St. Louis officials moved forward regulations for data center development in the city that they hope will thread the needle on an issue which lends itself to polarization more than consensus.
City planning executive Miriam Keller describes the development framework that passed out the Planning Commission on Wednesday as “open, but very cautious” toward the developments.
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The framework takes a harder line towards large-scale data centers than in the draft proposal first made by city planners. That would have put the most severe restrictions only on data centers of 75 megawatts or more. The plan advanced yesterday would extend those to data centers that use 30 megawatts or more.
As in the city’s draft, data centers of all kinds will be required to be spaced a certain distance away from residential areas, schools, transit stops, and parks, Keller says. The bigger the type of data center, the wider that buffer must be. Also, data centers of any kind will require a conditional use permit from the city, which allows regulators to look at the specific context of any one proposed build. “Each of these projects is unique and they really merit some unique review,” she says.
But, in general, the framework will allow for micro data centers to be built downtown, in industrial areas as well as in some larger commercial nodes. The data centers classified as standard size (between 5 and 30 megawatts) would be limited to downtown and areas zoned industrial. The largest data centers would be “restricted pretty tightly,” Keller says, limited to just the “most intensive industrial districts.”
Those districts—zoned K in the city’s current code—currently run along the industrial riverfront to the north and south downtown. But there’s also a thick ribbon of K zoning along the I-64 corridor and some industrial areas to the south. The Armory is zoned K, as is the former Famous-Barr Warehouse just west, which is currently the subject of a 120 megawatt data center proposal.
Keller adds that the framework also caps how many data centers can be in any one area to prevent, for instance, the facilities from overtaking all of downtown.
Wednesday’s meeting lasted more than four hours and, unlike a lot of public hearings about data centers, was sparsely attended by the public. However, Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer, who sits on the commission, says the framework that came out of it was the product of “hundreds of pieces of public comment and input, dozens of meetings with stakeholders, and hours and hours and hours of deliberation and testimony.”
At Wednesday’s meeting, Schweitzer offered an amendment that would have required a major data center to get a variance if it is to be built anywhere in the city, even in industrial areas. It did not pass.
However, another amendment significantly bulked up the renewable energy requirements a data center project in the city must meet. A previous iteration of the framework required data centers to meet certain green energy requirements within ten years of coming online. Schweitzer’s amendment moved those renewable energy thresholds forward, meaning that a data center will have to use 50 percent renewable energy upon becoming operational.
“These are much stronger regulations than the city currently has in place for data centers,” says Schweitzer.
The framework passed by the city’s Planning Commission now heads to the Board of Aldermen and, if it finds approval there, onto Mayor Cara Spencer. (If aldermen make any changes, it goes back to Planning.)
The city originally set about the process of putting together this framework in September, when Mayor Cara Spencer signed an executive order that put temporary regulations on data center development while a more long-term framework could be drafted. That executive order was a way to avoid an outright moratorium on the projects.
The framework advanced to the Board of Aldermen Wednesday night was a result of the past eight months of work. If it becomes law, it will only affect new data center developments so projects already in the pipeline will not be subject to them. That includes the high-profile project that would put a data center next to The Armory, which has just one more hurdle to clear at City Hall.
“We’ve ended up doing a lot of original thinking and trying to be as comprehensive and thorough as possible,” says Keller. “The planning commission’s recommendation is really quite a bit more detailed and comprehensive than where most cities are on this right now.”
Keller also notes that the commission’s work came in on time. The goal was to have the proposed framework to the Board of Aldermen time for them to pass it before summer recess, which starts July 10.
