New Castle County Council heard overwhelming public support for guardrails against data centers in the county its Department of Land Use and Planning Board hearing.
Board members took up the data center issue Tuesday during a hearing that included almost two hours of public comment.
The meeting focused on Councilmember David Carter’s draft substitute for an ordinance that would regulate data centers. Among other things, it calls for the Water Supply Coordinating Council to ensure there’s enough water to support residents and the data center.
“I took an oath of office to protect the health, safety and welfare of New Castle County residents,” Carter said. “This is a land use with huge impacts. These are the level of impacts that we had many years ago when we had heavy industrial proposals coming in.”
Public commenters largely sided with adding guardrails to data centers looking to set up shop in New Castle County or spoke against the project outright. They often referenced the implications of overwhelming energy use, water use and noise pollution data centers would bring to the area.
Starwood Digital Ventures sent an application to the Department in June.
Data centers house computer systems and infrastructure that power digital systems and data. The campus could house 11 or more two-story buildings and would need 1.2 gigawatts of electric power. That's enough to power between 90 thousand to 876 thousand homes for a year, with estimates varying from source to source.
Carter said addressing potential issues connected to large data centers like the proposed 6 million square-foot Project Washington data center near Delaware City and others like it is crucial because they are not adequately regulated by the County.
When County officials penned zoning regulations in 1997, facilities consuming energy and water at the scale of a large data center didn’t yet exist.
“One facility has the potential to use more electricity than we use in the entire state of Delaware,” Carter explained. “And our zoning should evolve.”
The ordinance called for a number of regulations, including that data centers must comply with federal and state requirements on emission standards and air quality monitoring.
Carter noted the changes to his ordinance make it easier to enforce the regulations and require companies to have plans to decommission sites so they can be redeveloped if data centers become obsolete in the future.
“If we don't get this right, it can have major impacts on water and air quality, and the really big impact could be on energy and energy rates…” Carter said. “[Constituents] see the same concerns [as] us, and they want to make sure that we have safeguards in place, and that's what we've tried to do here.”
If Councilmembers vote in favor of the ordinance, data center operators or property owners would be required to notify the Department of Land Use and Planning if they are out of operation for six months or more. Within two years of being abandoned, they would also have to restore the land to its pre-developed condition or submit a land use application to establish a new use for the site.
It would also hold owners financially responsible, requiring them to show they have 100% of the funds to decommission the site before it's even constructed.
Carter said the community input at the Department of Land Use and Planning Board meeting Tuesday showed constituents care about this issue.
An attorney working for a company applying to open a data center spoke during the public comment, Carter said.
“They talked about they really wanted to meet with me and blah, blah, blah, but quite frankly, they can call me anytime,” Carter said. “I hadn't heard from them, and I'm happy to meet with them in any public forum.”
Carter added he was not open to a closed-door meeting with someone actively seeking a permit from the county.
