Reporting by Rebecca Powell and Erin Udell, Fort Collins Coloradoan
As multiple cities and counties consider regulating the development of data centers, Fort Collins City Council members said they are interested in exploring a moratorium of some kind.
Rather than targeting all data centers in blanket fashion, council members said they were interested in limiting the largest energy and water users.
A moratorium would stop development on targeted facilities so Fort Collins could create standards to regulate things like energy use, water use, noise and pollution.
Fort Collins is not the most desirable location for a data center because of the higher cost of land and its availability, city staff told council during an Aug. 25 work session.
But council members said they didn’t want to rely on that fact.
The city’s land use code doesn’t define data centers, so any proposed data center would have to go through the “addition of permitted use” process.
For council member Anne Nelsen, the absence of a definition in the land use code is a problem.
“I think we’re actually creating equal problems without having that sort of definition in the land use code,” she said.
Data centers can range in size, and it’s often based on the customers they serve, said Clay Frickey, the city’s planning manager.
To put things into perspective, a large Fort Collins Utilities electric customer uses 12 to 25 megawatts, and a large water user uses 5 million to 10 million gallons annually, according to a presentation given to council.
Fort Collins’ peak electric load is 325 megawatts.
As Larimer County works on its own data center regulations, it considers small facilities to be less than 5 megawatts, large facilities to be 5 to 25 megawatts and very large facilities to be anything more than 25 megawatts.
A data center firm recently approached the city for a facility around 20 megawatts, Frickey said.
This firm is more focused on serving local entities in the realms of health care, education and research, and it wants to be close to end users, Frickey said, in contrast to entities like Meta or Google, he said.
“I just want to make sure we’re not using ‘data center’ synonymously with the hyperscale data center,” Mayor Pro Tem Julie Pignataro said, noting there are data centers already in the city and almost anything with servers can be defined as such.
And not all data centers support the use of AI, Pignataro added.
She said she could support a moratorium but not one focused on “data centers in general.”
Longmont has banned any future development of any data center at 100 megawatts or more — often referred to as hyperscale — and is developing regulations for smaller-scale data centers.
Aurora’s strategy is to limit data centers’ excessive water use, council member Josh Fudge pointed out.
“I worry that if we create kind of one-size-fits all rules, something really cool might come along that we can’t even envision yet that could be considered a data center but is highly efficient and doesn’t use a lot of water,” he said. “I would want to make sure we allow for the evolution of technology” and are attracting efficient projects.
If council can determine what megawatt level it believes is too high for a data center in Fort Collins, then city staff can explore regulations for lower levels at different speeds, said Ginny Sawyer, assistant to the city manager.
Council members also had questions about how high-powered a facility Fort Collins Utilities could accommodate without adding more generation.
Some substations on the fringes of Fort Collins have enough capacity to handle a new 15- to 50-megawatt facility while others, such as in Midtown, are full, Travis Walker, light and power director for Fort Collins Utilities, told council.
As larger-scale data centers get built, PRPA has to plan for more energy generation and transmission. That might require new generation and transmission infrastructure, and backup thermal generation to support renewable sources could be part of that plan, he said.
“We would still want to get to carbon free as fast as possible,” he said, answering a question on how data centers might affect Platte River Power Authority’s goal to get to 100% carbon-free energy generation.
Walker also estimated that a city cap in the 60- to 70-megawatt range would not rule out “some really cool opportunities in the 30-, 40- and 50-megawatt range for other uses” that might bring better employment opportunities than a data center would.
“(Facilities) could also be a benefit to the system if they are willing to be flexible,” he said. “So it could be that they run well during the day when wind and solar are abundant, slow down at night a little bit.”
What’s next for data centers?
City staff is currently developing a timeline for work on a moratorium or ban.
No specific timeline has been set.
What’s happening in Windsor?
The Windsor Town Board is also in the process of exploring data center regulations.
At an Aug. 3 joint work session, Windsor’s town board and planning commission directed town staff to gather more information on data centers and potentially work up a draft ordinance to regulate their development following news of a proposed data center just outside of town limits.
Global AI, which calls itself “the world’s first hyperscaler focused on sovereign AI infrastructure,” purchased 2000 Howard Smith Ave. W. late last year. It has since proposed renovating the industrial complex — formerly Carestream Health’s logistics and distribution center and, before that, part of Windsor’s once-expansive Windsor Kodak campus — into a data center.
Since it is located in unincorporated Weld County, the county has authority over development proposals for the property.
Windsor has still been gathering public feedback from residents, many of whom are overwhelmingly opposed to — or “highly cautious” of — the construction of data centers in the area, according to a staff presentation at the work session.
In feedback sent over email and via social media, most residents urged the town to prevent, pause or strictly limit data center development when possible, while a smaller subset supported the construction of these facilities in industrial areas and under “stringent, impact-based standards,” according to the staff presentation.
Since there are no active proposals for a data center within Windsor town limits, a moratorium on data center development felt premature, most planning commissioners and town board members said at the work session.
Even so, “taking no action is not an option,” Commissioner David Hassard said as the session drew to a close.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan.
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