[audio:http://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/TheGreen_07112014_DataCenter.mp3|titles= Delaware Public Media's Tom Byrne interviews UD President Patrick Harker and Vice Provost for Research Charlie Riordan.]
In the end, it was a public rebuke for The Data Centers, a high-profile reversal for the University of Delaware, and a resounding victory for hundreds of community activists who fought the ill-fated plan to build a data center and power plant on UD’s Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) campus.
The university’s announcement early Thursday that it was terminating the company’s plan to build the $1 billion facility on the site of the former Chrysler plant was surprising in its finality, if not entirely unexpected in its substance or its timing.
Over a year of protest from opponents who argued that the proposed natural gas-fired power plant would harm air quality, increase carbon emissions, and turn Newark into an industrial zone seemed to sway the university which sided with many of the critics’ arguments.
UD’s Working Group issued an eagerly awaited report saying that the power plant would produce far more electricity than the data center needed, and would generate greenhouse gases that would be inconsistent with the university’s goals of reducing its carbon footprint.
The panel of UD faculty and administrative leaders also questioned the company’s claims that it could boost efficiency by selling surplus heat to nearby buildings, and it accused TDC of frequent changes in its projections during the planning process.
“The proposed facility is not consistent with high quality development and a first-
class science and technology campus,” the report said. “The Working Group concludes that plans to support such a facility should not be approved on the STAR campus.”
TDC President Gene Kern said the company is disappointed in UD’s decision, and is evaluating its options.
“TDC disagrees that the university can terminate its ground lease for the reasons stated,” he said in a statement. “TDC remains committed to developing a first-class data center within the state of Delaware.”
The project’s failure raised more questions about the job-creation efforts of the Markell administration, which talked up the project and promised $7.5 million to bring a second natural gas line to Newark. That followed grants and loans of $21.5 million to the now-bankrupt Fisker Automotive to revive the old GM plant at Boxwood Road, and up to $16.5 million to Bloom Energy for a fuel-cell factory that to date has not created as many jobs as expected.
Gov. Jack Markell said Thursday he still wants to see the STAR campus develop. “The Governor remains interested in working with UD to develop that site in a manner that will create jobs and strengthen Delaware’s network of science and technology businesses,” his office said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the UD group accused TDC of providing “scant” information on technical, physical and environmental aspects of the plan, and said the university was unable to fully evaluate the project’s environmental impact because of company statements that its plans were in a conceptual stage and so were subject to change.
“This uncertainty has been apparent in TDC’s numerous changes in even the broadest aspects of their plan, such as carbon recovery and power redundancy,” the report said. “The important implication for the University is that the proposed advantages of the TDC installation at its completion cannot be considered reliable.”
The only part of TDC’s plan that could be evaluated was its effect on air emissions – as submitted in its permit application to the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control – but even that showed “significant” greenhouse gas emissions and a “lack of rigor” in preparing air-quality estimates, the report said.
On its own, the 288,000-square-foot data center would have the potential to create jobs, generate tax revenue, and attract other tenants to the site, the report said. But centers elsewhere are typically powered by the grid and renewable energy, unlike the TDC project which would depend on its own plant for power, it said.
The TDC power plant would have at least twice the capacity as those supplying data centers elsewhere, the report said.
After signing a lease with TDC in December 2012, UD sought to ensure the project would be consistent with STAR campus goals. But the university received information in the spring and summer of 2013 indicating that TDC was placing increasing emphasis on power generation, and was planning to sell power generated above the data center’s needs to the grid.
In an interview with Delaware Public Media, UD President Patrick Harker said the decision did not reflect any judgment on the data center project itself but on its suitability for the STAR Campus.
“It wasn’t consistent with what we see as the long-term vision for the STAR Campus,” he said.
In terminating its lease with TDC, Harker said UD is in “full compliance” with its terms, and said he doesn’t foresee any “significant” legal costs resulting from the decision.
The termination of the TDC project doesn’t mean the development of the 271-acre campus is threatened, Harker said.
“Development of the STAR Campus is a marathon, not a sprint,” he said. “No one project is going to make or break it.”
Charlie Riordan, a member of Working Group and Vice Provost for Research, said the university will continue to enter into public-private partnerships with companies working in the energy, environmental technology, health and life sciences, and national security fields, and will always do so with enthusiasm but recognizes that they may not always be straightforward.
“We are fully committed to building these public-private partnerships but they take time and they are complicated,” he said.
Critics – who opposed the power plant but not the data center itself -- said the UD decision vindicated their arguments, and showed the effectiveness of a well-organized community movement.
Jen Wallace, chair of the steering committee of Newark Residents Against the Power Plant, said she had expected the university to reject some aspects of the TDC plan but not to terminate it altogether.
“I am surprised at the finality of it, that the university has made a very clean break,” she told Delaware Public Media. “There’s no ambiguity about what’s going to happen next. “We were thinking that they were going to come back and say a smaller power plant would be OK.”
Asked what she thought swayed the university, Wallace said there was an “overwhelming amount of evidence” against the plan.
“This was a bad idea in a bad location and not good for the community or for the university,” Wallace said.
The report’s critical comments about TDC showed UD recognized that “this was not a good company to do business with,” Wallace said.
She dismissed concerns that Delaware will miss out on an economic boost because of the data center’s termination, asserting that TDC’s job-creation projections were overblown.
After holding its first meeting with a handful of members in July 2013, NWAPP has grown to around 2,000 active members, and they could not have wished for more from the university, she said. The group held a “Thank You UD” event on Main Street, Newark, for Thursday afternoon.
“This is the best-case scenario for us, and it feels very good,” Wallace said.
Willett Kempton, research director at UD’s Center for Power Free Integration, and an outspoken opponent of the data center project, said the Working Group had taken a “thoughtful and deliberative” approach and had reached a conclusion that may not have been easy given pressure from “other entities in the state.”
Kempton argued that opposition was the result of concern about climate change as well as about local factors, and suggests that global issues are entering the local debate over how to reduce carbon emissions.
“In the past, such facilities would have been opposed only because of local impacts,” he said. “It is a local indicator of the increasing U.S. public involvement in decisions about CO2 emissions, and a hopeful sign for the future.”
Democratic State Rep. John Kowalko (D-Newark South), a frequent critic of the plan, said it might have boosted the local economy but could also have deterred some companies from setting up on the campus.
“It would have discouraged some of the industry and the type of technology that the university would have liked to encourage to use that site,” he said.
Rep. Mike Ramone (R-Middle Run Valley) said he would have liked to see new jobs created by the project, but believes the university made the right decision based on the community’s environmental concerns.
Any plans to revive the project have clearly been set back. “We’re starting from scratch again so whatever we had ready to go is going to be delayed,” he said.
But Harris McDowell (D-Wilmington North), who chairs the Joint Finance Committee, signaled the project may yet have a future – this time in Wilmington.
McDowell said he and others have discussed courting the company to Wilmington should UD balk at the project. He said those talks would continue Thursday afternoon.
“We haven’t had opportunities for that kind of development in quite a while,” he said.