Overview:
• The proposed ordinance was presented to the Cumberland County Joint Planning Board on Tuesday.
• Data centers could generate their own electricity, but not with nuclear reactors.
• The county’s ordinance would apply to unincorporated parts of Cumberland County, plus Eastover.
Cumberland County’s proposed regulations for data centers would have significant rules for the controversial computing facilities.
These include: Setbacks from neighboring property lines and buildings, restrictions on where they may be built, noise limitations, buffering and screening requirements, limitations on how they obtain and use water to cool the computers, and requirements that their electricity consumption will not cause problems for other electricity customers.
Rawls Howard, the county’s planning and inspections director, presented the proposed regulations to the county’s Joint Planning Board on Tuesday. The board took no action and plans to discuss the proposal at a future meeting.
The Cumberland County Board of Commissioners wants to adopt regulations by December 15, when the county’s six-month moratorium on data center construction expires.
In preparing the proposed ordinance, county staff researched data center regulations from other communities across North Carolina, Howard said, and in Loudoun County, Virginia, which has a heavy concentration of data centers.
Once enacted, the ordinance would apply to unincorporated areas of Cumberland County, county officials told CityView, plus the Town of Eastover, which uses the county’s zoning regulations.
If Hope Mills, Spring Lake, Wade, Stedman, Godwin, Falcon, and Linden want ordinances to regulate data centers in their municipal limits, they would have to adopt them separately, the county said. Fayetteville is developing its own data center ordinance.
Data Center Property Buffers
The proposed ordinance defines a data center as, “A facility or campus of buildings, the principal use of which is the housing, operation, and maintenance of equipment for the storage, processing, transmission, or distribution of digital data.”
The ordinance would not apply to telecommunications facilities, such as cell phone towers. It also would not apply to properties that have data processing facilities as a secondary function, such as a factory’s or a hospital’s computing equipment to support their operations.
The ordinance would regulate data centers that rely on the electrical grid to operate, though they may have back-up generators for power outages. It also covers data centers with on-site power generation for partial or total operations.
Nuclear reactors would be prohibited at data centers.
Data centers would be allowed only on property zoned for manufacturing use, and then only with permission from county commissioners. That permission, according to a county memo, would be granted “through a conditional zoning process within the County’s manufacturing districts to allow for consideration of site-specific conditions or community concerns.”
The buildings on a data center site would have to be at least 500 feet from the property line. This increases to 750 feet if the data center is adjacent to residential property. The 750-foot setback also would apply to sites within a half-mile of an agricultural district designated for the preservation of farmland.
Further, regardless of the setbacks from the property lines, data center buildings would have to be at least 1,250 feet from schools, convalescent homes, retirement homes, group homes, nursing homes, hospitals, day care facilities, and religious worship premises.
Noise Limits, Other Rules
Noise from data center operations would be capped at 60 decibels at the property line, which is the level of a typical conversation or quiet office. If the site adjoins residential property, the sound at the property line must be no louder than 45 decibels, which is comparable to the hum of a household refrigerator.
The ordinance would impose screening, security fencing, and landscape buffers with a minimum height of 15 feet on the properties.
Maintenance and testing runs of backup generators would be limited to the hours of 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays, and would not be allowed on federal, state, or county holidays.
Data centers would be required to use water from a public utility, and not wells, rivers, streams, or other watercourses.
Evaporative cooling systems—which water to cool the equipment and then let the water evaporate—would be prohibited. Instead, data centers that use water to keep the computers cool would have to use a closed-loop or recycled water setup that minimizes water consumption.
Before they could build a data center, developers would have to research and report the amount of noise their project would generate. They would need to verify that there is sufficient water and electricity available to supply the project’s needs without impacting water and power use elsewhere.
Residents have said bright lights from a data center could be troublesome. Howard told the planning board existing county regulations address lights.
The Joint Planning Board next meets on October 20 and could discuss and vote on the ordinance then.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
