The purpose of this petition is to show our County Supervisors how many residents of Jefferson County are interested in a moratorium on Data Center development of anything over 5MW electricity draw in the County. The County Supervisors have let us know that they are happy to work on this with the Assistant County Attorney Elizabeth Estey and are in fact working on a draft of something, towards this goal. This is very good news. This petition is to show our support for an ordinance that is very strict and carefully builds out a way for us to enact a moratorium for 24 months with the express purpose of gathering more information on the real cost-benefits to our community. There are many factors that suggest this is not enough for the public good for our County to take on the potential environmental and financial burdens.  Links to resources, videos of the meetings we've had, and reporting on them, are below for you to research before you sign. Because we do not have zoning, and there is a large 345 kv line being put in across our County North of town, we are specifically vulnerable to and now explicitly desirable to large Data Center development as it will be cheap for them to hook into that line, we have ample land and water, and no vote, approval or public comment would be required for a project. That is not a statement of certainty but one of legitimate concern based on real factors. Additionally, Henry County (1 of the 3 counties in the area that the ITC Midwest line will go through) has just enacted a moratorium- though this was an easier process for them as they already had zoning in the County. This means we're already a little behind the curve here. While our elected officials are working on this issue, we can support them by helping them with real data around whether this type of strict ordinance that effectively acts as a moratorium for 24 months to more slowly assess how we as a community respond, is truly desired by a large contingency of their constituents. There are many more details about our situation in Jefferson County and in the United States, and about what we know of Data Centers so far, and why I believe this ordinance —> moratorium is essential to enact swiftly. Please do check out the links below and by all means do your own research. This is a hot-button issue all over the country and there is no shortage of news to tap into. Please, pass this on to all of your networks. This should ONLY be signed by LEGAL RESIDENTS of Jefferson County, as it is essential that we can provide quality data to our Supervisors. Thank you so much. 

I have found this be a very non-partisan issue and I encourage all to consider it regardless of what our ideas are of party lines, ideological alliances, etc. I have done my best to provide research, references and synopses of the situation, and I hope it helps you to form your own opinion. 

Best, 
Taylor Ross 

Resources: 

Slideshow: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vT5Rg52CG3zoO7FQe1ympNCnIs-N1_K2C9ZVT1R9UR7l_Whwxrig3ciZ7w_GLGApfLesY8cMUtUABnQ/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=15000

Video of Slideshow Presentation: 

https://echo360.org/media/e40296a5-304e-419a-b28a-8ab14e26c381/public

Ottumwa Radio Group Article:

Packed Joint Meeting Addresses Data Center Concerns as Jefferson County Officials Vow to Explore Ordinance Options - Ottumwa Radio

Transcript of Letter read at City Council Meeting:

Thank you for having this meeting. In this speech, I am going to generally go over what Data Centers are, why they may be undesirable, and why I think our county should be concerned about and take actions around this type of development with urgency. Some of the details and citations around this issue are addressed in more detail in the documents sent around to many of you. What I would like to do is share a brief overview of that information and then situate how that picture fits into the framework of what I as a citizen am requesting/ proposing to you, the County Supervisors, County and Assistant County Attorney, to do. 

What is a Data Center: This is the definition listed on Congress.gov 

In its simplest form, a data center is a physical facility that houses and runs large computer systems. U.S. data center annual energy use in 2023 (not accounting for cryptocurrency) was approximately 176 terawatt-hours (TWh), approximately 4.4% of U.S. annual electricity consumption that year, according to a report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A data center typically contains multiple computer servers, data storage devices, and network equipment that can provide information technology (IT) infrastructure service for organizations to store, manage, process, and transmit large amounts of data. Some projections show that data center energy consumption could double or triple by 2028.

An essential aspect of Data Centers is that they are a “continuous-use facility” running and drawing electricity 24/7 as well as needing to cool servers 24/7.

First I would like to broadly list the reasons that Data Center development can cause harm to communities and/ or simply not be enough of a public good to be worth it:

Higher electricity bills- This will be explained a  bit more by someone else. 

Large draws of water from our aquifers and potential contamination of that aquifer through vacuums created in the water table due to high drawdown in one specific point. A mid-sized Data Center situated on 50-200 acres can draw up to 30% of the daily water use of a 10,000 person town, and a hyperscale Data Center can draw 500,000 to 5 million gallons a day which would be equivalent to 2-6 times the amount of water drawn for a 10,000 person town. 

There is a bill in the house HF2447 that proposes: requiring data centers to report water and electricity use, disclose where water comes from, create separate utility rate classes for data centers, and potentially pause new construction until utilities file special data-center tariffs. What this bill tells us, more than what it’s seeking to legislate, is actually how much is not required by law, for the Data Centers to disclose at this time. This is  concerning and will tie into my conclusion and proposal. 

As Lee Dimmitt pointed out on Thursday, it seems as though Data Center development as we’re seeing it is not enough of a public good to be of interest to our County. Bob Ferguson did a quick economic analysis of Data Centers recently, and this can be sent to you all. I have sent it to some of you. The summary is, cost-benefit analysis at this point does not look favorable. 

There are many examples of Cities or counties giving big tax breaks in the form of TIFs - Tax Increment Financing, to Data Center development, with delayed returns, and we’re already seeing ways in which this can go awry. Altoona is a good example of this. What they have come to see is that, property tax structures often heavily favor the operators, equipment may be exempt, electricity may receive exemptions, job creation is far less than expected, and local governments can end up receiving far less net new revenue than early public narratives suggested. Altoona initially thought they would be getting $1 billion in property taxes etc but are now seeing that the income from their intensive incentivized deal with Meta, will be far less. 

Now continuing the list of concerns: All Data Centers use diesel generators as backup, and they run them when the utilities companies ask them to, to give the grid a break. Diesel generator pollution at that scale can be significant. 

The sound pollution alone, can be quite severe, I encourage all of you to watch the videos documenting this. 

80-90% of current Data Center builds are using evaporative cooling techniques which have been shown to evaporate 80% of the water, but leave a concentration of heavy metals and nitrates that then get dumped into local waterways. When water is pulled from reservoirs or rivers in Iowa, that water has high nitrate concentration. 

Other forms of water pollution happen in closed-loop systems that use biocides and other contaminants to run water through pipes for longer. With this kind of method, there just aren’t strict laws in place to monitor whether these Data Centers dispose of this kind of highly toxic material appropriately. And this gets at a point that I will return to- it’s not that we know absolutely that every form of Data Center is bad, it’s that we know enough to understand that there are potential risks, and that the frameworks for assessing this, are still being formed. We also have many examples, of states giving out permits to Data Center development, in areas where water is scarce such as Utah, Arizona and California. So for us, the DNR has pretty robust guidelines for the Jordan Aquifer because it doesn’t recharge quickly, and we’ve seen up to 6 feet of drawdown per year and 50-150 feet depending on the area, in the last 50-80 years. But, as mentioned, what we do have evidence of, is states giving out permits against their own water conservation laws and these are state-level decisions being made. There is a white house executive order, Order 14318  fast-tracking Data Center environmental permitting. Now as I understand it, executive orders do not necessarily translate into actionable law all the time, but this shows a trend towards pushing this kind of development before appropriate assessments can be made. 

Why I am concerned for our County:

As there is more and more pushback on Data Center development, developers are looking to unincorporated and un-zoned areas where they can build without jumping through as many hoops. In conjunction with this, we are now part of the ITC Midwest 345KV line that is being installed, and this makes it very desirable for developers to build in areas like this because hooking into the grid like this is cheaper than other forms of power generation like building a gas plant. This has effectively put us on the map. There is nothing in our zoning stopping anyone from building a gas plant, using our water and our land, and developing that way. If someone wanted to build along this line in our county, they would be applying to ITC Midwest to hook into one of their substations or have one built, applying for water permits from the state etc. As I understand it, there are things like stormwater permits, road use permits, that do come up, but there is no County Supervisor vote on this. 

It is my understanding that the DNR issued a stormwater permit to ITC Midwest to upgrade the Jefferson substation. There are some things that we know about this, and other things that we don’t know, and wouldn’t know until it was happening. I was told by a representative of ITC Midwest, that at this time, the purpose of the current upgrade, from 69 kv to 161kv is for redundancy for Fairfield, so that we have enough electricity at all times. This may be true. But what also may be true, and what ITC Midwest legally has the authority to do at any time, is that they can choose to step down from the new 345kv line, and use that substation to power a Data Center. While there is no proof of this, and it may not be happening now, there is also no guarantee that this will not happen, and therein is my concern. 

Limitations and unknowns that are still evolving are: For one, a hyperscale Data Center requires robust fiber optics and 50-200 or more, acres of land-land which we have but fiber which we do not currently have. But, it is a commonly documented trend that where large power lines go, robust fiber follows along that same easement. So, again we might say, oh we don’t have all the components for this to happen, but with the new line, we are now on the map and it has paved the way for these other things that traditionally follow. For a mid-scale Data Center, whose metrics in terms of water and electricity draw are still significant and on the slides I have sent to you, one would only need a lesser version of fiber, and it is not clear to me yet, but I believe it is possible that we may already have the infrastructure for this, but this needs more research and an expert. So again, this is another example of how we are seeing that I believe we have enough clues to understand we should be concerned about the reality of this type of development in our County imminently due to these new and desirable factors. 

We do not have any zoning, so if we were concerned about this type of development, not only would we not be able to stop it after the fact, as the Assistant County Attorney, Elizabeth Estey mentioned in the City Council meeting last week, “we wouldn’t even know whether it was already happening.” 

As it stands right now, there is no county decision-making access to water permits, electrical permits, substation permits, and there won’t be. But, there is also no current framework for the county to have any say in this type of development and I’d like to see us change that. This means that as of right now, we have no way to access local authority over large scale builds whose environmental and financial harms are both being reported around the country, and also still new and evolving and need studies. So currently all of the permissions for a small, medium or hyperscale Data Center are on the State level. 

I am requesting that the County consider writing an ordinance that works with the factors we can control as a county, to allow for the implementation of a 24 month moratoirum on Data Center and other continuous-use facilities from 2MW draw and above. I understand there are other industrial processes that draw closer to 10-15MW that we would not want to ban- I am hoping we can craft something that does not exclude those, such as grain drying, food processing etc, but does effectively ban small to hyperscale builds for the time being. This would be for the purpose of waiting to get answers to the many unknowns, impact assessments, etc, that are still developing during this rapid boom in this kind of facility. 

According to Tom’s Hardware, a site tracking data center development, there are currently 69 temporary moratoriums in the United States and 4 total bans. These range from 6 months to 24 months. Grant County Indiana just passed a 24 month moratorium in March, so we would not be the first. It is my opinion that we need time to watch and wait for peer-reviewed research, and to figure out how and if we as a county want to take the plunge into writing zoning. As I understand it, this takes time and this is why I am proposing the drafting of a strict ordinance to allow for a 24 month moratorium. Thank you for considering this information tonight.