Middlesex Township planning commission members voted to recommend the approval of plans creating internal lot lines for the project, now known as Pennsylvania Digital 1.
Those lines would split the 693-acre tract into three, six-building data center campuses, and a lot hosting an electrical substation and transformers needed to power them up.
The fifth lot, 61 acres sitting across Country Club Road from the rest of the property, will be open space in the short term but could eventually be developed for water storage tanks and related uses.
The plan also maps out an internal road providing access to each of the data center campuses.
The planning commission’s recommendation is only advisory; approval of the subdivision plan would come from Middlesex’s elected supervisors.
That could be on that board’s Jan. 5 agenda.
Environmental impacts, noise and other aspects of the plan that have drawn many questions — and some significant concerns from a dedicated group of area residents — will be examined more fully during review of land development plans.
The subdivision plans are a necessary step, however, because they define the lots to be developed.
According to a timeline submitted to Middlesex by the development partnership, land development plans for the electrical infrastructure and the first of the data center campuses will be placed on the planning commission’s agenda in January.
In a major development earlier this year, Middlesex’s water authority has already committed to reserving up to 400,000 gallons of water per day for the data center, an amount engineers say is equal to the consumption from 2,367 dwelling units.
That request, which is effectively a daily cap, was arrived at after the authority ran an analysis that suggests it has unused capacity of 910,000 gallons per day during times of peak demand, at present.
Reserving 400,000 gallons, in theory, leaves more than 500,000 gallons available for other new development around the township, according to the authority’s analysis.
Those numbers, Middlesex Authority Chairman Peter Lusardi noted, don’t include the planned construction of a second municipal well now under development.
That’s a project the authority has been working on since before the data center proposal emerged, he said, and it could be brought online later this decade.
Besides the water demands, PPL Electric Utilities has separately confirmed to the partners that, with some planned upgrades, it can meet the 1.35 gigawatt of peak energy demand.
About the project
Data centers — in layman’s terms — are big computer server farms that provide key infrastructure for ever-growing information storage and sharing needs.
The Carlisle plan — highlighted this summer at a Pittsburgh economic summit showcasing Pennsylvania’s ability to lead in the Information Age economy — is being pushed by a team of northern Virginia data center developers and local partners operating as Carlisle Development Partners LLC.
They have not yet identified an end user for the project.
Large residential developments, like The Meadows and Country Manor Mobile Home Park, sit across Conodoguinet Creek and on the other side of existing tree lines.
But all the proposed buildings, according to master plans shown so far, will be at least 1,000 feet away from the closest existing home.
Those conditions, the developers’ pitch materials state, make the Country Club Road site “uniquely qualified ... for tucked-away, low-impact data center development.”
Carlisle Development Partners acquired the site for $44 million earlier this year.
As customers of the public water system, the data center would become part of a network that draws water from a set of underground wells, none of which are in the immediate area of the proposed facility.
There would be no direct draws, according to current plans, from the Conodoguinet, which is a water source for some downstream municipalities, or the groundwater table at Country Club Road.
If potential pitfalls can be avoided, there is a lot for local officials to like about this project.
There will be piles of new property tax revenue — something badly needed by the deficit-ridden Cumberland Valley School District, and welcomed by the worried-about-deficits Cumberland County commissioners.
Developers have projected $65 million annually in new township, school and county taxes, though that figure has not been independently corroborated.
And then there is the possibility of several hundred new jobs.
Representatives of PowerHouse Data Centers, one of the partners in the Carlisle group, said this summer each building could employ 25 to 40 workers, depending on the final tenants and the technologies they deploy.
That’s a minimum of 450 jobs at full build-out, ranging from entry-level positions starting at $25 per hour to salaried engineering and management positions ranging from $70,000 to $120,000 per year.
Then there is the prestige and potential spin-off from bringing some top corporate flags into the region. The partnership has predicted its eventual tenant will come from the ranks of Big Tech giants such as Google, Amazon or Oracle.
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