Construction of a new data center in Iola will mean more electricity sales for the city.
In August, the city sold 10 acres of property north of Russell Stover Chocolates to Vine Energy LLC of Overland Park.
The company plans to put a data center on the property, with an option to purchase another 10 acres from the city within the next year.
Data centers are specialized facilities that manage, process and share large amounts of electronic information.
“There is just so much demand for computing power,” noted David Oliver of Vine Energy, who is spearheading the Iola construction project. “And that demand is still growing.”
There’s a reason why a person can, at the touch of his phone or a few clicks of a keyboard, call up pretty much any kind of conceivable bit of information instantaneously.
Getting access to that kind of voluminous information requires data centers.
And those, in turn, require large amounts of electricity.
The Vine Energy facility, which will fit easily inside a 60-foot by 60-foot building, is projected to use as much as 3 megawatt hours of electricity, a figure comparable to Iola’s largest industrial customers.
Iola City Clerk Roxanne Hutton said an industrial customer using 3 megawatts would have a utility bill of about $16,000 a month.
ADDING THE data center coincides with the city’s purchase in October of three diesel generators — which will add about 6 megawatt hours to the city’s electricity capacity. While the generators will scarcely be used, their generating capacity is key for the city to purchase wholesale power at a lower rate, and in turn to sell any excess capacity it does not use each month.
Fortuitously, the generators will be added to Iola’s north substation near the intersection of Marshmallow Lane and Miller Road, near to where the new data center will be located.
The substation’s proximity is important in that the city will be able to better allocate power to the facility, Phillips said.
“A lot of our system is based on redundancy,” Phillips explained. “We could provide electricity to it, anyway, but this makes it more stable.”
Oliver said equipment for the data center should be in place later this month, with construction beginning as early as December.
“I wished we could say we’d already started,” Oliver chuckled. “We’ve had a heck of a window in the weather to get this started.”
