Maybe if they tried to build some of these on existing dilapidated commercial or industrial plots that are vacant and languishing they wouldn't have to jump through so many procedural and political hoops. I'm told these exist all over rural america.
replyInstead they want to build their 100 acre Data-Center/Technology Industrial Park adjacent to the burrowing owl habitats or up against Grandma Martha's backyard.
Building on vacant industrial land is more expensive because you have to clean it up first. It might even be a superfund site, no one is interested in actually finding out. There hasn't been any room on compromise or cleanup assistance in most cases.
replyThere is also additional risk here. If company X made an unknown superfund site, then company Y develops on it. Is company Y then liable if the superfund site becomes known?
replyAll this speculation is pointless. Superfund sites haven't had their cleanup funded by the companies doing the pollution since 1995, when congress decided that the tax on companies to fund such cleanup (which had funded 70% of the cleanup of superfund sites up to that point) no longer needed to exist, and since then the taxpaying public of you and me have been paying every single dollar for cleaning up the pollutants these companies emit.
replyYou didn't have to pay to cleanup a site before using it, because the expectation was that you paid while running your business and the site would be cleaned before you wanted to utilize it.
But now the "Superfund" has been underfunded for like 20 years. Biden's IRA set up a new tax for ten years but, not sure how well that's going.
We literally had the system set up well and working fine, but it cost companies a few dollars so it had to go when the "Greed is good" folks came along.