I asked a data-center engineer the hard questions
When I posted on LinkedIn asking people in the industry to weigh in on what Linn Valley should be thinking about, I didn’t expect a senior engineer to volunteer an hour of his time. But Cory Plunk did — and I learned a lot.
Cory is SVP of Data Center Operations at Salute and a licensed professional engineer out of the Dallas area. Salute is a company that operates and staffs data centers (it started a decade ago placing military veterans into the industry); it isn’t a developer trying to build anything here. In other words, Cory has spent his career building and running these facilities, but he has no stake in whether Linn Valley ever says yes or no. He reached out simply to help.
I want to be straight about one thing up front: Cory works in this industry, so he sees its upside clearly, and you should weigh what he says as informed-industry perspective — not as a neutral referee. That’s exactly why the rest of this site leans on independent sources. But it was genuinely valuable to hear from someone who does this every day, including which worries he thinks are overblown and which are real. Here’s what I took away.
The thing people worry about most may not be the thing that matters most
The concern I hear most is water. Cory’s view — and it lines up with what our own water pages already say — is that water use comes down to cooling type. With air-cooled systems and no evaporative cooling or cooling towers, there’s essentially no cooling-water consumption and no cooling-tower wastewater; the only water use is bathrooms and landscaping. That’s precisely the direction we’ve said we’d require, and he agreed it’s where most new facilities are headed anyway. (We still take the water questions seriously and keep them sourced — see Water Quality — but on cooling water, the honest answer is “it depends on the design,” and the design we’d favor uses very little.)
The real concern, in his words: noise — and the generators
Here’s the part I most wanted residents to hear. Cory was blunt that the bigger, more legitimate concern is noise, and specifically diesel generators. A large site can have dozens of generators, each bigger than a Suburban. They’re backup only — but they get monthly test runs, so a few fire up periodically, and in a genuine extended power outage, they can all run for a day or more. On top of that, the cooling equipment runs 24/7.
His point wasn’t “this is a dealbreaker” — it was “this is real, and you have to engineer for it up front.” He’s seen newcomers to the industry genuinely believe they’ll control the sound and then not pull it off. So he gave me concrete things to require, which is the most useful part of the whole conversation.
What he told me to require
- A third-party acoustical study, done by a qualified acoustical engineer, that measures real sound at the property line — including when the generators are running. Don’t take the developer’s word for it. (We don’t currently have a noise ordinance in that area; we would adopt clear limits — see Noise.)
- Tier 4 emissions controls on the generators. Loudoun County, Virginia — the biggest data-center hub in the country — requires this, every major generator maker can meet it, and it cuts the exhaust dramatically.
- Validated battery fire suppression. The on-site backup batteries are typically lithium, and they need proper gas-based suppression in a contained area, designed to the manufacturer’s specs and verified by a third-party fire-protection engineer — with our fire district fully in the loop (more on Battery Fire Safety).
- Spill containment for the on-site diesel.
An honest comparison on the diesel
A big site might keep 100,000-plus gallons of diesel — but split across multiple tanks, so any single spill is far smaller, with required containment. Cory’s comparison: it’s in the same ballpark as the fuel storage at a truck stop. I found that genuinely useful, since some folks here have also asked about bringing in a truck stop — the spill profile isn’t dramatically different.
Jobs: modest, but real and accessible
I asked him directly about jobs, because I don’t want to oversell them. His answer: roughly 15 full-time people per large building (a number in the same range as the 20-25 Minooka officials told me), plus a good deal of well-paid vendor and technician work that staffs up locally. Just as important for us: these jobs have low credential requirements — the industry routinely trains people with zero prior experience, and hires a lot of veterans and career-changers. For a bedroom community like ours with almost no local jobs, even a modest number of good-paying, accessible jobs matters (this is part of why we’re looking at this).
Taxes and leverage
Cory was matter-of-fact about the money: these are billion-dollar developments, so the tax base is significant, and the mitigations we’d ask for (more berms, better sound control, community contributions) are a small fraction of a developer’s spend — which means a city has real leverage to insist on doing it right. And he said plainly: don’t feel pressured into tax giveaways. The era of small towns bending over backwards with giant abatements is fading, because the developers have the money now. That matches what we’ve found in our Case Studies and the utility-cost FAQ: the outcome depends on the terms a community negotiates.
Real-world reassurance — and honest caveats
He showed me photos of operating sites with homes directly across the street and no noise complaints, because they were sited and designed well. That matches what I experienced in person near Chicago, where I stood outside an operating facility and couldn’t hear the “hum” people describe online.
But he was also candid about the caveats, and I want them on the record too: not every location is right for a data center; during a rare extended outage the generators could run for a few days and a close neighbor might hear them; and none of the mitigation works unless the design is done right and the city requires it.
How this shapes what we’re doing
None of this changes our approach — it sharpens it. It reinforces favoring air-cooled, no-evaporative-cooling designs, requiring a third-party noise study with real limits, considering Tier 4 emissions, validating battery fire suppression with our fire district, requiring spill containment, and keeping the leverage to make any project pay its own way and contribute to the community.
What’s next
Cory offered two things, and I took him up on both. He’s going to review this site and our draft rules and tell me where we might not be strict enough. And he’s open to addressing residents directly at a council meeting by Zoom, to answer your questions himself. I want you to be able to hear from people who actually build and run these — especially people with no stake in what Linn Valley decides.
As always: this is one informed perspective, offered candidly. Weigh it, check it against the sourced material on the rest of this site, and make up your own mind. That’s the whole point.