“There is a lot of buzz around our country and around our state with this type of a development we have now, and I understand why some of the concerns exist,” Chad Dillingham, one of the four partners in Plainsmen Holding, said during a press availability event Tuesday afternoon. “I have concerns with how some of these projects are being developed in other areas, and we really wanted to kind of do this in a different direction. We want to do this from a community-first perspective.

“We’ve been working on this idea and this plan for some time, but it’s not perfect yet, and we want to continue to tweak it with community input, and then it’ll really be up to the community whether we collectively move forward to take advantage of this or not, and I’m OK if we don’t.”

The plan is in the early stages and nothing has been decided, Dillingham said.

They haven’t even spoken to any hyperscalers, the tech companies that build and operate data centers.

The other partners are Jason Singer, Aaron Singer and Troy Phillips.

“We’re reverse engineering this project or this process, I should say,” Aaron Singer said.

“So most of the time, what happens is one of these big tech companies goes into a town and says, ‘We want to build data centers. Here’s how we’re going to do it.’

“We are looking at a way to develop a project like that, but to do that in direct and deep consultation with the town’s leadership and with the folks who live here.”

“The Enid Regional Development Alliance works every day to attract innovative ideas, new investment and opportunities to strengthen Enid’s economy and position our community for long-term success,” said Marcie Mack, ERDA executive director.

“The city of Enid has wisely invested in strategic infrastructure to attract transformational projects, and Project Thunderbird represents the type of forward-looking opportunity that can create lasting benefits for our community.”

Community input

Project Thunderbird is designed to support what partners say will be long-term economic growth and a technological investment in Enid and Garfield County. Before the project can proceed, it must be vetted by the city of Enid to make sure it supports the community and ultimately approved by the Enid City Commission, Mayor David Mason said.

“There’s so much emotion around this issue nationwide, and sadly it’s become even a little bit of a partisan issue, and it shouldn’t be, in my opinion,” Dillingham said.

“I respect anyone who has the opinion that data centers are not good for this country, and I’m not going to argue with them. I’m not going to belittle them, but I do hope we can have a civil conversation, a rational conversation about facts, and if we can keep the noise and the clutter and the misinformation out, and just talk about the facts and be open-minded to looking at that …”

The proposed Project Thunderbird development would encompass approximately 1,735 acres across four campuses in Enid and includes plans for an on-site power generation facility of up to 3.3 gigawatts enabled through a partnership with a major natural gas midstream energy provider.

The four campuses would be the power plant at 42nd and Phillips, the industrial park on North 66th, 30th and Rupe, and on South 30th south of Rupe, according to the website for the project, https://projectthunderbird.com/.

The power generation facility would serve a two-fold purpose. One would provide behind-the-meter power to the data centers at no cost to Enid residents, Dillingham said. It also would serve as a backup power supplier to Vance Air Force Base.

“Vance has known for some time, and the city of Enid has known for some time, that the Department of War has a mandate out by 2030 that Vance needs to have a solution for off-grid, backup, redundant power supply, just like they are for all installations, and right now, in where we’re at in those discussions, we don’t have solutions,” he said.

“We can build a large-scale natural gas power plant in Enid that would be owned and funded by either what they call an IPP, which is a power provider, an independent power provider or the hyperscaler,” Dillingham said. “It could be built at a level that had excess headroom to then serve as that redundant backup excess power that’s off grid for Vance, and so that would give us a big check mark there with the Department of War and with the Air Force to solve that problem for Vance.”

Water, noise

If approved, Project Thunderbird plans to use raw water from the new Kaw Lake pipeline for cooling the data centers. Advanced closed-loop cooling technology will be used to reduce water consumption compared to traditional data center cooling systems, Aaron Singer said.

The city of Enid currently has the capacity to pump 10.5 million gallons a day from Kaw Lake, with the infrastructure in place to pump 20 million gallons, according to city officials.

“This is going to be a mid-21st Century data center, not a turn-of-the-century data center,” Singer said.

“Turn-of-the-century data centers were using cooling towers and systems like that, and they were consuming massive amounts of water. These are going to be closed-loop systems that will consume a fraction of the water of the early data centers that were built 25 years ago.”

He said it would take about 3 million gallons at first to fill the system.

The data centers would be built to mitigate the sound for neighbors, Dillingham said.

The buildings would include acoustic wall cladding, he said, landscaping, earthen berms and walls to lessen the sound, he said. The buildings also would be set back at least 500 feet from housing.

According to the project website, noise levels would be about 65 decibels at the 500-foot setback mark in the day and 55 decibels at night.

A normal conversation is around 60 decibels, according to https://noiseawareness.org/.

The proposal also includes a plan to buy homes at greater than market value from residents who don’t want to stay in the area, Dillingham said.

It also includes $15,000 grants for sound-proofing work on homes.

Opposition

Many people have voiced their opposition to the project on social media for a variety of reasons, ranging from water usage, damage to the environment and the noise.

Some people talked of organizing petition drives against the plan.

Written by Kevin Hassler and published in the Enid News & Eagle