University of Tulsa

Switchyard Volume 4

Power Failure: On Landscape and Abandonment

This expansion of the electric grid and demand for power comes at a moment when the consensus among scientists is dire at best. We’re a mere decade from a point of no return if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate catastrophe.

The data center has only one possible ending: abandonment.

Words by Author Mya Frazier.

It had been a brutal harvest for farmers.

The corn, the soybeans, the wheat fields, all rust-colored, almost Mars-like in hue.

There were no green fields.

A construction boom that in some alternate universe might have gone to building actual sustainable and technologically superior libraries, community spaces, cleaner farms, or even meeting basic human needs in the present: gardens and bike paths and sidewalks, or affordable homes.

Ron Van Winkle worried about the creek on his property and the utility’s plans to “remove trees that presently hold our creek bank intact.” Sarah and Shaun Collignon, who live on five acres, were too far from the lines to receive any compensation, but not far enough that the lines wouldn’t destroy the peaceful sanctuary they’d built for their three young children: the garden at the edge of the property, the chickens roaming freely in the yard, a tree house built by grandpa, the unobstructed view of sky and fields, the garden where the children “gather blackberries in the summer, run with the dog, find interesting insects, play in the leaves.”

Other locals submitted comment letters to the state’s regulatory body charged with approving the lines. They worried about losing their unobstructed views of fields and forests. Some had moved away from cities specifically to escape the snarl of overhead lines.

As the body’s vascular system circulates blood, transmission lines carry power across great distances, most of which is still derived from burned coal, fracked gas, and the potent hydrocarbons of methane.

Data centers, in the plainest terms, are nothing more than buildings—gleaming windowless monstrosities but just buildings.

Many of those data centers service Amazon.

I stood in blinkered awe: the lines really did hum. These two discordant sounds—the crackle and the hum—morphed into something more spectral.

The wind picked up, and for the briefest of moments, my entire body felt electrified, as if some inescapable force had surrounded me.

Their massive steel towers, as high as 180-feet, require wide corridors the size of football fields. After the mass clearing of trees and vegetation, vast swaths of rural countryside and farmland are rendered useless for much else.

150,000 miles of transmission corridors, enough to circle the equator six times.

Those giant windowless buildings will come to symbolize the post-agricultural landscape as surely as the worthless artifacts of our post-industrial age: the “ghost boxes” of shuttered Walmart superstores, the deserted shopping malls, the defunct Rust Belt factories.

Every bit of it demands more and more electricity, amping up demand for fossil fuels, and it requires astounding amounts of water—a large data center can require as much as five million gallons of water a day.

The shocking $65 million bribery scheme ended in early 2024 with Sam Randazzo, the former chair of Ohio’s public utility commission, which first approved the Amazon rate deals, found hanging from a rope in an empty warehouse, dead from suicide, as he was faced with a long jail sentence.

Like us, data centers can only consume—electricity, water, space. At most, they promise to drive the revolution that makes humanity obsolete.

Instead, we’re doing the most destructive thing imaginable: transforming the landscape irrevocably, adding at an astonishing clip to the estimated 11,000 energy-and-water-hungry data centers already in operation globally. With thousands more planned. Whether we fully recognize the consequences or not, we’re giving in to corporate America’s thirst for power and callous indifference to environmental cataclysm.