Excerpt from this story from The Salt Lake Tribune:

Skeptics of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County are sweating about a lot more than its energy demands and potential toll on water supplies.

Turn out, it could create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology, said Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.

“I suspected it would not be good,” Davies said. “What I’ve found is it’s so much worse than I even thought it would be.”

News of the proposed sprawling data complex, dubbed the Stratos Project, became public last month. The project’s boosters say it will likely need 9 gigawatts of energy at full build — more than double the electricity currently used by the entire state of Utah. That energy will likely come from a pipeline carrying natural gas from Wyoming to Nevada, Oregon and California. The project’s developer, “Shark Tank” celebrity Kevin O’Leary, specifically chose Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley to build the complex because the pipeline spans it, state officials have said.

Davies has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations to better understand the shear scale of what’s proposed. And what he’s penciled out so far has him alarmed.

“Nine gigawatts, that’s a number that’s really challenging to get your brain around,” the professor said. ”Communicating the scale has been a real problem.”

The project will actually produce more than 9 gigawatts of energy, Davies explained, because anytime a gadget consumes power, it also produces energy in the form of heat, whether it’s a toaster, a car or a sprawling rack of computer servers.

All the heat the Stratos Project emits will add up to another 7 to 8 gigawatts of energy in the form of waste heat.

Typically, waste heat is generated far from the power plant itself, in homes, businesses or on roads where it dissipates.

But for the Stratos project, it will get dumped into the local environment of Hansel Valley, in the same geographic bowl as the power plant. That actually makes the data complex a 16 gigawatt thermal load project, the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day,” Davies said.

“What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies wondered. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high desert environment? A valley?”

The professor predicts dumping that much heat and energy into Hansel Valley will raise local temperatures by five degrees Fahrenheit during the day and up to 28 degrees at night.

“That’s the difference between Utah’s semi-arid climate and the Sahara Desert,” said Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University who has reviewed Davies’ estimates. “This would absolutely change the landscape.”

Evaporation would spike. The dewpoint could vanish, with devastating consequences on wildlife, plants and the fertility of land owned by other ranchers in the valley, the scientists said. Abbott suspects Hansel Valley would become another dust source on the Wasatch Front, in addition to the exposed and drying lakebed of the shrinking Great Salt Lake.