(Radio Iowa) – Another Iowa county has hit pause on permits for data centers. Devlun Whiteing is chairman of the Ida County Board of Supervisors. “Following Woodbury County, Plymouth County and just kind of reading up on data centers and hearing stories,” Whiteing said, “and so I asked our county auditor to put it on our agenda.” The Ida County Board of Supervisors has unanimously voted to enact an indefinite moratorium on new data center development.
Whiteing says the decision gives the board time to understand how data centers could affect local resources. “What are the data centers? How big of any area do they take? How much electricity are they going to use? People are concerned about how much water they use to cool them down, noise levels. Are they going to be near places?” Whiteing said. “…We’re not for or against it right now. We just want to get some information and be better educated and have some kind of ordinances in place.”
The Ida County supervisors voted on the data center moratorium at the end of June. Whiteing says it’s about being prepared rather than reactionary. “We want to grow our country and we don’t want to turn down something that could be really good for our county and bring in revenue and not use the resources and be positive for our county,” Whiteing said, “but in the other aspect, we don’t want to do anything that would make the quality of life for our citizens worse.”
Whiteing says Ida County officials have been contacted in the past couple of weeks by some companies that are developing data centers. “There was obviously some interest in putting some data centers in Ida County because when they read that there was a moratorium…they reached out to the board,” Whiteing says, “so we’re going to Zoom meetings and just learn as much as we can so we can make some educated decisions on it.” At least nine counties have enacted temporary moratoriums on data center development.
Supporters argue the projects bring good-paying jobs and generate tax revenue, while opponents raise questions about whether developers are being transparent about water use, electricity demand and noise. There are over three-thousand data centers currently operating in the U-S, with at least 15-hundred more in the planning or construction phase. Nearly 40 percent of those under-development data centers are in rural areas according to the Pew Research Center.
