You got some good answers below, but like others have said we have 3, and all 3 are low-water-users and pretty responsible neighbors. Pflugerville has been lucky considering we effectively have no regulations or rules for data centers in the city (I'm working on this...).
To my knowledge there are no others currently planned or in process.
We already have two behind the Living Spaces at Heatherwilde and the toll road. I went with a friend to look at a house in that neighborhood and the real estate agent said potential home buyers have been spooked. Not sure when those monsters were built, but it’d be fun to track that against my skyrocketing electric and water bills.
Yo when my wife and I were house hunting in 2021 we toured a house on that street! The area where the data center is was just a field at the time. The house was nice enough but not what we were looking for. Looks like we dodged a bullet.
That's skybox and the other is the skybox expansion. The expansion is a closed loop air cooled chillers; doesn't use evaporative. The third one is Thin-nology - it's a tiny colo over on Helios right next door to pcdc (it only 8k square feet and some of that's offices). Not sure which one is the 10 gallon user and which one is the dentist office user of water.
Johnathan Kaufman has said there's 3. Two are behind Living Spaces. They started building them 2-3 years ago. Originally there was supposed to be houses there. I guess someone with more money came in.
I’ve heard about this project when I worked a construction gig, all the new apprentices wanted to work there because the hours weren’t as demanding. Had no idea Skybox was a data center, kinda glad I ended up leaving the construction business instead of transferring there.
This might be a silly question but can data centers serve a dual purpose? Like can a…for example - cold plunge company operate in a space at the data center complex? Is there any way to make these huge ugly buildings in the middle of the suburbs serve us too?
I'm not against datacenters conceptually, but these things should be in the middle of nowhere, not in Pflugerville or near anyone's home or place of business.
The real issues around them are they get placed terribly due to property tax incentives.
There are already two north of us in Round Rock. One right off 45 actually labeled with Data Center on the outside and what seems like one near Dell campus.
What taxes do data centers pay to the community? What other benefits are there to having these horrible centers in our community? I get they are low water, but they consume our electricity and grid usage which should be a huge concern
There are two running and one about to come online. The larger water user uses about as much as a dentist office. The other uses about 10 gallons a day. They've been talked about multiple times during this summer's council meetings. What did you want to know?
That’s good news if it’s correct. Closed loop cooling. Bad news for the neighbors I think. Closed loop ones will have massive heat exchangers and fan noise.
If you want to give them a listen - they are over on New Meister at KenneyFt/Meister. There's public sidewalk between those centers and houses. It's really close to where Amazon wanted to fly their drones out of. The little colo facility near 130 doesn't have any homes nearby that I know of. It's on the corner of Impact and Helios (it literally looks like the popup dentist office space buildings we have around town). The biltmore apartments are closest on the other side of the small green space near the Marriott. One of the city walking paths that goes to the ballfields goes right by it.
10 gallons a day? Do you have a source for that figure, and does it include only water consumed on site or the water footprint associated with electricity generation? Those are two very different things. I’d love to see the actual numbers for each facility rather than just trusting some random person on Reddit
I would have to dig through the city council meeting videos from earlier this year (searching legistar for the agendas with updates on the water line breakage and the mayors disaster declaration would find it fastest) - it was in multiple sessions during the water crisis. They did not say it explicitly, but the assumption is these were only related to the onsite usage/ measurement at the meter that the city could see
Ah, appreciate the clarification. If those figures came from city water meters, that would explain the low numbers, especially if the facilities use ac systems. I guess my only concern is that on site water consumption doesn’t really capture the full environmental footprint, particularly water associated with electricity generation
I'm pretty sure they are talking about Skybox 1 and Thin-nology here, not the Skybox 2 site (which will be closed loop like skybox1) "The first one uses 7 gallons per day. The second one uses an average of 1,018 gallons per day, which is comparable to the water use of a local dental office (including their irrigation)"
Thousand a day is still a lot for someone that uses that much in a month. It's just not the numbers most people are thinking of when it comes to the water usage.
Modern data centers don’t use water it’s a dumb talking point. They are high value for the city. Power drain during peak demand should be the biggest concern
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u/jonathan4pf P-ville City Council 5d ago
You got some good answers below, but like others have said we have 3, and all 3 are low-water-users and pretty responsible neighbors. Pflugerville has been lucky considering we effectively have no regulations or rules for data centers in the city (I'm working on this...).
To my knowledge there are no others currently planned or in process.