Whether it’s crazy-big, economically beneficial, or just worthy of detailed discussion, a new plan to build a massive New Castle County data center led energy experts last week to agree on one thing: this needs careful consideration.
The proposal, Project Washington, would create 11 two-story buildings totaling some 6 million square feet on two adjacent sites just north of Delaware City. It would use an enormous 1.2 gigawatts of electricity, about the equivalent to the entire output of a large power plant. That would be enough to power around 900,000 homes, about twice as many as Delaware’s total, and well in excess of the power that will be produced by one unit at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant when it restarts in 2028.
It would be by far the largest data center for artificial intelligence (AI) in Delaware, and one of the largest in the country. Its huge footprint would make it one of Delaware’s biggest industrial projects, overshadowing warehouses and big-box stores.
It was not immediately clear whether the center would generate its own power for meeting its own demand, or whether it will draw from the public grid. If the latter, it would put more pressure on the grid at a time when retail power prices have risen amid fears that national supply won’t be able to meet sharply rising demand which is being driven by proliferating data centers and the increasing electrification of buildings and transportation.
Most experts at Delaware’s Energy Stakeholders Group seemed to be betting at their meeting last week that the plant, if built, would draw power from the grid, threatening further rate rises for consumers.
Dustyn Thompson, chapter director of the Delaware Sierra Club, predicted that the center would repeat recent rate rises across the region of PJM, the operator that runs the electric grid in Delaware and 12 other northeastern and mid-western states. He warned that the center could become the next Bloom Energy, a Delaware-based fuel cell maker that has been accused of attracting ratepayer subsidies while failing to create a promised number of local jobs.
“What has happened is great harm to ratepayers across the PJM region, and in particular into those import zones that had to deal with the transmission impacts,” Thompson said, referring to Delaware’s reliance on electricity imports. “What we don’t want is another Bloom. It will absolutely be economic development on the back of ratepayers.”
A June 2 letter to New Castle County planning officials from the developer’s representative, Wilmington-based Vandemark & Lynch, said two electrical yards nearby “are sited to support both phases of the project”
Electrical infrastructure for the project is in accordance with a “master plan power delivery study” by Delmarva Power, the letter said. Frank Tedesco, a spokesman for Delmarva parent Pepco, declined to release the study, saying that part of it contained proprietary information. But he said Pepco supports new data centers because they help citizens complete daily tasks like financial transactions or managing health care data.
“When possible, we are partnering with local and state economic development and real estate firms to pre-screen development parcels for new data centers and other large load projects such as manufacturing,” Tedesco said. “The feasibility process helps to determine if the surrounding grid infrastructure has the potential to support the power needed for large load customers and what system upgrades need to be completed to support the customer’s request.”
If built, the center would mean Delaware joining states such as Virginia where data centers are seeing runaway growth, and where 70 more are planned, according to NPR reporting. The surge has sparked local resistance from people who don’t want round-the-clock noise produced by cooling systems, and worry about water use and pollution.
At the Energy Stakeholders’ panel, Dale Davis of the Delaware Solar Energy Coalition said large data centers should be required to provide their own power so that ratepayers don’t end up paying the high cost of the needed infrastructure upgrades.
“Large data centers bring a level of risk that we’ve never seen before,” Davis said. “We should seriously look at whether they should be self-funding their own generation, and should we remove that risk from ratepayers? Because I don’t know if the ratepayers are going to be able to afford it if it goes wrong.”
Sen. Stephanie Hansen (D -Middletown) leads the energy stakeholders group, whose members include power-industry executives, environmentalists, and consumer advocates. She called the data-center plan “crazy” after being briefed on its context by Dave Stevenson, an energy analyst at the pro-market Caesar Rodney Institute, and a member of the panel.
“This new facility that’s proposed for Delaware is 1.2 gigawatts,” she said. ”So that’s way more than Three Mile Island. I think that’s craziness, I’m sorry.”
The Three Mile Island unit, renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, would produce 835 megawatts, or enough to power about 750,000 homes if the electricity supplied retail customers. Instead, it will be used exclusively to power data centers run by the tech giant Microsoft which signed a 20-year contract with the owner of TMI unit 1, Constellation Energy.
In Delaware, a possible solution to concerns about ratepayer impact lies in a bill, HB233, by state Rep. Frank Burns (D-Newark). The measure would require regulated utilities to establish a separate rate for large energy users that lessens the risk of the costs of expanding infrastructure from being passed on to other electric customers such as residents and small businesses.
“What happens when you do your planning and someone says they are going to put a one-gigawatt data center in our state,” Burns, a member of the Stakeholders Group, asked members. “Are we serving the residents of the state or are we building the infrastructure to support data centers? Can we do both? Do we need to be even more aggressive in controlling the demand side?”
Pamela Scott, an attorney for the developer, Miami-based Starwood Digital Ventures, declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce said it had not been involved in the planning but generally supports data centers because they have few employees so have little impact on traffic, while boosting local tax revenue without placing big demands on local services like schools.
Delaware Prosperity Partnership, a nonprofit economic development agency, said Delaware’s tax regime is attractive to developers like that for the data center.
“Data centers are one of the hottest project trends across the U.S. right now,” said DPP spokeswoman Susan Coulby. “Given Delaware’s tax structure and its other favorable features, our state would be a highly competitive location for almost any company looking to establish a data center.”
The sites planned for the center would total about 580 acres in Red Lion and New Castle Hundred. Construction would require a change of zoning because some of the land is zoned suburban, although the center would not be close to current residential areas, said Kevin Caneco, a county councilman whose district covers the sites.
Caneco said it was “very early” in the planning stage, and he had not decided whether to support the project, whose permitting process alone will take 12-18 months.
“I want to look at everything that comes before the land use department,” he said. “I want to talk to folks more about it. I’ve heard a lot of feedback from people – calls, texts, social media – in favor and not in favor. “Let me reserve judgement, we’ll get everything on the table, and we’ll go from there.”
The councilman said he didn’t know whether the center would be producing its own power but if not, he would be concerned. The center would create 200-500 “six-figure” jobs but would also “take a lot out of the environment” from its use electricity and water, he said.
Hansen said the panel should hold a detailed discussion on data centers “sooner rather than later” but it was unclear whether that would be at the next scheduled meeting on Aug. 1. The plan will be discussed at a public meeting in Delaware City Fire Hall at 5:30 pm on Thursday, July 24, according to a Facebook post by Sen. Nicole Poore and Rep. Melissa Minor-Brown.
