UPPER SAUCON TWP., Pa.- The secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection says she’s getting peppered with questions every day about one topic in particular.<\/p>\n
Any guesses on what it is?<\/p>\n
Data centers, of course.<\/p>\n
Or, the “elephant in the room,” as Jessica Shirley called them during her address Wednesday morning at the 2026 Lehigh Valley Sustainability Summit. The event was organized by the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce and held on the campus of DeSales University in Upper Saucon Township.<\/p>\n
“I can hardly walk down the street without somebody stopping to ask me, ‘What are you doing about data centers?'” Shirley told the crowd.<\/p>\n
Data centers were not the only item discussed during the three-hour event, but they’re certainly top of mind in the Lehigh Valley, where a number of large hyperscale proposals have been floated, including in South Whitehall Township, Lower Mount Bethel Township, Upper Macungie Township and Allen Township.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The majority of those proposals have been met with strong public opposition. So far, only the Allen Township proposal has received any approvals on the township level.<\/p>\n
But, back to that question posed to Shirley and Governor Josh Shapiro’s administration in general: What are they doing about data centers? Plenty, according to Shirley.<\/p>\n
“We’re actually doing a lot,” she said. “They’re not unregulated, like people seem to think that they are, but Governor Shapiro is committed to positioning Pennsylvania as a national leader in data center development and artificial intelligence, while ensuring that this growth strengthens Pennsylvania’s communities and puts Pennsylvania’s residents first.”<\/p>\n
The Shapiro administration is advancing what it calls GRID, which stands for the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development standards. There are four major components, as explained by Shirley.<\/p>\n
Number one: data centers need to bring their own power generation to prevent increased costs for consumers.<\/p>\n
Number two: projects have to meet the highest standards for environmental protection, including meeting water conservation requirements to protect water resources.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Number three: community engagement. Developers, Shirley said, need to do more than attend a town meeting or two and call it a day: “They have to commit to being open and transparent with local residents and leaders.”<\/p>\n
Number four: data centers\u00a0need to deliver local jobs and community benefits.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘Uncertain times’<\/p>\n
The conversation continued with a panel discussion entitled Data Centers: Myths, Facts and Impacts.<\/p>\n
Tori Morgan, the director of funding, regulatory relations and compliance for Entech Engineering was the moderator. The panelists were Ben Mitten, the founder and CEO of Nuclei Data, a data center development company; Liesel Gross, CEO of the Lehigh County Authority; Shelby Linton-Keddie, senior director of government, regulatory and external affairs for PPL Electric; and Max Paine, an engineer for Service Electric.<\/p>\n
Opponents to larger data center proposals have expressed concerns about the impact on the local water supply- assuming the centers will use a lot of water for their cooling systems- and on the power grid.<\/p>\n
Gross acknowledged, while the region has developed significant water capacity to keep pace with growth over the last 50 years or so, “we have a limit to what’s available.”<\/p>\n
She said the LCA, which provides water and sewer service to more than 55,000 customers in Lehigh and Northampton counties, hasn’t yet reviewed any hyperscale data center proposals, but, when it does, the same standards used for any major development project will apply. “We look at, what capacity do we already have developed? What’s our storage capacity? What’s our capacity for fire protection, and how will this new use impact our ability to serve existing customers as well as future customers?”<\/p>\n
Gross admitted to feeling some anxiety about the many unknowns surrounding future data center development. “It’s uncertain times,” she said.<\/p>\n
Who will share- or generate -the load?<\/p>\n
The impact on the power grid isn’t so nebulous. PPL Electric serves 1.5 million customers in 29 counties, currently peaking at about 8 gigawatts, Linton-Keddie said, but the utility already has seen future demand in various stages of advanced agreement swell to 25.2 gigawatts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“What that means is, what took us 100 years to build and to get to from a load perspective, we are looking to quadruple in the next 10 years,” said\u00a0Linton-Keddie.<\/p>\n
Where will the new generation come from? Not from PPL Electric; at least, not yet. State law prohibits regulated utilities from owning generation assets, although the company has been lobbying to change that.<\/p>\n
“I don’t want to bust the bubble in the sustainability conversation, but the way that we will likely get most of this generation in the short term is natural gas,” said\u00a0Linton-Keddie.<\/p>\n
When asked whether nuclear power generation might be part of the mix in the future,\u00a0Linton-Keddie said yes, but most likely not the “old school, giant reactors being built from scratch.” The focus would be on small, modular reactors, she said, which most likely wouldn’t be commercially available until 10 or 15 years down the road.<\/p>\n
Myths and takeaways\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mitten was asked for his take on the biggest myths surrounding data centers. “The biggest myth at this point is that the developers don’t care,” he responded. “The communities, they’re requiring information, and the developers are giving that information to the communities.”<\/p>\n
He also stressed the importance of local planning commissions doing their due diligence in evaluating potential sites for data centers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another myth, according to Mitten, is that data centers are not regulated.<\/p>\n
“I ask that everybody just take a minute, pause, get educated and understand what is real and what is not real, and ask good questions to the developers and hold them accountable,” said Mitten.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But some people already have all the answers they need. According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, 65% of Americans oppose the building of an AI data center in their community.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UPPER SAUCON TWP., Pa.- The secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection says she’s getting peppered with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180174,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,1609,2116,157,2220,34887,2795],"class_list":["post-180173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-data-centers","tag-lehigh-valley","tag-pennsylvania-department-of-environmental-protection","tag-ppl-electric","tag-upper-saucon-township"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}