In response, county officials are collecting information and guidance they hope with help local governments navigate the growing industry.
County officials lack the authority to approve or deny data centers. However, they expressed concern about environmental impacts, usage of water and electricity and possible disruptions to the county’s Resilient Washtenaw Plan that seeks carbon neutrality in the county by 2025.
“The best role we can play is to provide information that can help townships, villages and cities make the best possible decisions with their land use rules,” Beth Gibbons, who directs the Washtenaw County Resiliency Office, reported to the county board Wednesday, Oct. 1.
In addition to the three data center projects proposed in the county, there are an estimated seven additional data centers under negotiation, which have not yet been publicly proposed, Gibbons said.
“There are more data centers under negotiation than there will be developed,” she said. “There is a common practice that the data centers will go in and try to see where they can develop in multiple places with no intention of developing all of them.”
County officials had approved a resolution Sept. 17 directing county staff to develop outreach materials for local governments, including recommendations of what local governments should require from developers in terms of water and energy use, environmental impacts and noise.
In the resolution, county officials also urge local governments to require data center developers use renewable energy and commit to not using “water-wasteful” evaporative cooling techniques, among other recommendations.
This week, the county expects to issue pamphlets on the plans and status of data centers in the county, as well as the county’s position on the projects.
Gibbons said they will also create a webpage that can be updated as new proposals for data centers in the county come forward.
A “toolkit” to help local townships, villages, and cities be prepared for data center proposals is also in the works, Gibbons reported to the county board.
The county will work with a university student with the University of Michigan’s Center for EmPowering Communities to develop the municipal planning toolkit with recommendations to local governments, with the goal of completing it by Nov. 1.
The toolkit “will start to provide municipalities with the knowledge and kinds of resources that they need in order to set up zoning codes or ordinances that will prepare them to receive data centers,” Gibbons said. “So that when data centers show up, they have the laws on the books that they need to have in order to manage them.”
Without regulatory authority over data centers, some county offices can see what data centers are up to, she added. Those include building inspections, the county Office of Community and Economic Development, the county health department, and county offices for racial equity and resiliency.
Data centers are a “rapidly growing sector” that is being driven by cloud computing, AI, and video conferencing, Gibbons said.
“Like most technologies, getting information about data centers is challenging because there is a lot of work that happens in the blind, because this is considered restricted information because of the new tech,” she said.
While her exploration of data centers and potential community impacts continues, she drew a few general conclusions.
“There is no way around it, data centers have a massive impact on our environment,” she said.
She pointed to electricity consumption as an impact of concern, comparing an average of about 2 megawatt hours of electricity use to the amount of electricity needed to power a small town.
She also said the amount of energy data centers consume in the U.S. is expected to rise from about 4% to up to 12% by 2028, which is comparable to all residential housing in the country.
“A couple data centers in Washtenaw County and there is no way we’re getting to be carbon neutral by 2035,” Gibbons said. “It’s just a non-starter. There is not an ability of a data center to put enough renewable energy on its site to actually generate renewable energy.”
Gibbons also said her office would be meeting with county environmental health officials to explore options for regulations around water discharge.
Depending on what type of system a data center uses to cool equipment, water use can be “extreme,” Gibbons said.
“What is challenging is that less than 30% of the data centers that we are seeing in the U.S. right now are actually disclosing what their water rate is, so this is where it’s really difficult to get into that information,” she said.
She also pointed out that data centers either use more energy or more water, resulting in “tradeoffs.”
“Are you using more energy? Is it using more water? But one way or another ... its robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she said.
Commissioner Jason Maciejewski, D-Dexter Township, requested the county also put together an FAQ resource for the public.
Commissioner Shannon Beeman, D-Manchester, said her “biggest piece” is trying to help communities understand data centers and getting “reliable” information out to the community.
The three proposed data center projects in the county are at different stages.
In Saline Township, township officials are looking to settle a lawsuit recently filed by Related Digital, a data center development firm working for an unidentified tech giant and landowners. The firm and landowners filed suit after the township board voted to deny rezoning about 575 acres off West Michigan Avenue, alleging the township is “exclusionary” and in violation of state law because there is currently no land zoned for industrial uses in the township.
In Augusta Township, a group of citizens claims they collected enough signatures on a ballot petition to let township voters decide whether to rezone about 522 acres of land just outside Milan for a computer data center proposed by development firm Thor Equities. Township officials had approved the rezoning.
In Ypsilanti Township, the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratory are partnering on a data center campus to bring high-performance computing for classified and non-classified research in AI, energy, national security, and other sciences. Two sites in the township are under consideration. In that case, the university does not need approval from the township, as it is exempt from local zoning regulations as a non-profit public university.
Commissioner Justin Hodge, D-Ypsilanti Township, who represents Augusta and Ypsilanti townships, said most questions he gets from his constituents are about the data centers.
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