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I've written about "delegates" and "trustees" in politics. Delegates focus on the wishes and opinions of the people who elected them. Trustees assume they know what's best and act accordingly.
In fact, the best leaders do their best work by using both approaches: listening carefully and widely, asking thoughtful questions, and providing their own opinions without belittling others.
In that middle ground, a thoughtful representative will listen, ask questions, make statements, discuss, listen more, ask more, discuss more, and work toward a balance of opinions and decisions based on facts, the community's opinions, and the law.
There hasn't been a lot of "middle ground" in the data center discussion. I have heard strong opinions from Council members from multiple perspectives, and I've heard claims from both sides, but there has not been much actual, factual information backed up with real verifiable data.
I like to start by figuring out what the real questions are - and they're not always the obvious ones - and then dig for the facts, question them for other meanings, and lay them out as plainly as possible for understanding. There are almost always more questions and interesting answers than you expect.
Once you have a large enough collection of verified information, then you can begin developing interpretation and analysis. Without that, without an exchange of ideas and perspectives based on facts, there is no basis for a rational decision.
Take data centers and water, for instance. The early data centers were water hogs. In some places, they still are. New technology tends to be resource-heavy, often copying what came before. Many industries use cooling towers, and the first data centers also used cooling towers. It was a known solution to the heat problem. No reason to reinvent the wheel, right?
But a data center is not a power plant. And clean water is a valuable resource and a critical issue. Redesigned data center systems use less water than in the past, and "closed loop system" is the new buzzword for data centers in general.
A closed loop system works a lot like your car's cooling system: the water circulates through the engine, carrying heat back to the radiator, where the water cools off and then goes back to pick up more heat. The heat still has to be disposed of, but that's the radiator's job and not a water issue.
The water issue comes when the system is drained for maintenance, repair, or the junk yard. In your car, you'll end up with about a gallon of contaminated water.
A closed loop cooling system at a data center will hold somewhere between a few thousand and several tens of thousands of gallons of water. That seems huge, until you realize that an average in-ground pool holds 15-20,000 gallons of water.
That closed loop system will be treated with many more and different chemicals to cut down on bacterial growth, mineral scale, and other problems that hot water is prone to. The good part is that once it's filled, it normally won't require much more water, unlike your car or the pool.
But at some point, the water and chemicals in that closed loop are going to go somewhere. Sometimes it's maintenance, and sometimes it's system failure or the end of the technology's useful life, but that
contaminated water will go somewhere. The closed loop system has solved the original resource issue, but disposal still remains. The rope has two ends.
A community that has already done thoughtful planning will have discussed water, both the clean water source and the contaminated water at the other end of the cycle, when it has to be dealt with. The questions will have been asked, and the plans will have been made for many scenarios.
That's why a smart community discusses the present and the future, thinking about (and pre-funding) "decommissioning" as part of the regulatory process. Otherwise, you could end up with another large abandoned building full of expenses and dangers for the city to figure out how to handle.
Ask thoughtful questions, collect verified information from more than one source, compare the answers you get and examine them carefully for flaws and hidden meanings. Who benefits from this answer? How about that one? Ask more questions. Keep track of the fine points and the major trends in the answers. Both delegates and trustees are valuble to the process.
That's how research and planning work. You start with a question, not assumptions. The wider your viewpoint, the more likely you are to see more than one possible answer; and those multiple answers often fit together into more useful plans, if the town puts the work into it.
This is that middle ground, the place where delegates and trustees (and the community) can meet and plan, if they're thoughtful.
So what are some thoughtful questions, some creative questions? What kind of wide benefits could a data center bring to a town? What if local entrepreneurs could tap into those resources to build online businesses or do software development? How could MCC or the high school participate?
What if the waste heat from the cooling system was used to produce power or heat? What if the data center used a retrofitted existing building, now that fiber optic cable is all over town? The "industrial" zones of town include several of those, and that's where a data center will be sited.
It worked for the old mall, and it might work for other buildings in town that are still in good condition. (I have added a link to the Marshalltown zoning map to getyourdatahere.org in case you'd like take a look and ponder what might be possible.)
All around the world, people are asking thoughtful questions and coming up with creative ideas about data centers. They are central to our lives, whether we like it or not. Time and willingness to really think and discuss are what's required. Easy answers won't be useful ones. And useful answers to complex questions are rarely easy.
Marshalltown is in a great position regarding data centers. With good planning, water will not be a significant problem. Alliant is obviously eager to maximize returns on their investment in Bobcat Energy, so it's a buyer's market for power. The fiber optic cable is already laid to provide good telecommunications. And people in Marshalltown are smart. That has not changed over the years.
Marshalltown has every reason to be thoughtful, careful, and creative while considering the future as well as the present. Marshalltown has time to blink and look to the future with clear vision. There is time to think.
So now it's up to the community, the Planning & Zoning Commission, and the City Council to work together and refuse to accept the fast and easy answers that won't last.
Annie Grieshop has lived in rural Marshall County for nearly 20 years. Having spent decades working as an historian of technology as well as for multiple technology companies (including 7 years in platform security at Microsoft), her involvement with many parts of technology and public policy is wide-ranging.