Amid a groundswell of grassroots opposition to new data center development in Wisconsin, Green County last Tuesday became the latest in the state to approve a moratorium on such developments.
The Green County Land Use and Zoning Board recommended approval by unanimous vote last Monday, July 14; and then the next night the full county board immediately voted 30-1 to approve the 12-month moratorium on data-center development here.
The lone holdout vote belonged to District 20 representative Casey Jones of Brodhead. He defended his vote, saying his reading of the laws regarding zoning show that it’s not right to institute a blanket ban on just one kind of business.
“Every business has its flaws,” said, Jones, a former mayor of Brodhead who said he has gotten plenty of heat for his lone dissenting vote. “We’ve gotten lazy and just want to sit here and (arbitrarily) decide, business-by-business, which one can go it.”
There have been no proposals for the development of a data center in Green County to date and officials have repeatedly and vehemently denied that the moratorium was conceived in response to one. Green County, though, joins the list of Wisconsin counties to enact moratoriums, the closest being Dane and Dodge counties.
A published report said the Green County ban was “instigated” by a nearby project — a $1 billion data center campus in Rock County that would stretch across both the towns of Beloit and Turtle on Prairie Avenue. Social media also has been littered with unfounded rumors of data center proposals in the region.
Rising public opposition to data centers nationwide is largely driven by massive resource consumption — they require huge amounts of electricity and millions of gallons of water to cool vast banks of computer servers that are rarely, if ever, turned off. This strains local power grids, driving up residential utility bills, and leading to quality-of-life issues like constant noise pollution from cooling fans; and backup generators.
Green County officials said they will use the 12-month pause to study the issue in-depth and to determine, among other things, whether there is any land in Green County even suitable for such a future use; and also if there is any public appetite for it.
On Thursday, reacting to the board’s Tuesday decision, County Board Chairman Jerry Guth said he thought the supervisors did the right thing by approving the measure.
“It was appropriate for the county to gather info to take time to hear all sides of this issue,” said Guth. “What we are doing is we are really trying to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to this.”
Policy experts also contend that such moratoriums also provide local governments additional time for the “gold-rush” fever around data center construction and the larger issue of artificial intelligence that is helping drive demand for them across the country to cool.