To power Utah’s data center boom, companies are turning to fossil fuels

In Utah’s rural Millard County, Kalen Taylor is bracing for the day when the farmland across the street from his home transforms into a sprawling data center complex. 

The initial plans for Joule Capital Partners’ 4,000-acre data center site call for six buildings, each powered by 69 Caterpillar natural gas-powered generators to meet the intensive energy demands. Construction is slated to begin this spring. Once built, Taylor will likely hear the equivalent of more than 400 semi-trucks idling in his neighborhood around the clock, producing emissions year-round. 

“I just would rather look out my back door and see cornfields than a data center,” Taylor said. “I like the sound of crops rustling in the wind, not the hum of a [Caterpillar] generator making power.”

Farther north, officials in the city of Eagle Mountain have turned to massive data centers operated by tech giants like Meta to provide much-needed tax revenue. But even in this urban, rapidly growing part of the state, developers struggle to secure the power they need from Utah’s largest electric utility, Rocky Mountain Power. Google has delayed building a campus there as a result of these energy constraints. That prompted Eagle Mountain’s City Council to explore building small nuclear reactors, to the consternation of many residents.

“It means our city would become a radioactive storage site,” said Joy Rasmussen, a mom of four who bought a home in Eagle Mountain in 2022.

Last May, in Washington, D.C., Senator John Curtis, one of the state’s two Republican senators, spoke glowingly to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, about Utah’s aspirations to lead the nation “with data centers and advanced technologies” during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on artificial intelligence. Curtis noted the “challenges” that come with data centers’ insatiable energy demands. How, the senator asked, can the state protect ratepayers?

“The best way,” Altman responded, “is much more supply. More generation.”

With the growing demand for more data centers, Utah finds itself in a difficult position. State and federal officials have called AI the “arms race” of a new era, as the country looks to fend off China and forge its place as the world’s leader in technology, energy, and innovation. And Utah looks to position itself at the forefront of that fight.

Since 2021, Utah has added or announced plans for at least 15 new data center buildings or campuses, according to Data Center Map, joining the thousands of new data centers planned around the country.

The state’s main electricity provider, Rocky Mountain Power, doesn’t have the capacity to meet the surge in energy demand. Data center developers have instead turned to generating their own electricity, mostly using natural gas. Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, has zeroed in on nuclear as a cleaner energy solution as part of his Operation Gigawatt, an effort to more than double Utah’s power generation in the next decade.

That collision of the AI boom and limited power supplies means Utah’s rush to build data centers is likely to rely on fossil fuel energy for the foreseeable future, raising concerns about the state’s already struggling air quality. Alternative sources won’t match the demand the centers generate — potentially as much as four times what Utah residents and businesses currently consume. Small nuclear plants are at least a decade away, while the Trump administration has curtailed many incentives for solar and wind power.

Lawmakers and regulators are trying to balance the needs of energy-intensive industries without ratepayers feeling the environmental and pocketbook pains felt in other parts of the country —  like rising energy bills and polluted air and water.

“We’re kind of in a big mess right now,” said Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and energy analyst for Utah Clean Energy, “and it’s manifesting in all of these different ways.”

Rocky Mountain Power, like many private utility providers in the United States, has a monopoly as the sole electricity provider in much of Utah, but it must yield to state regulation. For decades, power providers hummed along as energy demand across the country stayed relatively flat. Conflict arose, however, when platforms like Altman’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Elon Musk’s Grok made AI a mass-market good rather than a niche product. Demand for more data centers gripped the globe, and the utilities, which plan for energy needs decades in advance, were caught unprepared and undersupplied.

Data centers use substantial amounts of energy, with rows of servers computing day and night for services that are an increasing part of daily life — streaming services, online banking, e-commerce, and the rise of AI. In arid Utah, many data centers have pivoted away from water-guzzling evaporative cooling in favor of closed-loop systems, which require much less water but more electricity to run.

Last year, the Utah Legislature passed Senate Bill 132, allowing private companies that need 100 megawatts or more to build their own generating stations that operate off the public grid used by nearly everyone else. The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Scott Sandall, a Republican, specifically cited data centers as he promoted the legislation.

“It kind of un-handcuffs Rocky Mountain Power to provide these loads for data centers, for AI, for large manufacturers,” Sandall said, “those that are coming in, and quite frankly, changing the curve of power demand.”

In Millard County, both Joule and Creekstone Energy intend to build their own massive facilities, powered by natural gas. Mark McDougal, a managing partner of Joule’s campus, said that burning natural gas is efficient and a proven technology that can run around the clock.

“We are so excited for other alternative energy sources like geothermal and solar and wind and someday, maybe even nuclear,” McDougal said. “But we can’t wait for that.”

The developers received support from the Millard County government because of their potential to create jobs in construction, maintenance, and security, and also to boost economic development. The rural community in central Utah lost its largest employer, the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant, in 2023 — it accounted for about a quarter of all jobs in the county. The idling of the nearby Intermountain Power Plant’s remaining coal units also caused a hemorrhaging of local jobs.

Construction of the massive sites is sure to bring some jobs, but data centers generally employ a relatively small number of permanent workers.

Millard County’s location is attractive to data center developers because it lies on a fiber-optic corridor and near a natural gas pipeline. “Having both of those in the same place,” said Ray Conley, Creekstone’s CEO, “and not having a large metropolitan area that is competing for power is a very unique combo.”

The rural county also lies outside the Wasatch Front, Utah’s urban corridor and an area plagued for years by poor air quality that falls short of federal standards. In the winter, a layer of warm air, known as an inversion, keeps cooler, polluted city air trapped near the ground like a lid on a pot. 

“It’s so hard where you have inversions and trap emissions,” McDougal said. In Millard County, “emissions are able to disperse.”

Joule’s applications filed with the state indicate it will produce 1 gigawatt to start — about a quarter of the electricity Utah currently uses annually. But its own public statements indicate it eventually intends to produce more than 4 gigawatts onsite. Creekstone, less than a mile away, intends to produce 10 gigawatts, Conley confirmed.

At least a few computing campuses want to build natural gas plants on the Wasatch Front, too, despite its inversions and air quality challenges. QTS Data Centers received approval from the Eagle Mountain City Council to build a 20-acre, 200-megawatt gas plant last year, although a company spokesperson said it secured power from Rocky Mountain instead.

In West Jordan, the expanding Novva data campus received state approval to build a 200-megawatt natural gas plant in December 2024. But “natural gas” is an old greenwashing term, Mitchell said, and an attempt to make the fossil fuel sound more environmentally friendly. The fuel is methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Burning it produces carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants. Nitrogen oxides mix in the atmosphere, get baked by the sun, and turn into particulate pollution in the winter and ozone pollution in the summer.

The pollutants create haze in rural parts of the state and cloud visibility at Utah’s famed national parks, from Arches to Zion.

Even data centers on the Wasatch Front that have already tapped into Utah’s existing power grid have received state approval to install hundreds of diesel-fueled generators in the last five years, including QTS, Meta, and the National Security Agency in Utah County; and eBay, Aligned, DataBank, Oracle, and Novva in Salt Lake County. Those generators would only run during blackouts and other emergencies when their campuses can’t get enough grid power, according to permit applications. But diesel emissions contain even more harmful pollutants than natural gas.

In November, the federal government removed northern Utah from its list of regions out of compliance for wintertime inversion pollution after more than a decade, thanks to state efforts like banning wood burning on poor air quality days combined with stricter federal regulations on vehicles and fuel. But it continues to struggle with meeting national limits for ozone smog.

The new data centers coming online, with their diesel and natural gas generators, could bump the state right back out of compliance, environmental advocates say. “They’re eating into all of the progress we’ve made to reduce emissions from other sources,” said Mitchell from Utah Clean Energy.

State regulators said they’re not just concerned about temporary diesel generators and year-round natural gas generators taking a bite against air quality gains in recent years.

“We’re concerned about all growth,” said Bryce Bird, director of the Utah Division of Air Quality. “Everything that has to do with people also has emissions associated with it.”

State officials said growth and its associated emissions doesn’t mean Utah can’t be a tech leader. But the state’s still figuring out how to strike the right balance between affordable energy creation, environmental protection, and improving public health.

“I don’t know of a state that is not having similar conversations,” said Tim Davis, the Department of Environmental Quality’s executive director. “That’s just a mind-numbing amount of new power that they’re trying to plan for.”

Novva applied to the Trump administration for a two-year exemption from the Clean Air Act in March, under a program designed to benefit coal plants, smelting facilities, and chemical manufacturers. The company asked for the exemption so it could operate using diesel generators while it finishes building its natural gas plant, according to records obtained by Grist and shared with The Salt Lake Tribune.

The company noted that Rocky Mountain Power can’t provide the electricity it needs until 2031, and even then, it’s not guaranteed. The requested exemption aligns with national security interests, Novva wrote in its application, citing the U.S. Department of State’s assertion that AI is “at the center of an unfolding global technology revolution” and can help make Americans safer.

Novva’s CEO, Wes Swenson, said he never received a response to the exemption request. He insisted, however, that data centers like his are important for protecting “American data.” “If anybody wants to criticize data centers, look in the mirror,” Swenson said. “‘I want Netflix, I want Prime, I want Apple TV.’ … Nobody goes to the library anymore. Who uses cash? Where do people think that all comes from?”

Utah’s elected officials have honed in on nuclear power, and small modular reactors in particular, as a cleaner and more sustainable solution to the surge in energy demand. The need is not just driven by data centers, but also a hoped-for renaissance in manufacturing and the future electrification of Utah’s transportation. But Rocky Mountain’s parent company, PacifiCorp, only has firm plans for one small reactor — a plant under construction by TerraPower in Kemmerer, Wyoming. It won’t come online until around 2032, and Utah will share its projected 500 megawatts with other Western states.

Enthusiasm for small nuclear reactors within Utah’s borders appears tepid. Brigham City is the only community so far to proclaim it wants to build them. But in making that announcement in November, state leaders were light on specifics in explaining why the small city needs the power. No known data centers are planned for the area.

Ninety minutes south in Eagle Mountain, Meta’s data campus is expanding, QTS’s huge data hub is under construction, and Google is waiting to build on 300 acres it owns within city limits. The city made two attempts last year to adopt an ordinance to allow for nuclear development and other energy projects, including solar farms. After receiving mixed feedback, the efforts failed.

Elected officials’ pivot to nuclear has environmental and clean energy advocates wondering why Utah has shied away from renewables. Cox calls his Operation Gigawatt an “all-of-the-above” strategy that welcomes all energy sources. But resources like wind and solar have faded from the conversation.

“People see renewable energy as the woke liberal energy, and we have to stick with fossil fuels and nuclear, because that’s what conservatives want,” said Ed Stafford, a professor of marketing at Utah State University whose research focuses on renewables. “Politicization of energy is just a bad thing, because, as common sense tells us, we should go with the cleanest and cheapest forms of energy that spreads the wealth around.”

PacifiCorp intends to bring no new solar, wind, or battery storage online in Utah over the next two decades, according to the latest draft of its long-term resource plan. Meanwhile, the utility isn’t factoring large energy consumers, like data centers, into its projections, to Mitchell’s frustration.

“Rocky Mountain Power should be planning for the reality of the future,” Mitchell said, “rather than creating a fictional reality that indicates they don’t have much load growth, and they’re not going to build new resources.”

A spokesperson for the utility said their future planning does include some customer requests for large loads. “We generally model only projects that have a high probability of being constructed,” the spokesperson said. “Many of the large load inquiries the company receives have a high degree of uncertainty.”

Data center developers and operators interviewed for this story said they support transitioning to cleaner energy sources. But they also need consistent and reliable power, when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. The Trump administration has delayed and stifled renewable energy projects across the United States. 

“The economic rebates and incentives are going away, which is why it’s not as in fashion as it was before,” said Conley, Creekstone’s CEO. “But a lot of [data] customers are willing to pay a premium for green energy instead of dirty energy.”

Conley’s company recently applied to the Utah Office of Energy Development to operate the Intermountain Power Plant’s remaining coal units, which went idle this year after the plant’s customer base in California decided to transition to cleaner energy sources. Coal offers Conley another energy source that’s ready to deploy besides natural gas. “Diversification,” Conley said, “reduces risk.”

Risk is at the forefront of at least some Utahns’ minds, particularly as news stories cite concerns that data centers will drive up the cost of power for all ratepayers. Utilities build new generating plants and upgrade decades-old grid equipment to meet rising demand, then spread the costs among all their customers. An October report, “What we know about energy use at U.S. data centers amid the AI boom,” from the Pew Research Center, estimated that both data centers and cryptocurrency mining could cause the average U.S. electric bill to grow 8 percent by 2030.

In Utah, however, Senate Bill 132 seems to serve a dual purpose of helping data center developers get the energy they need off the public grid and behind the meter, while protecting other customers who still use the traditional grid.

“There’s very little evidence that data centers have impacted rates to date,” said Michele Beck, director of the Office of Consumer Services, a utility watchdog part of the Utah Department of Commerce.

Beck called the bill one of the “best ideas out there” for protecting power customers in the nation. But, she said, it’s important for Utahns to remain vigilant. It’s not just utilities struggling to catch up to new demand. Regulators have struggled to keep pace, too.

“The industry in general is speeding up,” Beck said. “It just compounds everything.”

Grist reporter Naveena Sadasivam and Tribune reporter Addy Baird contributed to this story.