Consultant talks about AI center

Consultant talks about AI center

Published 12:00 am Saturday, January 24, 2026

At Tuesday’s meeting, the Lawrence County Commissioner’s first speaker was Dean Greene, the man who helped bring in the Strata Expanse data center.

The commissioners invited him to speak.

Greene said he came to Lawrence County a few years ago to put in a solar field in Ironton and realized “that this is a good place to live, it’s a good place to work. The people are nice and genuine. So I moved my office here, which is a consulting group.”

He addressed several issues the community has had about data centers.

“I am the one that asked Strata Expanse to come here,” he said, adding they are not like other larger companies. “For one, on the noise issue, they don’t use fans to cool the data center. They use geothermal, so you don’t have the noise issue. That is a big issue with data centers, especially if you have a lot in one place.

As for concerns that the data center will be using water to cool and then release it, he said they don’t do that.

“They don’t use any water, except for the bathrooms and anything like that, just normal office use,” Greene said.

As for energy use, he said they are providing their own energy with solar panels to provide electricity. He said they will also be using graphine batteries, then they have hydrogen cells as secondary back up and the third back up is the electrical grid.

“So they would have to have the other two down before they would even use the grid,” Greene said. “By having the redundancy with the other two, they actually sell back and provide more power to the grid than they use.”

The company plans to sell electricity to the power company, so electrical costs should not go up and could possibly go down, he said.

Strata Expanse has already agreed to sell electricity to the power company if there is a power shortage and will shut down their operations to provide that electricity and they will sell at wholesale cost.

“They won’t make money on that,” Greene said. “They are doing that for the community.”

He said they are not trying to change Lawrence County and that Strata Expanse “is not here to change it. They like it as well.”

Greene said that the contractor for the data center is from Lawrence County and Strata Expanse is using that company for their other projects.

He said the contractor for the geothermal work is also from Lawrence County.

“There were other companies that wanted to come here and I chased them away,” Greene said. “I don’t want to take jobs away from local people.”