What we heard about data centers and battery storage
At the July 27, 2026 City Council meeting, the Council set aside most of the evening to learn about two subjects that keep coming up in Linn Valley: data centers and battery energy storage systems (BESS). Two guests presented and took questions, one on each topic.
Before anything else, the Mayor was clear about what the evening was and was not:
- This is research, not a decision. Studying a subject does not mean the City has decided to support it. Speaking with a company does not mean a project is approved. Listening to an expert does not mean the City accepts every claim they make.
- There is no data-center proposal on the table. The City is trying to understand the industry well enough to update its roughly 19-year-old comprehensive plan, decide whether this kind of use belongs anywhere in or near Linn Valley, and, if it ever does, what safeguards must be in place before anyone could apply.
- Nothing discussed that night gets built next month. These are long-term planning questions that will take expert input, community feedback, careful rules, and several public discussions.
The Mayor also explained why these two uses draw more attention than a smaller question like where a dog park should go: the scale of their potential impact, including location, noise, traffic, infrastructure, safety, environmental effects, property values, and the character of a small residential lake community with wildlife, dark skies, and limited municipal staffing.
Data centers: a return visit from Cory Plunk
Residents may remember our June post, I asked a data-center engineer the hard questions. That engineer, Cory Plunk of Salute, joined the meeting to walk the Council through the same ground in person and answer questions. He was careful to say he was there as an individual expert, not as a representative of his company, and, as we noted in June, his views are informed-industry perspective, not those of a neutral referee. Here is what he told the Council.
- Water is largely a solved problem, if the City requires the right design. Older facilities used evaporative cooling towers that consume a lot of water; the industry is moving to closed-loop, air-cooled systems. His advice: require air-cooled cooling (no evaporative cooling) on day one. This matches what our water pages already say.
- Power should not raise residents’ bills, if it is handled correctly. Data centers look for existing (“stranded”) power and are typically willing to pay for the substations and infrastructure to serve themselves. Requiring them to build that infrastructure keeps the cost off residents and can even help spread the cost of maintaining the grid.
- Noise is the hard one. Data centers run a great deal of air conditioning plus backup generators. His recommendation: require a third-party acoustical study, set an enforceable decibel limit at the property line, and back it with real penalties, because equipment can degrade and get louder over time. He also suggested Tier 4 emissions standards on generators. This is the same theme our noise concern and Noise & Infrasound FAQ cover in depth.
- Light, access, and fire all need up-front rules. Dark-sky, full-cutoff light fixtures and property-line limits keep the night sky dark; site access should keep fuel deliveries and traffic out of residential streets; and the City needs to plan for emergency response to a large building.
- Jobs and taxes. A useful rule of thumb is about one permanent on-site job per megawatt, plus construction jobs and local service and vendor work. On taxes, Kansas does not tax the equipment inside a data center, so the building itself is taxed like a warehouse; the larger revenue for the City would come from a 5% franchise fee on the facility’s electric use and 1% sales tax, and Kansas law requires such facilities to buy local power for at least 10 years. The Mayor cited a rough, unofficial estimate of around $3 million a year for a 100-megawatt facility. That figure is a ballpark for discussion, not a projection or a promise.
- Decommissioning. A decommissioning clause in the ordinance would require an operator to clean up and restore the site if it ever closed.
Asked about the biggest mistakes cities make, his short list was: not engaging the public early, not addressing noise and enforcement, not planning for site access, and not partnering with the operator on fire safety.
Battery storage: an inquiry from Silverton Power
The second presentation came from Georgia Misler of Silverton Power — the same company whose inquiry we shared in June, An inquiry about a battery storage project on City land. The company has asked about leasing about an acre of city-owned land near the existing Evergy substation to build a small battery storage facility. Unlike the data-center discussion, this is a real question in front of the City, so we want to be equally clear here: Silverton is an interested party proposing a project, and the City will verify its claims independently before any decision.
What the company presented:
- What it would be. A small, local (“distributed”) battery site of about 5 to 10 megawatts using fewer than four lithium-ion battery containers. It would store surplus wind and solar energy and feed it back into the local grid, which the company says can improve reliability for the valley and nearby homes on that circuit.
- Safety. Battery storage is governed by fire codes (NFPA) and large-scale fire testing standards (UL 9540A), including newer tests for whether a failure can spread from one container to the next. The presenter said modern units are purpose-built, double-walled, sealed containers with multiple layers of monitoring designed to shut down a problem cell before “thermal runaway,” and that in a fire the correct response is to cool the perimeter and let the unit burn out rather than put water on the batteries. She cited an industry figure of roughly 10 incidents per year worldwide even as deployments grew about 65-fold over the past decade. Our Battery Fire Safety page covers this concern in more detail.
- Noise and appearance. The main noise source is HVAC, described as roughly the level of a home air-conditioner and about 60 decibels at the property line. Because the site would sit near the main road and homes, screening, fencing, and trees would matter, and the company said it prefers to be set back from the highway.
- Money and jobs. Construction jobs plus roughly one local operations person; the site is monitored remotely around the clock. For city-owned, tax-exempt land, the company pointed to a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) agreement and a possible community benefits agreement, tools the City could also apply to a data center.
Council members pressed on the fact that Silverton is a new company (founded in December 2025), that this would be one of its first projects, and what would protect the City if the company failed partway through. The answer was a financial surety tied to decommissioning that lasts the life of the project. These are exactly the kinds of assurances the City would need to see in writing.
A note on electric rates
Because rising electric bills are a common worry, Council members noted that the Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC) sets utility rates, that there have not been rate increases attributed to data centers so far, and that KCC policy can require large users to cover their own infrastructure, which can help protect, and in some cases lower, residents’ bills. The City can also address rate protection through its own ordinance.
What happens next
None of this commits Linn Valley to anything. The path forward is the same one the Mayor described at the start of the meeting:
- Continue updating the comprehensive plan as a community conversation about what Linn Valley should look like in 10, 15, and 20 years.
- Write safeguards into the ordinance, on noise, setbacks, water, fire, light, traffic, and decommissioning, before any application could be considered.
- Hold more public discussion, including a possible town hall where residents can ask questions directly.
If you have questions or think we have gotten a fact wrong, please tell us. You can also read the fuller background on Concerns & Responses, the draft ordinance, and our FAQ.
Researching these subjects is how the City does its due diligence. It is not a commitment to build anything. We would rather have these conversations openly, even while they are unfinished, than present residents with a finished decision.