GREENFIELD — City councilors are weighing a one-year moratorium on data centers to allow time to research the impacts and consider how these facilities should be regulated.
Precinct 7 Councilor Sarah Bolduc presented two potential zoning amendments for regulating data centers to the Economic Development Committee on Tuesday.
One option calls for a one-year moratorium on data centers. The other would create a special permit process for any data centers that could potentially be built in the city. She said that, given the pending acquisition of FirstLight Hydro Generating Co. by Hull Street Energy, a Maryland-based private equity firm, it’s important for the city to be proactive.
While a spokesperson for Hull Street Energy did not directly address questions about whether any energy from the Turners Falls Dam or the Northfield Mountain Pumped Hydro Storage Station would be directed to data centers, reports out of Ohio indicate that Hull Street Energy is currently working to purchase two power plants in Illinois and Ohio with plans to redirect energy to serve data centers.
“I really think that we need to get ahead of this curve before it comes into our neighborhood,” Bolduc said.
Bolduc added that data centers pose environmental, health and economic risks to the city, as they require large amounts of electricity and water to operate.
“To produce 1 megawatt of power, approximately 4,000 solar panels are needed. It consumes approximately 5 acres of land to do that. Based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 1 megawatt-hour can supply electricity to 1,000 houses for an hour, or 300 houses for a day,” Bolduc said. “A report released in April estimated that just training a large [artificial intelligence] model, like Claude or ChatGPT, required a total energy draw of 25 megawatts.”
Bolduc added that data centers can use up to 5 million gallons of water in a day, and that analysis from Harvard public health researchers found that in Virginia, a data center fully complying with state air quality regulations is still projected to cause up to $99 million in health-related damages to local residents.
“All of that is to say data centers are scary,” Bolduc said. “I think Greenfield should come out and be proactive about this.”
The first zoning amendment option Bolduc presented would impose a one-year ban on the construction of data centers and direct the city to study whether Greenfield has the power and water infrastructure to support one. She said it would provide the city with time to “get our ducks in a row before we are caught off-guard by any new information or new corporate entity that wants to crop up.”
She said the second potential amendment goes further into detail about what regulations could look like, including developing a special permit process that looks at lighting, size and backup power, and requires regular reviews of any data center built in the city.
Economic Development Committee members said they would be in favor of pursuing regulations for data centers, and would lean toward issuing a one-year moratorium to allow time for further research and development of regulations that meet the city’s needs.
“This is super important,” Precinct 2 Councilor Rachel Gordon said. “I want to make it as hard as humanly possible for anyone to ever build a data center.”
Bolduc said she did not think the state would allow the city to ban data centers outright, as the state is currently pushing for more to be built in Massachusetts and is even offering tax exemptions for qualified centers, but she felt they should be regulated and discouraged.
“I think it’s misguided that the state is pro data center, I really do,” Bolduc said. “It doesn’t create jobs, it doesn’t create economic value, it really does not do anything for the city. It doesn’t put us in the lead of any kind of technology wave if we’re just having servers in a room and we’re not advancing technology.”
“This is a really important issue,” Precinct 3 Councilor Ann Dillemuth said. “Connecting those dots with the FirstLight sale also hit off alarm bells for me.”
“I think it’s pernicious,” At-Large Councilor John Garrett said of data centers. “I don’t see any benefits to these.”
Garrett said any legislation crafted would need to be cautious of how data centers are defined, so as not to bar any game developers or e-commerce businesses that may have a server bank that could be classified as a small data center.
Committee members agreed to move forward with exploring how to regulate data centers in Greenfield, and they plan to loop in the Planning Board as they rework Bolduc’s draft zoning amendment into a final version.
