorization to discharge boiler condensate and fill/flush drainage; and asks the Board to accept its 13 JUL payment of the $10,000.00 administrative fine under protest. The appellant's filing; no ruling was found as of 21 SEP 2026. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision wyofile.com
132. ↩ City of Chandler, "Chandler's data center ordinance now in effect," 11 JAN 2023: the zoning amendment, approved 05 DEC 2022 and in effect 05 JAN 2023, requires a pre-construction sound study, mitigation to the baseline levels and annual noise studies for five years, citing "an increase in potential noise impacts to the surrounding neighborhoods." City of Mesa, Ordinance No. 5957, passed and adopted 08 JUL 2025: data center development standards, including noise, whose recitals note that data centers "can generate impacts such as noise from mechanical equipment." Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision chandleraz.gov mcclibraryfunctions.azurewebsites.us (City of Mesa)
133. ↩ Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, "Oregon's city of The Dalles agrees to reveal Google's local water usage," 15 DEC 2022: after the Wasco County district attorney ordered the records released, The Dalles filed a reverse public records lawsuit to keep Google's water use confidential, then settled, agreeing to disclose its 2012 to 2021 usage and to pay the Reporters Committee's legal fees. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision rcfp.org
134. ↩ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "What Are Heat Islands?": "Vehicles, air-conditioning units, buildings, and industrial facilities all emit heat into the urban environment," and hard, dry surfaces such as "roofs, sidewalks, roads, buildings, and parking lots" contribute to higher temperatures. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision epa.gov
135. ↩ Spanish Fork City, "Spanish Fork City Council - September 21, 2026," recording of the 21 SEP 2026 special meeting, including item 9.1, on the Spanish Fork City YouTube channel, posted 22 SEP 2026, about six hours. The author attended; this report's account of the outcome is his until the city posts its minutes. Added in the 22 SEP 2026 revision youtube.com