If a data center is coming to your town, you’ve probably been handed a tax slide, a logo on a jersey, and a higher power bill. We’re not here to tell you that’s fine. We’re here because the heat that building throws away could feed your town instead — and because a benefit you can’t verify is just another promise. So here’s the deal, and here’s how to hold us to it.
Let’s start where most of these pitches won’t. Across the country in 2026, more than half of Americans now blame new data-center construction “a lot” for rising electricity prices — it’s the single biggest concern people raise, ahead of water and noise.1 If that’s where your head is, you’re not being unreasonable. You’re reading the room correctly.
Here’s the honest part most companies skip: the link between any one data center and your specific bill is genuinely complicated — rates were climbing before AI, and independent analysts say blaming a single source oversimplifies it.2 We’re not going to pretend a greenhouse fixes your electricity rate; it doesn’t, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What we will say is narrower and true: the costs of these buildings land on you, and the benefits usually land somewhere else. That imbalance is the real grievance. And that, we can do something about.
People aren’t anti-technology. The polling is consistent: support for data centers in the abstract is high, and it collapses the moment the site is nearby — because at the property line, you absorb the noise, the traffic, and the worry, while the jobs and revenue feel distant and abstract.3 You’re not refusing the digital economy. You’re refusing a bargain where you pay and someone else collects. That’s a fair thing to refuse.
We understand the instinct to block it outright — sometimes that’s the right call, and towns have done it. But it’s worth being clear-eyed about what blocking usually buys: the project, and its tax base, moves to the next county that says yes, and your town gets neither the building nor anything in its place. The fight was real; the table is still empty.
You can see this playing out in real time. In Maine this spring, the legislature passed what would have been the country’s first statewide data-center moratorium — and the governor vetoed it, the override failed, so no statewide ban exists.4 Tellingly, the one project she moved to protect was a rural development that already had strong local support.5 Read that the way we do: the projects that earn community consent are the ones that survive. The fight isn’t really yes-or-no. It’s about what you get in return.
Design target Food and jobs are internal design targets for a ~2.5-acre flagship; temperatures are simplified for explanation.
A data center is, underneath the computing, an enormous heater — nearly all the power it draws leaves as heat, and today that heat is dumped into the sky. Our entire proposal is to give a thin sliver of it a second job: pipe it next door into a working greenhouse and grow food with it, year-round, for the people who live with the building — fresh produce grown across town instead of trucked in from three states away, at a time when the cost of food, and the long supply chain behind it, is on everyone’s mind.
The data center’s cooling is never touched — the greenhouse taps a sealed side-loop, the way a side channel draws off a river without slowing it. And the water that touches the servers never touches the crop; they were never the same pipe. (If you want the engineering, follow a drop of water through the whole trip, or read the math we hand the engineers.)
A data center is one of the very few buildings in your county built to ride out a blackout — it carries backup power most of Main Street doesn’t. Designed for it, the greenhouse next door can borrow that resilience: a heated, lit place that keeps growing food when an ice storm or a heat wave takes the grid down — local food that doesn’t depend on a truck getting through, in a building that stays on when others can’t. That’s a kind of insurance a sponsorship banner can’t buy. It’s a design intent we’d set with the engineer of record, not a promise we’d make before it’s built — but it’s real, and no one else is offering it.
Here’s the sharpest objection to a project like ours, and we think it’s the right one: a greenhouse could become a green fig leaf — a photogenic distraction that buys approval while the real impacts roll on. We agree that’s the danger. So the entire design is built so you don’t have to take our word for anything.
We’re not asking you to join a movement, or to trust a company you just met. We’re asking you to watch the meter, read the harvest numbers, and hold the permit to its word. If the needle doesn’t move, the idea fails in the open, where it should.
You have more leverage than you think — the consent of your community is the scarce thing in this entire industry right now. Here’s how to use it well.
No engineering degree required. Follow a single drop of water — and a joule of heat — from the server hall to a strawberry, and decide for yourself.
Take the tour →Your council can write the benefit into the permit as a condition of approval. Hand them the case we built for exactly that.
The page for officials →If there’s a project near you and you want to know whether this fits, tell us about it. We’ll be straight with you either way.
Start the conversation ↓1 Heatmap poll, May 2026. 2 E3 analysis, 2026; rate drivers are multiple. 3 HostingAdvice / Navigator surveys, 2025. 4 Maine LD 307 vetoed Apr. 2026; override failed — no statewide ban exists. 5 Governor’s veto letter, citing strong local support for the Jay project. † Greenhouse figures are engineering design targets for a ~2.5-acre, four-zone flagship.