> but lacks the capability to sink a well and pull water out of the ground?

But they also have to dispose of the heated water. An ordinance preventing that would cause complications.

And if electricity supplies are withheld, they then have to spend more money installing generator plant and ( vetted ) personnel to operate that.

> the NSA could still have giant data centers in this country by the simple expedient of building them on ships.

Ships require victuals, fuel and connectivity. Ships are subject to inspection by maritime authorities, unless stationed in international waters - which an intelligence agency would never risk.

~~

All of this would require a request for expansion of the budget, or alternatively eat into the operational aspects of the current budget.

In the absence of any high-level political will to address the underlying issue, making routine operations difficult and expensive would seem to be the only practical approach.

As you mentioned, the discharge of heated water would be regulated by the EPA, depending on the body of water they attempted to discharge it in (similar to how its regulated for coal and nuclear plants that use water for cooling).

If you're coming up with creative ideas to avoid this particular legislation, it's only fair to also allow for creative counter-measures.

Getting water in Utah is a bit harder than just sinking a well and pulling water from the ground. Even if you get water, it's likely to have high sand and/or salt content, making it unsuitable for water cooling of electronics.

And as you said,

> I can't take your ideas about policy seriously if you are not connected to practical reality.

Yup.

When you have the Army Corps of Engineers and a massive budget at your disposal, such problems tend to become marginal. It seems to have escaped everyone's attention that the Utah data center is only a couple of miles away from Utah's largest freshwater lake and there's a smaller lake only around a mile away, which already serves Camp William. The nearest river is only about 500 yards from the data center.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/NSA+Utah+Data+Center/@40.4...

Tell me again why this would be such a problem for the Federal Government in the unlikely event that Utah actually signed this into law and it remained in force in 2021. I'm pretty sure that water access was something taken into account when they selected the location from the data center in the first place, along with the possibility of the water supply being interrupted by sabotage in the event of war.

OK, first you said "Just dig a well", now you want to get the water from the river. But again, it may not be that simple.

Do you know how much water is in that river? It isn't all that large. Do you know how much of the water is already spoken for by various canals and city water treatment plants? Do you know whether any of the water in that river is actually available?

Same thing with the lake. The lake is the only supply of water to the river. You can't just pump a bunch of water out of the lake without cutting out the people downstream who need the water from the river.

This is Utah. It's a desert. Water's not a real plentiful commodity out here. It's precious and scarce. Most of the easy answers don't work. (If they did, somebody else would already be using the water from that source.)

I'm perfectly well aware that Utah is a desert, thanks. I also thought about who was using the water already; if I was the federal government I could, in a pinch, just eminent-domain the golf course that sits adjacent to the river in question. I would much prefer, of course, to have the Army Corps of Engineers

You can keep pretending that if this bill were to pass it would be a huge problem for the NSA and the feds, but the idea that the Utah government would be able to hold the facility hostage is a ridiculous pipe-dream.