Worked sample · printable PDF
ENV-04 · Data center siting analysis
Produce a siting analysis for a hypothetical or proposed regional facility: water, power, land, transmission.
Specialty centers · Environment, Energy & Compute
Two printable energy-and-compute briefs you can assign this term
Free environmental-studies briefs about the data center as a local question. Students produce a public-docs siting analysis a planning board could argue with, and they estimate the grid intensity of representative AI workloads with sensitivity shown. ENV-04 and ENV-03 have single-brief PDFs; every brief is in the bank PDF; the other ten are full on the page. No account. No student data leaves your school.
Public documents only
Public documents and public data only. No trespassing, no site visits presented as fieldwork for this bank, no photographing secured facilities. Uncertainty and missing data are part of the deliverable. Include the student’s own compute footprint when models help produce the memo.
How to run one
- Students choose the brief. You approve the facility framing (or workload set) and the public source list in writing first.
- Two scheduled checkpoints. Score with the six questions below.
- Mentor is advisory — school-supervised, never one-to-one unsupervised.
Featured packets
Featured · printable PDF
ENV-03 · Grid intensity of a query
Estimate energy/carbon for representative LLM/API workloads; show sensitivity to hardware and location assumptions.
Catalog (10 briefs on the page)
- ENV-01 · Remote sensing change detection
Quantify land-cover or heat change in a defined AOI; report uncertainty and resolution limits.
- ENV-02 · Climate model literacy
Compare two public climate products on one local question; separate scenario uncertainty from measurement error.
- ENV-05 · Water for cooling
Model water demand scenarios; identify where public data is missing and how that limits claims.
- ENV-06 · PJM / demand crossover
Tie local load growth narratives to public demand data; test one forecast against a naive baseline.
- ENV-07 · Embodied vs. operational carbon
Attribute life-cycle pieces you can support with citations; refuse a single magic number.
- ENV-08 · Environmental justice overlay
Combine facility proximity with demographic layers; state what correlation is not.
- ENV-09 · Policy instrument comparison
Compare disclosure, efficiency standards, and pricing tools for data-center impact — with tradeoffs.
- ENV-10 · Student compute budget
Set a project compute budget; log actual usage; include it in the final memo.
- ENV-11 · Adaptation vs. mitigation framing
Argue which frame fits your local case — and what each frame hides.
- ENV-12 · Public comment draft
Write a public-comment style brief suitable for a local hearing, with citations and uncertainty called out.
Six-dimension rubric
- R1 — Is one place, one question, and one decision audience named?
- R2 — Are sources dated and methods clear enough to rebuild?
- R3 — What is the naive baseline — and what does the analysis add?
- R4 — Are data gaps, resolution limits, and scenario uncertainty explicit?
- R5 — Could a planning board argue with the memo productively?
- R6 — Who is harmed by a false certainty — and what did the student refuse to claim?
Feedback
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