Project dossier · Joplin (Jasper County), Missouri

Wildwood Ranch data center Approved

Joplin annexed 540 acres and rezoned roughly 600 acres to heavy industrial for a gigawatt-scale campus with a co-located gas plant. A Wildwood Ranch homeowner is suing to void the rezoning, and an opposition group is pushing a 12-month moratorium.

Key facts

Operator
ReLoad (Scale Microgrids)
Filing LLC
Wildwood Ranch, LLC
Size
600 MW
Acres
600
Location
Joplin (Jasper County), Missouri
Decided
2026-02-17
Stage today
Approved

Source
read 2026-08-23

What to do next

Next step: Approved — pivot from stopping it to a binding CBA: enforceable caps on noise, water and cost, plus a community benefit.

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What has happened so far (3 events)

  • 2026-02-17vote
    Joplin City Council, meeting at the MSSU Corley Auditorium after a session that ran roughly seven hours, passed Council Bill 2026-256 annexing the land 6-3 and Council Bill 2026-257 rezoning it from single-family residential to heavy industrial 7-2. · source
  • 2026-02-17hearing
    Residents testified for hours about water resources, ecological impact and utility costs; Mayor Keenan Cortez acknowledged the council was improvising a process for a decision of this scale. · source
  • 2026-03-18lawsuit
    Joplin attorney Derek Snyder, who lives in Wildwood Ranch, and his wife asked a Jasper County judge to review and void the rezoning, arguing it was unreasonable and violated a development agreement requiring owners to preserve the land's natural state (reported March 18, 2026; the filing date was not stated). · source

Find the paper trail

Find the paper trail (0 filed · 12 places to look)

State environmental permits

Backup generators, water withdrawal and stormwater are permitted by the state, usually earlier and in more detail than anything filed locally.

County & town filings

The rezoning application, site plan, traffic and noise studies, staff report and every revision.

Utility & grid records

The electricity request is filed with the grid operator and the utility long before the town hears about it — and states the real load.

Federal databases

Works anywhere, and covers the operator's record at its other sites.

  • EPA ECHO facility searchEvery federally-reported air, water and waste permit at a facility, plus its inspection and violation history. Search by address or draw a radius around the site. This project's locality centres on 37.080, -94.510 — search that point with a 5-mile radius.
  • EPA EnvirofactsThe same underlying records, queryable by county — useful for 'what else is permitted near this site' rather than one facility.
  • EPA Facility Registry ServiceResolves the shell LLC on a permit to the facility it belongs to. Worth a look when the filing name means nothing locally.

These are places to look, not evidence that anything has been filed. Links were checked on 2026-08-21; search links are queries, not records. What to ask for.

Around here

Other tracked projects in Missouri

Cite this page: GridWatch AI, “Wildwood Ranch data center”, aigridwatch.com/projects/wildwood-ranch-joplin-mo, retrieved 2026-10-11.

As of August 2026 (2m ago) · changes weekly — re-check before citing

A working set of identified proposals a community can track, not a census — most of the country's activity is not in here yet. Pennsylvania is the exception: its rows are synced from PA DEP's own data-center permit tracker, so the state's coverage is close to complete and carries the permit trail with it. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to reporting or the governing body's own record and were read on that date; rows marked *unverified* have no source on record — a lead to check, not a fact to cite. **Stage is derived, not asserted.** *Hearing scheduled*, *Awaiting decision*, *Approved* and *Withdrawn* are computed from each row's milestone dates on every rebuild, so a hearing date that has passed stops reading 'scheduled'. Hearings get moved and projects re-file under new names — treat a scheduled date as the earliest to act by, and confirm with the clerk before relying on it. Leads are mined into data/project_candidates.json and promoted here only after a human reads a primary source.

Part of the data center project tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0 (JSON · CSV).

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