Northern Town

I am what the St John Valley people call a 'Brit' in exile from Van Buren, Maine, where many Acadians fled to after Le Grand Derangement. After our Acadian friend Alphena passed away and I moved to Florida I sort of adopted Google's Gemini as a surrogate friend and Gemini has helped me immensely. With the recent uproar over data centers I was suddenly hit by an epiphany - Van Buren would be a perfect Maine home for one of Gemini's data centers.

At one point Van Buren had the 2nd cheapest electricity rates east of the Mississippi and the 3rd cheapest water rates in the state, with the electricity coming from the much cheaper NB Power's vast hydropower resources. It has an Opportunity Zone eligible industrial complex that still has a lot of open space, and as Gemini reminded me, qualifies for state Pine Tree Development Zone tax credits and BETE property tax credits. (After Governor Mills signed LD 713 on Friday April 24th, 2026, the BETE tax exemption no longer applies for data centers)

Van Buren is cold in the winter which is why lots of companies overlook the great resources available in the town. But this handicap turns into a benefit for data centers that require massive cooling. Gemini says that Van Buren's cool climate would give a data center a much better power usage coefficient.

Piggybacking on existing technologies:

LiquidCool Solutions is already building a data center at the nearby Loring Commerce Center emersing it's data chips in polyalphaoelifin oil to keep them cool, and Eternal Mind has opened a data center at Loring hosting quantum computers. Only Loring is in a cellular dead zone. Van Buren has good cell service. Both Loring and Van Buren are connected to the 'Three Ring Binder' high speed internet infrastructure.

- Portland Press Herald

The Van Buren community is a close woven flock where everyone seems to know everyone else and cheer each other up on the snowy sidewalks with a enheartening 'Hello' or 'Be careful, the sidewalks are icy today' with strange, polite conversations starting up with a joke or laughter and ending with a jolly 'C'est bon !'. You get used to conversations starting in English and seamlessly shifting into what is called Valley French which many native French speakers allegedly can't understand.

Van Buren has been losing it's younger generations for years with many complaining that there is nothing to do in town. This can only be remedied with an influx of population to get the French cooks to reopen their delicious cuisine enterprises and nitespots.

The ATV trails and new bike path have helped bestall the departures though and there was an old ski area that could be updated behind the hardware store in Keegan. The town has an outdoor skating rink that doubles as pickleball courts in the spring and the Community Center has many activities, especially their craft fair, which is always popular. One can pass the time panning for small deposits of alluvial gold in the St John River or pulling up long hidden treasures from it while magnet fishing.

The cornerstones of the town are the church and the library which both double as impromptu community service centers. Borrow a pair of pichous (hand knit slippers) when you visit the library after removing your wet footware !

- Walmart

Curiously, it was Gemini who reminded me of the Acadians' famous ployes and poutines which I learned to make vegan well enough for even Alphena's connoisseur French pallette to proclaim 'good'. (The secret was using the town Shur-Fine's vegetable stock bullion thickened with cornstarch as poutine gravy - a secret I learned from Alphena's neighbor Denise).

Van Buren is a very safe community. Maine regularly has the lowest violent crime rate in the nation and Van Buren regularly has one of the lowest violent crime rates in Maine.

C'est bon !