Supporters, protesters and curious community members all gathered in Sunland Park yesterday for the Project Jupiter open house and career fair.
Concerned community members have been asking Doña Ana County commissioners for a public meeting to have their questions answered.
The Project Jupiter team and representatives from Oracle, Open AI, and Stack Infrastructure held an open house and career fair that replaced the requested meeting.
In a statement sent to KRWG, Oracle said the event was designed to give the community, “direct access to project representatives and subject matter experts to ask questions and get the facts about the project.”
Protesters stood outside of the open house talking to people going inside. Annie Ersinghaus with Fighting Chihuahuan Desert Extraction (FCDX) was part of this group. She said she felt that her questions were still not answered properly.
“They are satisfying the community here with free food, with little toys for their children, with tote bags, and with fake answers and not fully complete answers.”
Jonathon Copeland is another concerned community member who had a similar experience.
“We keep hearing about the jobs the jobs it's going to create and so what concerns me is that we have water issues already,” he said.
Inside the room was filled with representatives, employers, and community members. I spoke to Senior Director of Product Strategy at Bloom Energy, Akhil Batheja.
“People have come out with a genuine sense of curiosity wanting to learn more. They’re looking for reassurance. The project switched from a combustion technology to fuel cells and people wanted to understand that change,” Batheja said.
Fuel cells use natural gas to produce power without combustion, which reduces emissions he said.
“Importantly for New Mexico it's also a water neutral technology so it does not consume water during normal operations and it’s also a very quiet technology and suites the project really well and benefits the community in a number of ways through that.”
El Paso resident, Sebastian Heredia said he left the event feeling positive about the data center.
“Talking to the individuals here, it really opened my eyes to what good it could do to the community” he said. “I feel informed I feel less worried about the data's consumption I feel improved about the job security here not only in Sunland Park but the neighboring towns.”
Oracle announced this week that they will continue community outreach. Doña Ana County commissioners plan to launch a q&a section on the Project Jupiter website and to gather subject matter experts to answer community questions.
