Commissioners have approved an option to lease 25 acres to CDH Consulting, a Californian firm specializing in siting datacenters, which is hoping to attract a datacenter to the former Kinzua mill site.
Chris Hardin, president of CDH Consulting believes it's possible to attract a corporate datacenter to Heppner.
"The datacenter industry is pretty much a constantly changing animal," Hardin said. "We are seeing an age of expansion in the technology arena," he added.
Heppner offers relatively low-cost, reliable electrical power through the Columbia Basin Electrical Cooperative, Hardin said, and the fiber optics from WindWave Communications, both based in Heppner. The port's land also is available at a reasonable cost.
Discussions are in the preliminary stages More than likely, Hardin said, any datacenter built there would use a high-power density of 125 watts per square foot, have a high level redundancy and would have multiple backup power sources that would allow it to operate three days without commercial power.