By Ned Seaton
Ten to 15 buildings and a facility that uses an amount of electricity equal to a third of the capacity of Jeffrey Energy Center.
Those are some of the specifications of a proposed data center in Pottawatomie County that members of the county’s planning commission have heard so far.
Beltline Energy, the Atlanta-based developer brokering the deal, has said that it wants to build a large-scale data center near Jeffrey Energy Center, a power plant north of St. Marys that’s owned by Evergy, and sell to another company. Beltline reps have held meetings to lay out some of their plans, but they have not submitted an application to the government, in part because the land they’re considering using is zoned for agricultural use and couldn’t be used for a data center without a change in the regulations. The county is currently working on draft regulations for such facilities.
