Stop the cosmos, Wyoming wants to get off

March Madness.

A month that saw the return of "Cosmos" also brought us a maddeningly unscientific move by the State of Wyoming.

On March 14, the Casper Star-Trib explored the effects as Wyoming (through a footnote in a bill passed by the Republican-dominated legislature) became the first state to block national science standards:

One of lawmakers' big concerns with the Next Generation Science Standards is an expectation that students will understand humans have significantly altered the Earth's biosphere. In other words, the standards say global warming is real.

That's a problem for some Wyoming lawmakers.

"[The standards] handle global warming as settled science," said Rep. Matt Teeters, a Republican from Lingle who was one of the footnote's authors. "There's all kind of social implications involved in that that I don't think would be good for Wyoming."

Teeters said teaching global warming as fact would wreck Wyoming's economy, as the state is the nation's largest energy exporter, and cause other unwanted political ramifications.

Micheli, the state board of education chairman, agreed.
"I don't accept, personally, that [climate change] is a fact," Micheli said. "[The standards are] very prejudiced in my opinion against fossil-fuel development."

We staties realize that a chunk of our salaries comes from taxes on coal that is burned in rickety old power plants that produces greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. Many of us also have children or grandchildren who attend science classes in Wyoming public schools where teachers should be teaching science and not some hare-brained wingnut theorem based on how many Tea Party votes there are in Lingle. I also know that Wyoming doesn't exist in a vacuum, that every wacko move by our legislature has a way of zooming around the Internet for everyone to read. Thinking about moving your family to Wyoming? Interested in having your kids learn that coal is the breakfast of champions or that our ancestors rode around the prairie on dinosaurs? We have just the education system for you. And good luck getting into that tier-one university.

The above Casper Star-Trib article went viral this week, with coverage by the Washington Post and Education Week, among many mainstream news outlets, as well as progressive blogs such as Daily Kos and Think Progress.

One might speculate that pols such as Teeters and Evanston's Micheli (also a Repub) are purposefully going out of their way to portray Wyomingites as a bunch of bumpkins just so people won't flock here when floods, caused by nonexistent global warming, inundate the coasts. That attitude is in stark contrast to our governor's efforts to attract tech-savvy companies to Wyoming. For two years, I've heard him at the Wyoming Broadband Summit push for more tech companies to locate in Wyoming. I've also heard him lobby for increased connectivity, from Cheyenne to Jackson, from Lingle to Evanston. We all want greater connectivity. The danger, of course, if that communiques from Wingnuttia reach the wide wide world much quicker.

Wyoming Broadband Summit: New generation of Microsoft data centers to be tested in Cheyenne

Microsoft's Gregg McKnight was in Cheyenne today talking about a pilot project for a new kind of data center. He was a speaker at the first Wyoming Broadband Summit at Little America.

Asked McKnight: “Who would have expected Cheyenne to be the place where the next generation of data centers would arise?”

Not me. Maybe not you, or your neighbors. And possibly not McKnight, not until he visited Cheyenne a few months ago.

He was greeted warmly by officials from the University of Wyoming, Cheyenne LEADS, Board of Public Utilities and other members of the community.

“This was a dream” he said, adding that, over the course of several days, he discovered that Cheyenne “was the ideal location to do business.”

Microsoft wants to build a $7.6 million data center that will run off of methane produced by the city’s Dry Creek Water Reclamation Facility. To that end, the city of Cheyenne will apply for $1.5 million from the Wyoming Business Council's Council’s Business Ready Community Grant and Loan Program. Three weeks ago, the Cheyenne City Council’s Finance Committee gave its approval to move the request forward. If approved, the grant would cover up to $1.5 million of the project’s total cost, with Microsoft providing the balance.

According to officials at the computing giant, the project would consist of the data plant, which would be connected to a fuel cell. Both would be in close proximity to the water reclamation facility, which is located on Campstool Road just south of Interstate 80.

The fuel cell would collect excess methane gas from the water reclamation facility’s biodigester and would then convert the gas into about 300 kilowatts of electricity. The data center itself would require only 200 kilowatts to run. Not sure where the remaining 100 Kw would do. Presumably it could be used for other energy needs in Cheyenne.

The plant will test Microsoft's new “siliconization” process, which utilizes silicon to move beyond the era of the microprocessor. McKnight gave a quick explanation which went way over my head. He showed a slide that illustrated this formula: “Si Systems + Fuel Cells + Modularity=Reimagine the Data Center.” Sounds cool to me. Faster technology is needed for the 200-plus cloud services Microsoft now provides. “There will be a twelve-fold increase in the amount of info that flows through the optic fiber backbone in the next five years,” McKnight said. He called the Cheyenne experiment the next step in “the evolving data center.”

The fuel cell data plant is separate from a $112 million cloud data center Microsoft has proposed to build to the west of Cheyenne, near the recently-opened National Center for Atmospheric Research supercomputing facility.

McKnight is quite happy with Cheyenne. And why wouldn't he be? The state of Wyoming has pledged $10.7 million in grants and incentives for the cloud data center project. Microsoft is making an initial $78-million investment and plans to go up to $112 million, according to Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead, who also spoke at Tuesday's summit. He's a big believer in data centers. And I'm beginning to believe that he's on the right track. All of this will change Cheyenne for the better. New technology. New ideas. New people moving in. New energy mixes with old energy. Not sure what the formula is for that, but it could be a heady mix.