An open letter to greater Lehigh Valley Region local government officials about massive data centers

Dear officials:

Served eight years at Upper Saucon Township. First as a member of the planning commission and second as a Township Supervisor and Vice Chair on the Board of supervisors. You can see my professional background on Linkedin.

Your ultimate fiduciary responsibility to our community is to protect the health and safety of our people. You serve during a massive developer data center gold rush. This gold rush is for technologies for which the business case is not proven. These mega data centers are huge industrial sites that consume massive quantities of power, water, and cooling. They generate huge quantities of audible, infra, and ultra low frequency noise. They have been proven to be regional heat islands. All of these factors can hurt our community's health and safety.

Spent years leading projects to assess, move, design, and build data centers. But the new generation of hyper scale data centers are incomprehensibly large. Their economic benefit to local communities is limited. The risk are just emerging as the first wave are being placed in human proximity. Your acceptable uses may not today conceive of this industrial use. The benefits do not compel you to update zoning or SALDO to accommodate their development.

Am not a lawyer but you could become personally liable if you and your entity do not do workmanlike due diligence and then local or regional health and safety is degraded. Lack of adequate diligence would be gross negligence.

This diligence should include hiring expert engineering and technical support because your current engineering and perhaps legal counsel are unprepared for this development type. You should also arrange a field trip with your planning commission and executive board to visit several operating hyper scale data centers. Northern Virgina and Memphis have good sites you could inspect. You should not decide anything until you have personally visited a couple operational 1 GW or greater data centers. Local entities may consider pooling resources to adequately study the issue before making decisions. The planning commission has obviously punted.

Yes, you can expect the private and venture capital backed development teams, perhaps also backed by utility and fossil fuel interests, to campaign aggressively including all the aggressive development tactics you already know. Ignore the noise.

Am proud that Upper Saucon Township has explicitly excluded data centers as an acceptable use. But a single hyper scale data center in the area can affect communities in a wide radius.

At very least, you should take due care studying the issue before making any decisions that allows development of hyper scale data centers.

There is nothing that compels you to decide anything until you have done your workmanlike due diligence. Am optimistic that you will do the right things to protect regional health and safety.

Cordially,

John Gilda