RushShelby Energy Chief Executive Officer Chris Chastain sat down with TSN to discuss what would happen from an electrical standpoint of a potential data center in their service area.
If it moves forward, the Prologis proposal would be the first data center in RushShelby Energy's region. Chastain (a Rushville native who has been with the company for 20 years) said they're treating the industrial site just like they would any other industrial build in their region — Prologis will have to pay for 100 percent of the needed infrastructure upgrades of their project, just like POET and Bunge will do.
This would ensure the cost of the upgrades is not passed onto the ratepayer, he said. For clarification, the City of Shelbyville utilizes Duke Energy and Duke customers are unaffected by changes to RushShelby Energy. The current average bill for a customer is $200 for 1125 kWh of power.
"A lot of people talk about the strain a data center would put on the electrical grid," he said. "We go through multiple studies that talk about what would be necessary to make sure that this load or any load of a certain size can be handled at a certain point. Those studies tell us what things need to be done to the infrastructure, whether it be new power lines, new equipment on those lines, new substations, or even up to new generating units. One-hundred percent of that is being handled by the data center."
Prologis already completed two feasibility studies with RushShelby Energy over the last six months to determine if the site at State Road 44 and Interstate 74 ("Tindall South site") in Shelbyville is ideal for a data center. These electrical studies are the first step in the process of determining if the land is suitable, and the only studies Prologis has completed so far related to the site.
The RushShelby Energy transmission lines that run through the site are 345,000 volts. By comparison, the lines that supply power near Tom Hession Drive are only 138,000 volts.
"That's the key," he said. "You could put a data center [at Tom Hession Drive], but more upgrades are going to need to be done. A new transmission line would need to be brought in to serve the site, as opposed to [Tindall South] where it might just require the capacity of the lines to be increased."
Chastain said the studies that have been completed already give the power coop and the data center company a pretty good idea of what would need to be done to the Tindall South Land, which is mostly upgrading equipment on the power lines.
Those upgrades would benefit the power company as a hole by reducing the chances of rolling blackouts. It would also benefit the ratepayer because it will prevent them from having to pay for upgraded transmission lines when that time comes.
"Right now, if the data center didn't come in and that line needed upgraded, the people that pay for electricity would have to pay to upgrade that line," Chastain said. "With the data center coming down, it could be a benefit that the data center pays for it rather than passing that along to the ratepayers. That's a side benefit."
Substations would be needed to bring the power down from the transmission lines to the data center buildings. The number of substations a service area would need is dependent on power load.
"In this case, you need a substation because you have to transform that voltage down," he said. "Just like your house, you can't plug it straight into a 12 kV line. I have a transformer in front of my house. When you think about your house, you either have a pole and it's a gray box at the top of the pole, or you have a green box in the yard."
They do hum, but it should be a quiet hum, and anytime a transformer is louder then something is wrong, he said.
Additionally, Prologis will have to buy power directly from the source, not from RushShelby Energy, Chastain said. The power cooperative would act as a pass-through for the data center, which reduces the risk to RushShelby Energy and its ratepayers.
"I'm a member of RushShelby Energy," he said with a chuckle. "I know what my electric bill is each month. I don't want it to go higher."
If the city moves forward with annexation at its next meeting, Prologis will still have to complete one more study with RushShelby Energy and one study with MISO, the power grid for the midwest region. Chastain said that the MISO study could take 3-5 years or longer.
Chastain said RushShelby Energy can be reached at 765-544-2600, and staff is more than happy to answer questions.
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