Arkansas’ Data Center Problem

Arkansas is set to welcome $12 billion in new data centers that
will require significant electricity, while recent legislation has
made it nearly impossible to develop new wind farms. The state will
have to rely on importing power and building natural gas plants,
leading to higher costs for ratepayers. Sign up now for Uptime Tech
News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This
episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn
more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS
retrofit. Follow the show
on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit
Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes'
YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Allen Hall: Let me tell you a little
story about wind energy in the state of Arkansas. But first, let me
pick you a picture of the natural state. Arkansas sits right in the
heart of America. This is the land that gave us President Bill
Clinton and the retail giant Walmart. It's the home to the rugged
Ozark mountains and the fertile Mississippi River Delta, where
folks still wave from the front porches. And Sunday dinner means
the whole family surround the table. Arkansas has always been a
place where old traditions meet new opportunities. Rice fields
stretch across the eastern flatlands. Timber companies harvest the
dense forest. The Buffalo River runs wild and free. And now. Wind
energy companies are eyeing those wide open spaces
and [00:01:00] mountain ridges. But here's where our
story gets interesting. The natural state is about to welcome $12
billion in new data centers. That's Google building a $10 billion
facility in West Memphis, just across the river from where Elvis
lived. Two more billion dollars centers go up in Little Rock and
Conway near the center of the state. These data centers will demand
massive amounts of electricity. How much Arkansas Electric
Cooperative Corporation says they've got requests for 4,000
megawatts of new load. That's more power than the entire system has
built in 80 years. And the data center companies want it in just
three or four years. And here's an interesting turn of events.
Arkansas just made it nearly impossible to build wind farms that
could power these data centers cheaply. And cleanly. Senate Bill 4
37 passed by just one vote in the
Arkansas [00:02:00] Senate 18 4 14 against, they called
it the Arkansas Wind Energy Development Act, but don't let the name
fool you. This 20 page regulatory monster is designed to kill wind
development. The bail requires wind turbines to be set back three
and a half times their height from property lines. That's up to a
quarter mile it. Bans turbines within one mile of schools,
hospitals, churches, and city limits. It demands extensive
environmental studies and public hearings. Wind companies warned
this would kill future development. Wire, Hauser the Timber Giant
with 1.2 million acres in Arkansas said the rule would limit their
ability to host wind projects to zero acres. Zero. Representative
Jack Leman, a Republican from Jonesboro, Arkansas, summed it up on
the house floor, quote, if wind is a bad idea, it will fail on its
own. It's not our job to kill an [00:03:00] industry,
unquote, but they killed it anyway. Six Arkansas counties have
already banned wind development. Carroll County, Boone, Madison,
Newton Crawford, and Criton Counties have all said no to commercial
wind projects. The current projects get a pass. The Crossover Wind
Project in Cross County and the Nimbus Project in Carroll County.
Were already under development by April 9th of this year, so
they're exempt from the new rules. Crossover wind will be
Arkansas's first operational wind farm, 135 megawatts, 32 turbines
enough to power 50,000 homes. It's going online next summer in the
flat farmland of Eastern Arkansas. Nimbus is more controversial.
180 megawatts. Plan for the Ozark Mountains in Carroll County near
the state line with Missouri and not far from Walmart headquarters.
46 turbines up to 600 feet tall. The locals are furious. They post
it on Facebook tracking every wind turbine
component [00:04:00] truck that rolls through their
mountains. Carol Rogers lives on Bradshaw Mountain near the Nmba
site. She's been fighting the project since 2023. She says,
Arkansas ranks in the top 10 states for lightning strikes, quote.
So will you put a 698 foot tall structure on top of a 2000 foot
tall ridge line? It could be a recipe for disaster. Rogers hopes
that federal wildlife enforcement might stop the project. Nimbus
supplied to the Fish and Wildlife Service for permits to protect
golden eagles and endangered bats during construction and
operation. But the permit process is uncertain under the Trump
administration. The project is building without final federal
approval. Quote. Maybe it can be more of an enforcement action,
unquote. Rogers told reporters, I hope it happens unquote.
Meanwhile, Arkansas lawmakers tried to pass Senate Bill 3 0 7, the
generating Arkansas Jobs Act. This would've allowed utilities to
build power plants faster and charge rate payers while construction
was [00:05:00] underway. The goal attract energy hungry
industries like data centers. But even that failed. The bill died
by one vote in the Senate 17 4 11 against one short a passage. So
Arkansas has made it nearly impossible to build wind farms. They
can't even pass a bill to build other power plants faster, but they
welcome $12 billion in data centers that will need massive amounts
of electricity. The utilities are obviously scrambling Energy.
Arkansas is planting new natural gas plants near Hot Springs and
elsewhere. Arkansas Electric Cooperative is building a gas plant in
Texas to import power back to Arkansas. Both utilities co-own two
major coal plants that must retire within five years. The White
Bluff plant in Redfield and the Independence plant in Newark,
they're being forced to shut down by federal court order. Now,
here's what nobody's telling the Arkansas voter, the state had
nearly two [00:06:00]gigawatts of wind projects under
development before the crackdown. That's enough to power over a
million homes. All that potential clean energy banned by
politicians who then welcome data centers that'll burn through
electricity. And the irony gets thicker. Arkansas sits within the
Mid-Continent independent system operator grid miso. That's a
strategic advantage for wind development. The state has excellent
wind resources. The Department of Energy estimates Arkansas has
9,200 megawatts of potential wind capacity. But instead of
harnessing that wind, Arkansas will import expensive electricity
from other states or burn more natural gas and coal rate. Payers
will foot the bill. Google says they'll cover the full energy costs
for their West Memphis data center, but that's just their share the
massive infrastructure upgrades to handle all that power that gets
spread across everyone's electricity bills. Arkansas Senator Ron
Caldwell, the [00:07:00] Republican who represents Cross
County, sees what's happening. He praised the Crossover Wind
Project. He said most landowners who wanted a turbine got one. The
environmental impact is small. Quote, I'm not trying to talk anyone
into bringing them into their counties, quote called Old said
quote, but as far as we're concerned in Cross County, we're looking
forward to having those facilities there and the revenue that comes
from it, unquote. That's the choice. Arkansas faces revenue from
wind farms and cheap clean electricity, or expensive imported power
to feed the data center. Boom, the data centers are coming. Whether
Arkansas builds wind farms or not, Google doesn't care where their
electricity comes from. As long as the lights stay on, but Arkansas
rate payers should care because they're about to pay the price for
politicians who banned one of the cheapest forms of a new
electricity generation, just as demand explodes. The natural state
is about to learn an expensive lesson in energy policy.