06/12/2026
I haven't posted here in while, but almost 20 years of photographing the wildlife along the Elk and Mississippi Rivers will bring you out of hiding when it matters.
This photo was taken on Earth Day 2026 at the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge, a place I volunteered at for 10 years and have been photographing since before most people knew it existed. A bald eagle feeding her eaglets at sunset. One of an estimated 40 to 60 active nests within 30 miles of Elk River, including up to 22 at the Sherburne refuge alone. At least another 36 are documented along the Upper Mississippi corridor from Elk River to Hastings.
As a 34 year Elk River resident, I'm sharing this today because our community is being asked to make a decision that could affect every single one of those nests, and most residents don't have the full picture yet.
A company called Elk River Capital LLC (created specifically for this project) is proposing a 33-megawatt data center at 19178 Industrial Boulevard in Elk River (I believe this is the old E&O Plastics building). Ironically, I used to work in the building right next door. The City Council public hearing is June 15th at 6:00 PM. The vote is July 6th.
Here's what I think everyone should know before then.
Data centers require 10 to 40 TIMES the power of facilities built before 2015. The electricity demand is enormous, and it has real consequences for our water, our wildlife, and our wallets.
Elk River calls itself "Energy City, Powered By Nature." In April 2026, Sherburne County rejected a 3.5-megawatt solar farm in Big Lake because residents found it “aesthetically unpleasant.” The proposed data center requires nearly ten times that power demand running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, forever, at the confluence of two rivers. I'll let that contrast sit for a minute.
What most Elk River residents don't know is that the city has been actively marketing itself as a data center destination. The city's own Economic Development website states: "A cooperative economic development department, reliable electrical power and sufficient water capacity combine to make Elk River a very desirable location for Data Centers." Those are their exact words. While residents were never told.
The existing data centers near the courthouse, a UnitedHealth Group facility that sold in 2023 for $90 million to global investment firm CloudHQ, and a Target data center right next door, are not in compliance with current city zoning. City staff confirmed this themselves during recent planning proceedings. They operate only because they were grandfathered in as legal non-conforming uses.
And now— and this is the part that matters most— the city is proposing to permanently amend Elk River's zoning ordinance to add data centers as an officially allowed use under Light Industrial zoning. A 33-megawatt data center running 24 hours a day, consuming the power of a small city, generating continuous industrial noise at a river confluence is not light industrial. Once that zoning door opens, it opens for every Light Industrial parcel in Elk River. Forever.
This isn't just an Elk River story. Across Sherburne County, Amazon and Microsoft have quietly purchased hundreds of acres near the Sherco plant in Becker— using shell companies with names like "Elk River Technologies LLC" that hid their identities even from local officials. In Monticello, just up the road, a $5 billion data center development is proposed right next to Bertram Chain of Lakes Regional Park, with a combined power demand of 400+ megawatts. Minnesota has 11,842 lakes and 92,000 miles of rivers and streams. The AI industry noticed. They are coming here specifically because of our water. And our communities are being asked to bear the costs while corporations get tax breaks until 2077. Yes— twenty seventy seven.
The water concern doesn't go away with closed-loop cooling. Generating 33 megawatts of electricity continuously consumes roughly 2 gallons of water per kilowatt-hour at the power source. Our watershed feeds the drinking water supply for Minneapolis and St. Paul— the Elk River flows into the Mississippi 25 miles upstream from their intakes. And data centers run loud. All the time. Never stopping. Research published in March 2026 found that a 10-decibel noise increase can shrink a hunting eagle's listening area by 90%. Birds like bald eagles, sandhill cranes, and great blue herons, all present in this corridor, are most likely to abandon habitat when chronic industrial noise is introduced.
Friends of the Mississippi River, which has an active restoration project at Bailey Point Nature Preserve right at our confluence, co-signed a February 2026 Star Tribune opinion piece calling for a two-year moratorium on data center development in Minnesota. The Mississippi River Islands Scientific and Natural Area, designated by the Minnesota DNR in 1979, sits directly downstream. Minnesota law— HF 16, passed in 2025— prohibits permit approval for data centers that cause adverse impacts to watershed health. Has that been evaluated here?
Residents deserve to know the truth.
I've been doing a lot of research on this— the shell companies, the watershed impacts, the wildlife corridor, and what's happening across the entire Sherburne County data center corridor. There is a LOT more to this story than one building on Industrial Boulevard. I'll be publishing my full breakdown on my Substack at substack.com/ — follow along there for the complete picture.
SheilaKayPhotography.com | substack.com/ | Sheila Kay Photography
Sources: Consumer Reports (March 2026) · Fortune (May 2026) · Bloomberg (2026) · U.S. Energy Information Administration · Minnesota Pollution Control Agency · Friends of the Mississippi River (February 2026) · Wildlife Society (March 2026) · Minnesota DNR · American Rivers (April 2026) · Elk River Star News (June 2, 2026) · Minnesota HF 16 (2025) · Data Center Dynamics (January 2023) · Elk River Economic Development Authority
