A new data center off I-88? Naperville officials leery of potential development

The developer of a potential data center in Naperville will reimburse the city for the costs of a study about its electricity demands.

Naperville’s electric utility has decided to contract with ICF Resources to conduct a “network interconnection study” related to the possibility of a data center being built along the I-88 corridor. All costs associated with the study will be billed to the developer.

Mayor Scott Wehrli made the future of the I-88 corridor a focal point of his State of the City address last month, calling it “the largest and most significant redevelopment opportunity in our city’s history.”

Wehrli noted at a city council meeting the same week that data centers are the “No. 1 item” topping a list of conditional uses in Naperville’s office, research and light industry zoning district, which is applicable to the I-88 corridor.

“So the plausibility of potential data centers seeking to locate there is real,” the mayor said. “And I think it's something that the city needs to look at very cautiously and with an open mind.”

Among the most prominent examples of suburban projects, the once-vaunted Sears’ headquarters in Hoffman Estates has met the wrecking ball to make way for a Dallas-based developer’s sprawling data center campus. During the Naperville council meeting, officials did not identify the developer eyeing the I-88 corridor, but some expressed reservations about data centers in general.

“There's a million articles out there about the load issues that we may have as a result of data centers springing up all over the state and the country. And I just don't think it's a very beneficial use for the city where it's not going to be many employees,” Councilman Patrick Kelly said.

“You're not going to have sales tax generated by this type of a center. It's not a quantum computing center where you'd have very highly skilled, highly trained employees coming to Naperville. And the demand on electric and water are so enormous,” Kelly said, “that I just don't see the upside.”

Councilwoman Allison Longenbaugh said she’s skeptical overall about data centers, but that she’s going to keep an open mind.

“From what I've read, they're environmentally intense, whether it's water and energy, and so that does worry me … The only thing I really like about this is the fact that the developer is doing their homework,” Longenbaugh said.

According to Brian Groth, Naperville’s electric utility director, the proposed development represents an immediate load growth of 10.4% and a near-term load growth of 28.8% — well above the 3% load growth projections that the utility typically assumes, he wrote in a memo to the council.

The current request is for 36 megawatts of utility load “today,” Groth wrote, with the ability to grow to 100 MW of utility load in the near future. To put that into perspective, the peak demand for the entire city in 2024 was 347 MW.

“Traditional load growth is fine,” Groth said. “It's just these large, high-density load facilities are the ones we need interconnection studies to understand what we would need to do as a city to accommodate (them).”

· Daily Herald staff writer Eric Peterson contributed to this report