How much power, and on whose grid?
A hyperscale data center is, in physical terms, an electrical load with a roof. So the obvious question — how many megawatts? — is also the hardest to answer, because no one is required to say. The art is reading the records that do exist for what they let slip.
What the air permit discloses
Google’s campus holds an IDEM Title V air permit — Indiana’s major-source operating permit. A
data center is an air source for one reason: its diesel emergency generators, the fleet that
keeps the servers alive through a grid outage. The permit discloses the fleet: 34 diesel emergency
generators, 26.4 MMBTU/hr each. [verified]
That genset count is a floor signal. Hyperscale campuses back up their IT load N+1 or 2N, roughly
genset-per-data-hall; 34 units is the scale of a multi-building campus, consistent with the seven
buildings the site plan shows. What the permit does not state is the campus’s actual IT-load
MW — the number the whole subsidy debate turns on. [open]
The skill: read an air permit for its disclosure boundary. It must list the gensets (they emit); it need not list the IT load (that’s not an air question). The silence is structural, not accidental.
The number nobody states
The campus’s electricity demand is genuinely undisclosed. In its place, the public record offers
a substitute: Google and its utility, Indiana Michigan Power (I&M), won IURC approval for a
demand-response program — an agreement to curtail machine-learning workloads in certain hours to
ease grid strain. [verified] A demand-response deal is a tell that the load is large enough to need
managing — but it is a behavior, not a capacity figure.
For system-wide scale: I&M projects its peak demand roughly doubling — from ~4,000 MW to ~8,000 MW
by 2030 — explicitly driven by hyperscaler data centers, of which this is one. [reference] Because
the campus MW is undisclosed, the platform’s SiteFacility power basis stays None: we do not
fabricate the figure the permit withholds.
Whose grid
The campus is served by I&M (EIA #9324), an AEP subsidiary regulated by the IURC (Indiana
— correctly not Ohio’s PUCO), settling in the PJM AEP pricing zone at a day-ahead annual mean of
$45.81/MWh. [verified] That the load lands on an AEP-zone grid puts Fort Wayne on the same
wholesale market as the network’s Ohio AEP sites — the cross-state comparison made concrete.
The shape of the deal
Hold the pieces together: $2 billion in capital, roughly 200 permanent jobs, and a 10-year
50% property-tax abatement worth ≈ $55.5 million. [verified] Allen County’s information-sector
location quotient is 0.44 — the sector is under-represented locally. [reference] This is the
network’s recurring shape: the campus is an electricity and water load, not an employment base —
billions in capital and public subsidy for a couple hundred jobs and a very large meter.
Records read in this chapter (in the library under Records):
idem/fort-wayne/47378f.idem.yaml— the Title V air permit (the 34-genset backup fleet).fort-wayne/datacenter-facility.md— the I&M demand-response program, the abatement, the load-not-jobs read.