After almost three hours of constituents mostly deriding the idea of a data center in Sangamon County, the County Board voted 15 to 13 to table the CyrusOne project that would take more than 280 acres of farmland.
More than 700 residents of Sangamon County, and other counties, attended the Sangamon County Board meeting on March 23, with a majority of the audience cheering as speakers described a variety of reasons why they do not want a data center built nearby. The meeting was held at the BOS Center, rather than the County Board chambers, due to the anticipated large public turnout.
Prior to the public comment period, a vote to table the proposal failed with only 13 members initially voting in favor of tabling it. However, following the lengthy public comments, District 7 board member Craig Hall, who represents the area in southwest Sangamon County where the data center would be located, called for a second vote on tabling the proposal. This time it passed, 15 to 13.
County spokesperson Jeff Wilhite told Illinois Times that a County Board member would have to make a motion to bring the proposal out of committee for it to be revisited at the next meeting. The April County Board meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, April 7.
CyrusOne previously outlined projections to net the county $98 million in property taxes over a 20-year period. At the March 23 meeting, company representatives proposed community investments totaling roughly $20 million across local fire districts, water projects and STEM-related school programs.
CyrusOne, which has two other Illinois data centers in Aurora and Lombard, has already taken advantage of $132.5 million in tax breaks from a state program providing tax exemptions to data center companies. It’s unclear how much CyrusOne might receive in tax breaks from the Sangamon County project but it appears to meet the state program’s guidelines to qualify for such incentives.
The two centers in DuPage County are considerably smaller than what CyrusOne has proposed for Sangamon County, which would be classified as a hyperscale data center with a 634-megawatt capacity once fully constructed. Although it has dozens of data centers operating across the U.S. and Europe, the largest operational data center that the private equity-backed CyrusOne has built possesses a capacity under 170 megawatts, according to its website.
Since 2014, CyrusOne has paid DuPage County a total of $10.6 million in property taxes for those two data centers.
The Aurora data center is one-fourth the size of the Sangamon plan and has a capacity of 109 megawatts, while the one located in Lombard is comparably miniscule with a capacity of 12 megawatts.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a federal agency created in 1975 to address nuclear energy safety, cites how one megawatt “equates to about the same amount of electricity consumed by 400 to 900 homes in a year.”
That means 634 megawatts of electricity could provide enough power for anywhere between 250,000 and 570,000 homes annually; Sangamon County has fewer than 100,000 housing units. County officials have said the project won’t affect consumers’ electric rates and the Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative, which operates the grid the data center would pull electricity from, also claims such a project would not lead to an increase in electricity rates.
This story will be updated with additional information.