Opponents of a proposed $500 million data center in southwestern Sangamon County went away disappointed and angry but unbowed, while officials from a Dallas-based company left smiling, after a pair of nonbinding votes by county officials Feb. 19.
“This is a long-term catalyst for the labor and construction industry,” Bradd Hout, location and power strategy director for CyrusOne, said before the Sangamon County Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) voted 5-0 to support the company’s request.
CyrusOne wants to build the data center in an agricultural zone and is requesting approval for the project as a conditional permitted use.
But opponents said their concerns remain about how the 634-megawatt data center would create noise, take prime farm ground out of production, disrupt the environment and become part of a data center boom across the county that is contributing to electric rate increases and perpetuating the use of climate change-causing fossil fuels.
“These companies only care about money,” Jill Krippel of Springfield said. “They don’t care about us.”
Gary Schulze, who lives about a mile from the proposed data center, said he worries there will be a constant buzzing from the site. Data centers, he said, “are only good for the people with deep pockets.”
Don Hanrahan, member of the Coalition for Springfield’s Utility Future, said low-frequency noise from data centers will create long-term health hazards, a claim dismissed as unsubstantiated by CyrusOne officials.
But Darrel Thoma, a spokesman for business groups related to Dowson Farms of Divernon that own the land to be sold to CyrusOne, told county officials, “to get an investment like that into Sangamon County is absolutely tremendous.”
Company officials, quoting estimates from Sangamon County government, said the data center would generate an additional $5 million to $6 million in new property taxes each year once the complex, to be built in segments, is complete in the next four or more years.
The ZBA vote by chairperson Charles Chimento and ZBA members George Petrilli, JD Sudeth, Tony Mares and Richard Thompson will be considered by the County Board when it meets at 6 p.m. March 23 at the BOS Center to take a final vote on the CyrusOne zoning plan.
By voting in favor of the request, ZBA members said they agreed with a recommendation from the Springfield-Sangamon County Regional Planning Commission staff that the CyrusOne request complied with the county’s zoning ordinance.
The ZBA vote on Feb. 19 followed a 4-5 advisory vote that same day by a County Board committee to not support a proposal for a six-month moratorium on any final zoning decisions for data centers.
Voting in favor of a moratorium were Republican County Board member David Mendenhall and Democrats Reggie Guyton and Linda Douglas-Williams. Voting against were Democrat Kevin McGuire and Republicans James Schackmann, Jeff Thomas, Greg Stumpf and Tom Rader.
County Board member Marc Ayers, who proposed the moratorium, said he had expected a favorable vote from the Zoning and Land Use Committee but plans to ask the full County Board to vote on the moratorium March 23.
Guyton said he and other County Board members don’t yet have enough information to make “informed decisions.”
But Springfield attorney Kyle Barry, who is representing CyrusOne, told the ZBA that opponents are using “a lot of hearsay” to make accusations. He added that opponents’ pleas of “just give us more time” aren’t justified for a project that has been evaluated by county officials since the fall.
“This project has been vetted,” Barry said. “There’s no reason at this point to delay things, and it probably would be legally inappropriate.”
The proposed data center, to be built on a 280-acre site currently farmed in the 13000 block of Thayer Road in Talkington Township, would provide rented space for computer servers owned by companies that help to power the internet and artificial intelligence, CyrusOne officials said.
The company hasn’t revealed the data center’s potential clients. CyrusOne has said the project would create 100 permanent full-time, on-site jobs – with average annual salaries of $83,000 – more than 500 temporary construction jobs and ongoing support for local vendors to keep the sprawling complex operating.
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Hout told Illinois Times after the ZBA vote that he didn’t know how the proposed Power Act – contained in bills pending in the Illinois House and Senate – would affect the CyrusOne project.
He said he also didn’t know how or whether the Sangamon County project, which has the support of local building trades unions, would be affected by Gov. JB Pritzker’s proposed two-year pause on sales-tax incentives for new data centers. The governor told lawmakers he supports the pause to allow for more study of the impact of data centers on energy supplies and the economy.
Hout said, “Everything we’ve worked on is intended to comply with the rules and regulations in effect today.”
The Power Act legislation, according to the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition, would “protect Illinois families, communities and our climate from the growing impacts of energy- and water-intensive data centers.” The legislation would require data centers to “bring new clean-energy resources to the grid” and prohibit data centers “from shifting infrastructure and capacity costs onto everyday consumers,” according to a coalition news release.
The coalition cited a recent report from the Union of Concerned Scientists that said data centers will account for up to 72% of electricity demand growth by 2030 and increase electric system costs in Illinois by up to $37 billion, or 24%, by 2050.
Plans from CyrusOne currently call for the company to build four 450,000-square-foot, one-story buildings to house computer servers rather than the originally proposed six 230,000-square-foot buildings.
Each building would have 105 diesel-powered electric generators, each the size of a semitrailer, for a total of 420, with each generator operating an average of 15 hours per year.
The reduction in the number of buildings, which increases the total square footage from 1.39 million to 1.8 million, was done to set aside more space for native landscaping and wildlife, Hout said. The company said in its zoning application that the change will allow for a bigger setback from Thayer Road and reduce projected water consumption by 24%.
Unlike some data centers that use large amounts of water for cooling computer equipment, CyrusOne says this data center would use “closed-loop” technology to recirculate about 280,000 gallons of water that would be trucked in from elsewhere.
The 2,800 gallons of water needed each day at the site for restrooms, humidification and other basic operations would be comparable to a regular office complex and would come from the Apple Creek Water Cooperative, which gets its water from Waverly Lake.
CyrusOne officials said they are discussing plans for the company to fund improvements to the lake and system upgrades within Apple Creek’s territory.
They said the complex wouldn’t cause the value of adjacent property to drop and would generate over $98 million in property taxes during the first 20 years of operation, or between $5 million and $6 million in new property taxes annually.
The data center would meet all county and state sound limits, company officials said amid complaints from opponents who point to complaints from neighbors of a CyrusOne data center in the Chicago suburb of Aurora.
Company officials respond that the Sangamon County center would be in a more secluded location, with the closest home three-quarters of a mile away. And CyrusOne officials said they have learned from their experience in Aurora.
“The Aurora campus, constructed in 2017, was built in accordance with the design standards in place at that time,” the company said in a March 3 statement. “Since then, our engineering standards have continued to evolve. Today, All CyrusOne data centers are designed with enhanced, purpose-built sound attenuation measures to further reduce off-site noise.”
The statement also said, in part, “Backup generators operate only during routine testing and maintenance or in the event of rare utility outages.”