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SOCORRO — In April 2017, Jason Bak, then CEO of a company called Solar Alliance, pitched the town of Murphysboro, Illinois, a vision: a solar array manufacturing facility in a building that had once held a paper, foil and plastic packaging manufacturer but had been vacant since 2004, according to an article in the Southern Illinoisan.

The idea sounded almost too good to be true — including William Shatner as a company spokesperson (Shatner did make a brief appearance). Bak used all the right language — words like Bitcoin and solar power — claiming the world's first solar-powered Bitcoin mining facility could attract other tenants to Southern Illinois. In the end, it was too good to be true.

“I would not believe anything they say at face value, period,” Will Stephens, Murphysboro’s mayor, told the Chieftain. “The bottom line up front is that they promised a lot of things in Murphysboro that they never could deliver, whether or not that was because they just simply had good intentions and couldn't follow through because of financing or something else, I don't know.”

Fast forward nine years and Bak has now latched on to the next big thing: data centers. And he’s seeking to build “the world’s largest” green data center in Socorro. Now CEO of Green Data Center, his company specializes in renewable energy projects.

“We are leaders in history. We want to work with other leaders in the industry and the state,” Bak said at the Socorro Electric Co-op meeting in March. “The opportunity is that this is the largest data center in the state and the largest in the world.”

According to Bak, the Socorro project would generate 2 gigawatts of baseload power, with a goal of delivering 100 megawatts per month. The project includes battery storage for a 24/7 operation and water-neutral design using atmospheric water generation.

Bak’s proposed project comes at a time when communities across the country are rejecting data centers as a drain on resources that pollute and don’t yield much local upside like employment. In New Mexico, a massive data center known as Project Jupiter led by Oracle and Open AI, has been under attack for its potential water use and pollution. And the state Legislature passed a bill regulating data centers by enforcing renewable energy standards on their power sources and protecting consumer rates.

Bak now says the Murphysboro experience helped him focus on a strategy of larger renewables and he feels highly confident that, with community support, the project in Socorro will be successful.

“New Mexico Tech is different, and the state is different,” Bak said. “NMT has a skill set that is second to none. They would be an amazing partner. We were invited by them a few years ago, after we started working on another renewables-led project in the state.”

According to Bak, Green Data has been working at Spaceport America in Sierra County for about four years and plans to start construction there this year on a 50‑megawatt solar and battery project, which would provide roughly 5 megawatts of continuous power to a smaller data center.

Bak believes New Mexico has the best solar irradiance — the power per unit area received as electromagnetic radiation from the sun — in America.

“This allows for a new, economic, behind-the-meter design for a data center that allows for minimal grid usage in December and economically supports atmospheric water generators. We hope this is a template for all data center designs in the future, minimizing any emissions and any need for any community water,” Bak said. “We may be able to actually export power and water from the project, though we are still working through the design. We welcome these designs being vetted by NMT; they have the ability to do so and can be a leader in this space.”

In his presentation to the Socorro Electric Co-op, he said they can create excess power by overbuilding solar capacity, designing for worst-case winter conditions which will allow for surplus energy production during normal conditions. According to Bak, the atmospheric water generation machines in the Socorro plan will be able to pull moisture out of the air and condense it into liquid water.

During the February legislative session, he said he heard the concerns of environmental groups and his company aligned with those concerns.

“I personally have been developing renewable energy for over 20 years,” Bak said. “We felt that our design was best for the state, superior to others in the industry, and look forward to bringing the capital to the region in a responsible way.”

But back in Murphysboro, things didn’t work out that way. Stephens said the company couldn’t maintain the property or fulfill its plans. After about five years, its only concrete action was spending roughly $100,000 to tear down an old railroad roundhouse. Due to concerns about absentee landlords, he urged them to vacate the building, which enabled the community to recruit a different company that is now successfully providing 100 local jobs in airliner maintenance, repair and overhaul.

“I spent probably the better part of four or five years trying to make them a success here. But they had some other things, some other place, some new shiny object they were always chasing,” Stephens said. “It was always all flash and no substance.”

Bak defended his record in Illinois.

“It was a hard sell, but we invested more in that building and in Murphysboro than anyone had for a decade — about $1 million. This was during COVID, when we focused on smaller, cloud data centers for Zoom, teleworking, etc., while everyone was working from home,” Bak said.

According to Bak, the utility company Ameren moved too slowly and couldn’t provide the required interconnection size, so he moved on to larger projects.

“The town did well; however, we improved the property, completed data center design work, but sold it to another job generator that’s using the site today. We invested speculative cash, but the fundamentals weren’t there,” Bak said. “The mayor tried, but even he was unsuccessful in moving the utility forward.”

Bak said his company started as an environmental company, and they are genuinely committed to designs with minimal environmental impact. He said they plan to and are interested in increasing community engagement.

“We are absolutely going to engage with all community members to ensure they are heard,” Bak said.