They Want to Build a 600MW Data Center Next to the Everglades

What Is Actually Being Proposed Here

According to The Guardian, developers have proposed building a hyperscale data center on a 202-acre parcel of land in western Palm Beach County, about 16 miles southwest of Mar-a-Lago, near the northern edge of the Everglades. The facility would operate at 600 megawatts of capacity. For scale, the US Energy Information Administration estimates that at peak draw, that's roughly equivalent to the power consumption of half a million American homes.

The site is not adjacent to the Everglades in some distant, abstract sense. It sits directly across the street from a pump station that serves as the first step in pushing freshwater into the southern Everglades system. The land around it feeds into a web of canals, lakes, and marshes that are hydrologically connected to Lake Okeechobee and everything downstream of it. You could not have drawn a worse location on a map if you tried.

The Algae Problem Nobody in Power Wants to Talk About

Here is where it gets genuinely alarming. Lake Okeechobee, which feeds the Everglades, already has a serious cyanobacteria problem. In recent summers, The Guardian reports, toxic blue-green algae blooms have covered nearly half the lake's surface. The Florida Department of Health in Palm Beach County issued a health alert about cyanobacteria in the lake as recently as July 30. This is not a hypothetical future risk. This is happening right now.

Cyanobacteria produce a toxin called microcystin. It makes people and animals sick. It contaminates drinking water. And the blooms thrive in warm, nutrient-rich water. Reinaldo Diaz, who founded Lake Worth Waterkeeper and grew up in Palm Beach County, told The Guardian that waste heat from the data center could raise water temperatures in the surrounding watershed enough to accelerate exactly that kind of bloom. Even a closed-loop cooling system, which the developer claims would reduce water consumption, still generates enormous amounts of heat that have to go somewhere. That somewhere, in this case, is an already-stressed watershed connected to millions of people's drinking water.

Emerging research cited by The Guardian suggests that even much smaller data centers can increase downwind air temperatures by as much as 2 degrees Celsius. A 600-megawatt facility dwarfs most of what that research looked at.

The Community That Showed Up and Actually Won (Sort Of)

Earthjustice attorney Christina Reichert is representing residents through the Western Palm Beach Community Alliance, which has been fighting to block developers from converting a previously approved 2016 plan for warehouses and a server farm into a full hyperscale facility. The existing zoning is light industrial. A 600-megawatt data center, Reichert told The Guardian, brings offsite water, air, and sound impacts that light industrial zoning was never designed to handle.

At a Palm Beach County zoning hearing last month, residents testified for more than 12 hours. They raised concerns about the proximity to a nearby elementary school, roughly 1,200 feet away. They talked about noise, heat, traffic, property values, and electricity bills. After all of that, the commissioners voted 5 to 1 to deny an expansion of the proposed data center. That sounds like a victory, and it partially is, but The Guardian reports that two more administrative applications from the developers, either of which could add significant square footage to the project, are still pending. The fight is not over.

Trump's Hot Take: Just Accept It

Last month, President Trump addressed concerns from data center neighbors at a press conference. His message, per The Guardian, was essentially: you're going to lose, so stop complaining. "You have to convince your community how great these things are. You can't fight it. You have to go with it," Trump said. This comes from a man whose private club sits 16 miles away from the site in question and who has never, in his life, had to worry about what cyanobacteria does to a municipal water supply.

Trump also reiterated a non-binding pledge encouraging data center developers to cover their own electricity costs, which is the kind of promise that sounds vaguely reassuring right up until you notice the word "non-binding." Sue Ellen Loyzelle, who lives in the planned community of Arden directly next to the Project Tango site, told The Guardian she appreciated the pledge as a starting point but was pointed about its limitations. "There's got to be a lot more guardrails," she said. She is correct.

Six Billion Dollars and a Very Bad Neighbor

The federal government and the state of Florida have spent $6 billion on Everglades restoration. That is not a typo. Six billion dollars, spread across decades, trying to undo the damage of drainage projects and agricultural runoff and development that carved up one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the Western Hemisphere. The Loxahatchee River, northeast of the proposed site, winds through one of the few surviving remnants of the northern Everglades beneath bald cypress trees and native palms. The Guardian visited the area recently and described the sound of dog-day cicadas drowning out distant traffic. It is, by all accounts, still worth saving.

Diaz put it plainly to The Guardian. "There's nowhere in Palm Beach county where it would be acceptable to put one of these," he said. "But the place they are choosing is egregious." That's not hyperbole. The proposed site is surrounded by water on multiple sides, sits adjacent to Everglades restoration infrastructure, and feeds into a watershed already dealing with toxic algae, drought stress, and fertilizer runoff. The developers chose this location anyway.