Ellendale

Like I was saying last week while Scott was away, we had a lot of really good conversations, but leading into today, talk about data centers and everything like that.

There's one right near my hometown in Oaks, North Dakota, and I have only heard good things and seen good things in the The community in Ellendale, North Dakota, is booming.

There's a lot of good people there that have traveled from across the country to work there.

I've got to meet some, including this last weekend while I was in Oaks.

Listen to them talk about the work they're doing and the community they have found in Ellendale has been very welcoming.

I think, again, it doesn't matter to me what your opinion is one way or another.

I think when a particular proposed project comes up, what matters is the people that actually call that particular thing home.

What did you want to tell us a little bit about today? Your thoughts on this particular proposed project?

...

in Ellendale.

I've seen...

I've, I've talked to people even at MPPD, and they give the excuse that, "Well, you see, they're using the, uh, the, the same wattage in off-peak hours as they're using in on-peak hours."

We've had some large ones, but we also are starting to have some what are called edge computing, where companies like Armada, who build these smaller data centers on a trailer, basically, and modulars.

And we have so much... capacity, and we're very rural, as you know, and so it's easy to find pockets where there's actually electricity, but this is an important stat because MDU Resources, Montana Dakota Utilities, headquartered in Bismarck, they've been feeding electricity to the little town of Ellendale.

They have a Huge data centers there.

And the result of that has been that retail prices have gone down about one penny per kilowatt hour in North Dakota.

A repeatable delivery cadence applied is now scaling across the whole platform.

Applied frames this as a continuation of long-standing local relationships rather than a new market entity at their Ellendale site in North Dakota.

And the CEO, Wes Cummins, framing is actually worth noting.

Securing the power is only the starting point with 250 of the 400 now operational and already fully leased.

So I think it's important to recognize that, and we come back to this community saying yes, what does it mean for a community to say yes? There are communities that genuinely want data centers.

So there's a place called Ellendale, North Dakota we wrote about.

It has 1,000 people in it.

They have a data center, and they have seen their tax revenue go up by three times since they have the data center.

Okay.

You know where he went to college? North Dakota, Ellendale.

Think that school's still there?

I've never heard of it.

He finished there.

Oh.

He started at North Dakota, Ellendale.

North Dakota, Ellendale.

and that's all orchestrated because it's happening in every community that I'm involved in.

Every time I get a phone call, it's to come because they want to bring about, like I stopped at Ellendale, North Dakota, on my way home for a few minutes and just couldn't believe what was happening there.

It was 6.30, 6.20 in the morning.

Yeah.