Environment & Safety

Kristal Farms is designed to be a good neighbor by default: minimal water use, controlled heat rejection, and continuous public reporting of the few indicators that matter.

This page describes the environmental safeguards and the safety / compliance gates that must be met before the project scales.

Environmental safeguards

ΔT compliance (no exceptions)

Any heat rejection to the bay is constrained by a hard environmental rule: the temperature rise (ΔT) must stay below an agreed limit, with the system designed for 100% compliance (no hours above the cap).

This is enforced by:

real-time sensing on supply/return,
conservative fallback modes if telemetry fails,
and oversight by an Environment Committee.

Near-zero water consumption (closed-loop cooling)

Kristal Farms avoids evaporative cooling towers. Cooling is based on closed loops and heat exchangers, so Water Usage Effectiveness is near zero by design (only minor top-ups).

Minimal new ecological disturbance

The model assumes an existing hydro site (no new flooding / reservoirs) and places the pad yard on previously disturbed or low ecological value land near the port/village edge.

Reduced diesel dependence (tracked benefit)

By reusing heat (buildings + greenhouse), the project reduces diesel burned for heating and the spill risks that come with fuel transport and storage—this benefit is tracked and reported.

Light/noise nuisance minimized

A compact port-side footprint and directed lighting are part of the “do no harm” approach, reducing nuisance for residents and wildlife.

Safety & compliance gates

Commissioning requirements (before any scaling)

Before the site scales, the project must pass:

electrical commissioning and protection verification,
heat system commissioning (including safe reject mode),
fiber acceptance tests and isolation verification,
and fire safety audits appropriate to the pad yard and utility equipment.

Auditable isolation (black-box tenancy)

Tenants are treated as “black boxes”:

the host monitors infrastructure availability,
but does not inspect tenant workloads or packet content,
and a cybersecurity audit can be used to validate that isolation is effective.

Monitoring & transparency

Public dashboard indicators

A small set of indicators are published (aggregate, non-sensitive), including:

ΔT compliance status and incident flags,
heat delivered and useful heat fraction (HUF),
uptime/availability,
and additional public indicators (diesel avoided, heat delivered, HUF) are shown to connect operations to civic outcomes.

Governance oversight

the Environment Committee oversees ΔT compliance and incident review, with a target of 100% compliance.
go/no-go gates include safety/compliance audits and operational transparency (dashboard live).

Decommissioning protection

A key protection is the ability to remove the installation and restore the site (pads are modular; decommissioning is planned and financially provisioned).