What a Gigawatt Would Mean for Sharon, Kansas: The Scale of Google's Project Helium, and the Numbers Nobody Has Published

Start with the numbers that exist. Google's project site and the reporting by KAKE and KWCH put Project Helium at about 1.7 million square feet, air cooled, with the buildings on about 900 of the roughly 2,000 acres Google assembled northwest of Sharon. Google's own frequently asked questions describe the planned buildout as "up to two data center buildings, along with support structures," built on what the company calls its "latest standard blueprint."

An acre is 43,560 square feet. So 1.7 million square feet is about 39 acres of building. The U.S. Census Bureau's 2024 gazetteer records the entire city of Sharon as 0.281 square miles of land, which is about 180 acres. The buildings alone, then, are roughly a fifth of the land area of the city they sit outside of. The 900 acre project area is about 1.4 square miles, five times Sharon's land area. The full 2,000 acres is about 3.1 square miles, eleven times it. The Census Bureau's 2024 population estimates put Sharon at 143 people and Barber County at 4,070, down from a 2020 base of 4,233.

The power figure does not exist in public. This is worth stating plainly because it is the most consequential gap in the record. The county's press release and the county's deal summary, the two documents the commission published on the day it approved the agreements, contain no megawatt or gigawatt figure. Neither does Google's project website. Neither does the reporting we reviewed. The Kansas Legislative Research Department's September 1, 2026 overview of state data center policy gives no project level capacity figures for any Kansas site. The Kansas Department of Commerce's own data center fact sheet, which the county posted, classifies a "mega" or hyperscale facility as "Million+ sq ft" and "100+ MW," which places Project Helium in that class by size but sets only a floor.

Because the number is unpublished, the useful exercise is a conversion, not an estimate. Here is what various loads would mean measured against Kansas's own electricity system, using the U.S. Energy Information Administration's Kansas electricity profile for 2024 (19,356 megawatts of net summer capacity, 57,696,155 megawatthours of net generation) and EIA's figure for the average U.S. residential utility customer (10,791 kilowatthours a year, about 899 a month). These are arithmetic conversions of hypothetical loads, not claims about this project.

For scale in the other direction: the Kansas Legislative Research Department reports that data centers currently consume approximately 0.4 terawatthours of electricity annually in the entire state of Kansas, seventh among surrounding Midwest states. One gigawatt running continuously for a year would be roughly twenty two times that statewide total.

The last piece is the one utilities actually care about, and it is not peak demand. It is load factor, the ratio of average demand to peak demand. A household's load is spiky: it collapses overnight and surges on hot afternoons. A data center's is close to flat, which is why regulators write rules around it. Kansas law makes this explicit. The version of K.S.A. 66-101j amended by Senate Bill 98 conditions large industrial rate discounts on an "annual load factor that is reasonably projected to be at least 55%," and the Kansas Corporation Commission's Large Load Power Service tariff, approved November 6, 2025 in docket 25-EKME-315-TAR, requires customers of 75 megawatts and above to pay a minimum monthly bill based on 80 percent of contract demand whether or not they use it. The development agreement points the same way from the other side: generators "shall not be operated to reduce electrical usage during peak hours." A flat load is easier to plan generation around and harder to shed when the grid is tight. Our guide to who pays for data center power covers what that has meant for bills in other regions.

The county's deal summary states the sound terms in one sentence: "Daytime operations shall not exceed 55dBA at 100% load; nighttime operations shall not exceed 50 dBA at 100% load." KAKE reported the same figures. Those are real numbers, and by the standards of the ordinances we have collected they are strict ones. Our table of data center noise limits by jurisdiction shows the range: 55 dBA at the receiving lot line in Loudoun County, Virginia, 60 by day and 55 at night in Prince William and Fairfax counties, 75 by day in Culpeper County, and no number at all in Memphis, Shelby County, or Newton County, Georgia. A 50 dBA nighttime ceiling is at the strict end of that range.

Two things the sentence does not do are worth understanding before 2030.

First, it does not say where the reading is taken. Every numeric noise ordinance we have read specifies a measurement point: the receiving lot line closest to the source in Loudoun, the property boundary of the source or any point within the affected property in Prince William, Fairfax, and Culpeper, outside the emitting property boundary in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. The published deal summary states the limits without a stated measurement location, a measurement method, an averaging interval, or a meter standard. Those are the details that decide what a number means in practice. The signed agreements themselves are the place to look, and the deal summary carries its own caution: it "does not itself approve, amend, or create any binding agreement," and "all terms remain subject to final approval and execution by both parties."

Second, dBA is a filter, and it discards the part of a data center's sound that neighbors report most. A-weighting mimics the ear's response at moderate volumes and sharply discounts low frequencies. C-weighting keeps most of them. Virginia's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission studied the world's largest data center market for the General Assembly in 2024 and made this a finding: the noise that generated complaints at Virginia facilities measured an estimated 40 to 59 A-weighted decibels, typically under the local limit, because the lower frequency content data centers emit is not fully captured in A-weighted decibels. Its Recommendation 8 asked the legislature to let localities set limits using C-weighted decibels instead. Our guide to what a data center sounds like walks through the physics.

Barber County's own file shows the gap in this project's own equipment. The county's data center page hosts a preliminary Project Helium acoustic study, modeled by the engineering firm Olsson in SoundPLANessential and dated June 5, 2026 in the county's file name, and the county's posted June 15, 2026 update slides carry the A-weighted version of the same model. The scenario in both is "All Chillers and BESS @ 100% Load, No Gens," includes a noise wall around the chiller banks, and places receivers 1.5 meters above the ground. The modeled source levels:

Read the chiller row twice. The same equipment, in the same model, measures 6.5 decibels higher in the daytime C-weighted scenario than in the A-weighted one, and 5.8 decibels higher at night. The battery storage row is essentially flat between the two weightings, 0.3 decibels apart. That difference is the signature of low frequency content, and it sits in the chillers, which is where the agreement's 2,250 foot setback is also aimed. The compliance number in the agreement is written only in dBA. The county has published a C-weighted contour map and no C-weighted limit.

On the maps themselves, the labeled contours are drawn outward from the buildings in five decibel bands. On the daytime A-weighted map the labeled 55 dB(A) contour lies outside the drawn project boundary in places, and the 50 and 45 dB(A) contours extend well beyond it; on the C-weighted map the labeled 60 and 65 dB(C) contours also extend past that boundary. None of that is a compliance finding. The agreement does not say the measurement point is the project boundary, the model is labeled preliminary, it excludes generators, and the maps carry Google's own caveat that the "contour and study is unique to site design and conditions." It does tell a resident where to stand with a meter in 2030, and what to measure.

Google's own published position on sound is that it "ensures all site designs undergo rigorous pre-construction noise studies so that engineering can ensure equipment operates at a reasonable sound level relative to neighboring commercial and residential areas," that "local leaders thoughtfully mapped this corridor next to a busy highway, which naturally blends the site into existing ambient noise," and that the site "will be in compliance with local and regional noise ordinances (if applicable) and employ mitigation as needed to comply with standards." On expected levels at homes, the company's answer is that thresholds are "governed by state and local noise ordinances specific to each jurisdiction" and that "Google and Barber County are currently collaborating to establish these baseline environmental standards," language that appears to predate the August 31 agreement. For context on the highway: the average daily traffic recorded on US Highway 160 in the county's own posted traffic slide is 1,156 vehicles.

Two distances are documented, and they come from the same paragraph of the county's deal summary. Chillers "shall be set back at least 2,250 feet from non-participating residences." All project infrastructure "shall be set back at least 2,000 feet from the city limits of Sharon," excepting retention ponds, roads, landscaping, and similar improvements. In miles, that is about 0.43 miles for the chillers and about 0.38 miles from the city limit.

Note the qualifier in the first one: non-participating residences. A setback measured from non-participating homes does not run from homes on land whose owners are party to the project. How many residences fall into each category is not stated in the published documents.

The site's position is described consistently and loosely. Our sourced tracker entry on the Barber County approval places the campus northwest of Sharon, about eight miles east of Medicine Lodge, following KWCH and KAKE, which described the project as near Sharon and about eight miles east of Medicine Lodge. KAKE described it as going up north of Sharon. The county's posted June 15 traffic slides give the most specific geography in the public file: the traffic study covers US Highway 160, Tri City Road, Lone Tree Road, Cedar Hills Road, and Walstead Road, with site drives shown on Tri City Road. Google's answers name Lone Tree Road and Tri City Road between Highway 160 and Blackmore Road as the roads it would improve to two lane asphalt.

What is not documented is any published distance from the campus buildings to the nearest home, or to Sharon itself. We did not measure one off a contour map, and no county or company document states one. If a resident wants that answer on the record, the request to make is for the final site plan and the survey.

Agriculture, briefly. The site sits in working agricultural country, and converting roughly 900 acres of it to an industrial campus raises questions about field access, drainage, dust on standing crops, and effects on livestock that are separate from anything covered here. We are reporting that subject separately rather than sketching it, and we are not putting figures to it until they verify. Water, wells, and wastewater are also outside this piece: our companion report on the Project Helium water and aquifer question takes those up in full.

Operations are 2030. Construction is 2027, and it is the phase communities consistently underestimate. Here is what the published record says about it.

• Duration. Google's project site puts site development and community engagement in 2026, construction starting in early 2027, operations for building one in 2030, and estimated completion "between late Q4 2030 and Q1 2031." Its June 15 slide deck shows a tentative milestone timeline of roughly nine months for planning through engagement and roughly thirty months for permitting through turnover, marked "Illustrative only."
• Peak workforce. Google's answer is specific: "The peak construction workforce is currently projected to occur between Q4 2027 and Q3 2028," subject to weather, materials, and labor supply. The company does not publish a headcount, describing only "thousands of temporary construction jobs throughout the various phases."
• Where the workers live. In a January 15, 2026 meeting recap posted by the county, Barber County Development recorded Google representatives saying that local temporary housing availability is considered first, that the company would be mindful of not depleting availability in the community, that it provides daily bus transportation for employees housed in nearby communities, and that it plans to bring in housing for a portion of the workforce. The same recap notes the company did not elaborate on the number or type of housing, and that arrivals would be phased rather than simultaneous.
• Traffic, against a documented baseline. The county's posted slide of existing peak hour volumes records average daily traffic of 1,156 vehicles on US Highway 160 and 108 on Tri City Road. Those are the roads the campus would be built from. Google's stated plan is to improve Lone Tree Road and Tri City Road between Highway 160 and Blackmore Road to two lane asphalt, to improve the Highway 160 intersections at Lone Tree and Tri City, to install site entrances designed to prevent backups onto public roads, and to keep current speed limits. A separate slide identifies two possible construction route bridge locations, on Walstead Road and Cedar Hills Road. Truck routes themselves are not set: Google's answer is that the engineering firm's traffic study "will be used to determine truck routes and any required improvements."
• Dust and hours. Google's published answers on both are general. Construction hours "are determined by the selected general contractor(s)." Dust, dirt, and debris will be kept "at acceptable levels" through unspecified mitigation. On night work, the company says that if it becomes necessary its partners will deploy lighting management, noise controls, and community notifications.

The road protection is real, and unusually specific. Under the road use agreement, Google completes a pre-construction road inventory and a post-construction inventory, maintains or restores the roads to pre-construction levels, coordinates with the township and the county on a road improvement plan the county approves, reimburses the county for its engineer's inspection costs, and posts $5 million in security. That structure matters more than the dollar figure. A pre-construction inventory creates a documented baseline before the first truck arrives, which is precisely what residents in other construction damage disputes have lacked; a post-construction inventory creates the comparison; and the security means the county is not chasing a judgment to get the money. Our guide to data center construction damage claims covers what these disputes look like where no such inventory exists.

One caution about comparisons. A companion piece is examining an existing Google project of comparable size in Armstrong County, Texas, and we will report those findings separately once public records confirm them. Nothing from that project is imported here.

An air cooled campus of this size implies substantial backup generation, and this is one of the few places where the company has been more specific than the county.

What the agreement says. The deal summary's generator clause is short and, read carefully, stronger than what several larger jurisdictions have on the books: "Generators may be operated only during an emergency or for planned maintenance, testing, or repair of the electric substation or related electric infrastructure. Generators shall not be operated to reduce electrical usage during peak hours." The last sentence rules out running the fleet for peak shaving or demand response. Separately, Google "shall comply with the Kansas Air Quality Act and all other Kansas ambient air quality standards and air pollution control regulations," and a qualified professional is to conduct baseline and subsequent soil, water, and wastewater testing for contaminants, with all results made available to the county.

What the county's documents do not say. The press release and the deal summary state no generator count, no engine tier, no fuel storage volume, no permitted hours, and no testing schedule. That is a factual observation about two documents, not a criticism of anyone: the county published the terms it negotiated, and generator specifics are ordinarily fixed later in an air permit rather than in a county contract.

What Google says. On its project website, the company states that the site "will feature over a dozen critical backup generators, which exist solely for emergency resiliency during outages and are not used as primary power," that all generators require air permits, that "backup generator testing is strictly limited to normal business hours," and that routine maintenance is scheduled during the day. On emissions, the company writes that a data center's "everyday operations produce zero air emissions" and that it has "the same daily emissions profile as a standard office building," with generators built to high EPA standards that "only run during rare power outages or for short, scheduled testing windows." On spills, it says on-site diesel tanks are double walled and fueling zones have built-in containment. Google's site attributes generator air permits to "the Kansas Department of Health"; air permits in Kansas are issued by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

Two framing points from our reporting elsewhere, offered as context rather than prediction. First, "over a dozen" is a floor, and the fleet size that ends up in the air permit is the number that matters; Virginia's regulators counted roughly 9,000 data center backup generators statewide, a median of about 35 per site by the legislative audit agency's inventory. Second, the definition of emergency is where these rules move. Virginia redefined emergency in early 2026 to include planned utility outages announced with 14 days' notice or less, over roughly 400 comments in opposition. Barber County's agreement, as summarized, allows generator operation for "planned maintenance, testing, or repair of the electric substation or related electric infrastructure," which is broader than an unforeseeable event and narrower than peak shaving. Our diesel generator guide has the full framework, and the air permit, when it is filed, is a public document that will answer the count.

This is the analytical spine, and it is the difference between Barber County and almost every other approval on our tracker. Everywhere else, the protections came from a land use decision: a rezoning, a conditional use permit, a site plan with conditions attached. Here they came from a contract.

Barber County's website lists no planning department, zoning administrator, or planning commission, and in September 2024 the county posted responses to a survey asking residents about adopting countywide zoning. Kansas law permits that: K.S.A. 12-744(a) says a board of county commissioners "may create" a planning commission. May, not shall. A county without zoning has no zoning districts, no conditional use process, and no board of zoning appeals under K.S.A. 12-759.

Three consequences follow, and none of them is legal advice. Anyone weighing action should get a Kansas lawyer's read on their own facts.

• The setbacks and decibel limits are contract terms, not permit conditions. An ordinance binds whoever owns the land, is enforced by county staff, and typically carries a citation and a penalty. A contract binds the parties who signed it. If the property or the project changes hands, whether the terms follow depends on what the signed agreements say about assignment and successors, which the published summary does not address.
• The county is the party holding the remedies. That is not a small thing. The county approves the decommissioning plan and holds security equal to 125 percent of the estimated decommissioning cost; it approves the road improvement plan and holds the $5 million road security; it reviews the exterior lighting plan; it receives the soil, water, and wastewater testing results; and it reviews the emergency response plan annually. Those are levers, and they belong to the commission. Residents' influence over them runs through the commission, which is why who sits on it matters. KAKE reported that after the August 31 vote one man said the decision had inspired him to run for the seat of one of the two commissioners who approved it.
• A resident is generally not a party to a contract they did not sign. Whether someone outside a contract can enforce its terms is a question of state law about intended third party beneficiaries, and it turns on the language of the specific agreement. Nothing in the published summary addresses it. Separately, common law private nuisance does not depend on a contract or an ordinance at all: it asks whether an interference with the use and enjoyment of a home is substantial and unreasonable. That claim would belong to a resident, would arise only if something actually happened, and nothing has happened yet.

There is also a timing consequence. Kansas gives 30 days from a final zoning decision to seek district court review under K.S.A. 12-760, measured from publication for an approval. That statute is written for zoning decisions, and Project Helium was approved by contract. The Kansas Open Meetings Act runs on a different and shorter clock, and Kansas has a standing rule that rewards people who objected on the record at the time. Our guide to zoning appeal deadlines by state puts the Kansas rule beside eleven others, our report on the approval itself walks through both clocks statute by statute, and our Kansas page covers the rest of the state's data center picture.

Five things are genuinely open as of September 3, 2026, and each of them is a place where a resident can get an answer on the record.

1. The final agreements and the site plan. The county's published summary is explicit that it "highlights the principal financial, siting, infrastructure, road-use, emergency-response, and decommissioning terms that are expected to be included in the final agreements," that "all terms remain subject to final approval and execution by both parties," and that the summary itself creates no binding agreement. The press release, issued the same day, says the commissioners "announced signing of agreements." The signed documents are the operative text, and they are the thing to request. So is the site plan, which is where distances to specific homes will finally appear.
2. The SB 98 sales tax exemption. Kansas Senate Bill 98 created a sales tax exemption for a qualified data center, and its terms are precise. The firm must make an investment in eligible data center costs "of at least $250,000,000 in the aggregate by the fifth year of operations" and must create and maintain "at least 20 new jobs at the qualified data center within two calendar years after the commencement of operations." The exemption "shall be valid for 20 years after the date of commencement of operations." It requires an application to and an agreement with the secretary of commerce, a commitment to purchase electricity for 10 years from the utility certified to serve the territory, a water conservation commitment, and, before any public financial assistance is awarded, approval from the fusion center oversight board after a Kansas Intelligence Fusion Center review of the equipment for critical infrastructure security risks. The secretary of commerce certifies eligibility every five years. We found no public record that Project Helium has been certified. Note also what the exemption is not: it is a state sales tax exemption, and it does not affect the county property taxes the development agreement addresses. Google is paying 100 percent of ad valorem property taxes with no abatement, an unusual term explained in our guide to data center tax abatements.
3. The power arrangement. No utility is named in either county document. SB 98 separately amended K.S.A. 66-101j to bar data centers from the discounted economic development electric rates that other large industrial customers can receive: "A customer shall not be eligible for the discount authorized by this section for any new or expanded facility that is a qualified data center." On the other side of the ledger, the Kansas Corporation Commission approved a Large Load Power Service tariff for Evergy on November 6, 2025 in docket 25-EKME-315-TAR, applying to new facilities with a peak load forecast of 75 megawatts or more, with a minimum 12 year contract plus a load ramp period of up to five years, a minimum monthly bill at 80 percent of contract demand, and collateral equal to two years of minimum bills. Whether that tariff reaches this site depends on which utility serves it, and that is not on the public record we could find.
4. The air permit. The generator count, engine tier, fuel storage, and allowed operating hours will be set in a Kansas Department of Health and Environment air permit, not in the county agreement. That permit will be a public document with a comment opportunity.
5. The measurement protocol for sound. Where the 55 and 50 dBA readings are taken, over what interval, with what meter, and by whom, are the details that turn a number into an enforceable standard. They are not in the published summary.

If you live in Barber County, the actions that cost nothing and matter most are the ordinary ones: request the signed agreements, the site plan, the traffic study, and the pre-construction road inventory from the county clerk under the Kansas Open Records Act; put any objection in writing and ask that it be attached to the minutes; and start a dated baseline record now, sound in both dBA and dBC, photographs of the roads, and notes on traffic, while the fields are still fields. Our guides on fighting a proposed data center and documenting data center harm cover both. Nothing has been built and no one has been harmed. If that changes, a free case review connects you with an independent attorney in our network who handles data center matters in Kansas, at no cost and with no obligation.