The Niagara County Planning Board gave its support to proposed moratoriums in the towns of Lockport and Cambria for any new data centers operating there.
Both municipalities are working to develop regulations for such facilities, with Lockport’s lasting 18 months and Cambria’s nine months. Neither town has received any new requests for data centers.
Lockport already has the H5 Data Center complex within the Lockport Industrial Park, which Yahoo! uses. Other data centers in Niagara County include the Digipower X facility in North Tonawanda, the Lake Mariner complex in Somerset, and Blockfusion in Niagara Falls.
Last week, New York State announced a year-long moratorium on approving new large-scale data centers, with the state working on creating regulations to address factors like energy demand, environmental impacts, and water usage. As that action applies only to state permitting, data centers could still go through the local permitting process before waiting on further state action.
The Town of Lewiston also enacted an 18-month-long moratorium on data centers earlier this year.
The planners also supported an 18-month moratorium in Lockport for new battery energy storage systems. Lockport Town Attorney Tom Seaman said the main concerns the town board had were a potential loss of agricultural land and potential fires.
Several local municipalities had already established battery storage regulations this year, like Pendleton, Porter, Barker, and Wilson. Newfane had a six-month moratorium passed earlier this year.
There was also an item on the agenda for the planned changes to the Digipower X facility, but that was taken off because the City of North Tonawanda’s current moratorium on new crypto currency and data center operations prevents it from going through the review process.
The facility plans to change its main focus from crypto mining to data center usage for artificial intelligence. It would build a new 80,000-square-foot building on Erie Avenue to house the computers and industrial-size fans used as part of the project.