The public backlash against data centers has become a potent political issue across the country, and one battle is playing out just 30 miles north of New York City, where residents are fighting a project that\u2019s moving forward despite a statewide moratorium.<\/p>\n
Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the moratorium last month to much fanfare \u2014 but the executive order applies only to data centers requiring 50 megawatts of energy or more.<\/p>\n
That leaves out projects like one in Rockland County that would use 45 megawatts of energy if a planned expansion goes through. The data center has become the subject of protests, including one outside Orangetown Town Hall on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think it has a major environmental impact,\u201d said Dave Rosen, co-founder of the Bi-State Datacenter Crisis Coalition NY\/NJ and a leading opponent of the project.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest issue that we have,\u201d he said, \u201cis that these are next to residential areas and, most importantly, Lake Tappan.\u201d<\/p>\n
The data center operator is DataBank, a company that says it\u2019s been a good corporate citizen.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no harm to the environment,\u201d said JP Laqueur, DataBank\u2019s senior vice president of marketing. He says some community concerns, including those regarding water use, are not rooted in the facts.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re not using evaporative cooling. They\u2019re not wasting water,\u201d Laqueur said. \u201cWe take no water out of the reservoir. We put no water back in the reservoir.\u201d<\/p>\n
This week, the town of Orangetown in Rockland County passed its own data center moratorium, but exempted the DataBank project because it\u2019s already in the approval process \u2014 drawing outrage from some residents.<\/p>\n
Opponents are now pinning their hopes on legislation sponsored by State Sen. Kristen Gonzalez that would create a moratorium on data centers as small as 20 megawatts. Gonzalez, who represents a district covering parts of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan, has been on a statewide tour of data center locations, pushing her bill.<\/p>\n
The DataBank site \u2014 which overlooks Little League fields \u2014 connects to Manhattan via high-speed fiber.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of these large data centers are being proposed near New York City because we have a massive consumer base that are using AI-powered tools,\u201d Gonzalez said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s why these tech companies are rushing to invest here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gonzalez\u2019s bill passed in June, but Hochul has not committed to signing it, which has made her the target of protesters.<\/p>\n
The opposition is also driven by concerns over artificial intelligence, but Databank says its data centers overwhelmingly support other services like banking, healthcare and even government systems.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re saying, \u2018Not every data center is an AI data center.\u2019 And some of these things we really do rely on for our modern lives, and we\u2019ve got to protect them,\u201d Laqueur said. \u201cAnd if you want to have a moratorium, you want to have regulation that slows some of this stuff down, great. But let\u2019s be smart about how we go about doing it and not have this knee-jerk reaction.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hochul has until the end of the year to decide whether to sign or veto Gonzalez\u2019s bill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The public backlash against data centers has become a potent political issue across the country, and one battle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331451,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[109,25,3284,199,75,84,83,9,24,49,12,63,87,27,200],"class_list":["post-331450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-app-local-state-politics","tag-app-top-stories","tag-bobby-cuza","tag-hudson-valley","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-state","tag-news","tag-nyc","tag-politics","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}