A borough council in Pennsylvania has said no to a data center campus planned around 588 diesel backup generators. On 21 October the seven members of Archbald Borough Council, in Lackawanna County, voted unanimously against the conditional use application for Wildcat Ridge, WVIA reported. The developer, Cornell Realty Management of Brooklyn, wanted 14 buildings on 578 acres of mountainside above the Eynon and Sturges neighborhoods.
Nine Hearings, Then a Flat No
The site lies inside a data center overlay district that the borough created last November, so the question was never zoning as such. Data centers there are conditional uses: council has to find, after a public hearing, that the project meets the ordinance. It held nine hearings between January and September. The developer put up nine witnesses on cooling, generators, noise, traffic, air quality and economics, and its attorney argued that the standards had been met. Opponents answered with a public health expert who put the health cost of the generators at between $3 million and $124 million a year.
The reports we read do not give council's reasons. Residents had argued that the developer offered assurances rather than evidence. Council did not comment, citing possible litigation, and residents expect an appeal.
The Generator Count Moved Between Drafts
When the Times-Tribune covered the March hearing, the plan called for up to 41 generators per building, about 574 in all, each rated 3 MW with a 2,000-gallon tank. That is roughly 1.15 million gallons of diesel on site. The developer called 41 per building a worst case and said newer designs would cut the need by 80 to 90 percent; it proposed testing each unit for four hours every three months and expected about one 24-hour outage a year. The campus was described as needing about 1.6 GW from the PPL grid. The reports from October give 588 generators, and WVIA describes them as the project's power source rather than a backup to the grid. Which of those descriptions is right is just the kind of thing a hearing record has to settle.
What a Board Wants to See
A fleet counted in hundreds is judged on how it will run, not on its nameplate: test hours, fuel storage, noise at the neighbors' fence line, and what happens in a long outage. Boards in Pennsylvania and elsewhere are asking for those answers in a form they can check, and the same questions sit behind the draft testing cap in San Jose (our report) and the air permit review in West Virginia (our report).
If the generator count is still changing between application drafts, as it did here, expect it to be read as a gap in the design, not as flexibility.
Sources: WVIA, The Allegheny Front, The Times-Tribune via Yahoo News