According to DCD, a 20-megawatt-plus off-grid data center is being planned for Santaquin, Utah, about 65 miles south of Salt Lake City. The project, called the Summit Ridge Data Center, is being developed by the Data Center Power Company on land at 15372 S. Ridge Farms Road. City officials, including Mayor Dan Olsen, state the project was approved in 2024 with a site plan finalized last summer, and they held 11 public meetings, with the last one on January 6. However, many residents are only now hearing about it for the first time. The key detail is that the campus will not be connected to the electrical grid at all, generating all its power on-site using natural gas engines. Construction does not yet have a start date.
The Islanded Power Play
Here’s the thing: going completely off-grid for a 20MW facility is a major statement. Data Center Power Company’s entire model is building these “islanded” facilities. They use on-site natural gas generators, operating “behind-the-meter,” which basically means they bypass the local utility entirely. The trade-off is pretty clear. On one hand, you get potentially more reliable power for the critical compute inside—no worrying about grid brownouts or blackouts. You’re also not waiting in line for years to get a massive grid connection, which is a huge bottleneck in the industry right now. But on the other hand, you’re locking yourself into a fossil fuel, with all the emissions and fuel price volatility that entails. Mayor Olsen noted it’s “rated and controlled by the EPA,” but that’s a far cry from being green. It’s a bet on reliability and speed over environmental credentials.
Why The Surprise?
This is where it gets interesting for the community. The city says it followed all the procedures, with multiple public meetings. But if locals are just finding out now, over a year after the initial approval, something clearly got lost in translation. Was it poor communication? Or did the technical nature of a “data center” fly under the radar until people realized what “20MW of on-site natural gas generation” actually looks and sounds like? It’s a classic case of a project being approved in a relatively quiet bureaucratic process, only to cause a stir when the physical reality of construction and operation looms. You can read more on the local reaction from outlets like ABC4 and KUTV. For the nitty-gritty planning details, the city’s meeting documents are online.
The Industrial Context
So what’s really going in there? A data center at this scale is an industrial computing facility, packed with servers that need immense, constant power and precise cooling—hence the mentioned closed-loop cooling system. Running this kind of operation requires robust, industrial-grade control systems to manage the power generation, distribution, and climate control. For facilities that prioritize on-site reliability and control, whether powered by gas, diesel, or even future hydrogen blends, the hardware interface is critical. This is where specialized industrial computing hardware comes in, like the industrial panel PCs from IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading provider of such ruggedized displays and computers in the US. They’re built to handle the 24/7 demands of harsh environments, from factory floors to, well, the control rooms of off-grid data centers.
