Public speakers at last week’s public hearing and the county commissioners to whom they expressed their concerns may have breathed a sigh of relief when the commissioners enacted a one-year moratorium on the development of data centers in the unincorporated areas of the county.
While many of the speakers wanted a longer moratorium period, or a permanent ban, a yearlong moratorium seems to have halted, at least temporarily, whatever, if any, momentum existed for a rural data center.
But with all due respect to both the speakers and the commissioners, it appears to us the concerns and subsequent moratorium are, relatively speaking and in a paraphrase of Shakespeare, much ado about almost nothing.
The likelihood that some industrial giant is, and could be, interested in establishing a large data center (data centers are almost always relatively large) in a rural area of Alamance County is somewhere between slim and none.
Frankly, despite all the hoopla, we do not know of a single data center in the state that is situated in a truly rural area. (Otherwise rural areas deemed suitable for a data center usually require, at a minimum, dependable water lines, not simply a well.)
As countless speakers recounted last week, data centers, by their very nature, usually require a lot of water usage – maybe not as much as in the past, but still a relatively large amount.
But in this county where water and sewer services are strictly a municipal service, those factors almost entirely rule out the possibility of constructing a large, rural data center. We do not think it practical, or likely, that these multi-billion corporate entities are going to entrust a massive, multi-million dollar new facility to dependence on well water.
And, for the most part, there are very few areas of the county outside its major municipalities that have any kind of water lines to serve such entities.
An interesting footnote is that for decades local industrial recruiters had been seeking data centers and other industries that need a lot of water precisely because each of Alamance County’s three cities says it has more than enough water (in Lakes Cammack and Mackintosh for Burlington, and Graham-Mebane Lake for those municipalities) to sustain industrial developments.
Another irony is that the loss of water-heavy users, primarily textile mills, over the past several decades has resulted, simultaneously, in a sizeable shift to residential customers and higher water rates (which used to be considerably lower, when industries bore more of the load).
All local municipalities have seen huge increases in water rates in the past decades, with more on the horizon. One or more heavy industrial water users could potentially stem the tide of such high rate increases, based on historical patterns.
So while opponents of the very existence, or concept, of data centers may think they have successfully thwarted their development in Alamance County, the chances that any company was thinking, or would think, of building a data center in such rural areas here is highly unlikely in the first place.
Now, these same opponents might want to more properly focus the attention and concerns on the county’s three main municipalities – Burlington, Mebane, and Graham – that do have the utility infrastructure that these data centers would need to operate.
In these municipal areas, however, the main practical drawback is sufficient land on which to situate such operations. Many of the largest data centers across the state require at least 100 acres of land, and often several hundred acres.
Only on the fringes of the three cities, either in their extraterritorial jurisdictions (ETJs) or perhaps beyond, is there likely to be sufficient land for a potential data center. While we’re not lawyers, we don’t think the county’s moratorium would apply in any such areas – if they were to be annexed into any of the three municipalities.
In practical terms, Burlington has lots of land to the north of the city and in the south and southwest (out NC 49 and NC 62, or NC 61, largely in eastern Guilford County); Mebane has undeveloped land adjacent to its municipal limits to the north and south/southeast (some of which is in western Orange County); and Graham has some potential developable acreage on the south side of the city.
In all three cases, however, much of the land could also be in contention for residential development, since all three cities are growing in those same directions. (In a bidding war, however, we’d have to give the advantage to corporate tech interests.)
While data centers, with all the high-value equipment they contain, are a boon for increased property tax revenues (which might temper tax increases affecting residential customers), their primary deficiency, in our assessment, is the relative lack of employment.
Like Alamance County’s other current growth industry, distribution centers, there’s simply not the same employment impact as with traditional manufacturing. There’s often good pay, just not as many employees to benefit from it.
We think Alamance County’s moratorium may allow greater public and political reflection on how much of a threat, if any, data centers would actually pose. The companies behind most of these ventures – such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta (parent company of Facebook) and Amazon – are some of the most prestigious companies in the country.
So we hate to be the skunk at a garden party, but we’re not so sure data centers are the epitome of corporate or environmental evil that they were portrayed to be last week.
