Aurora restricts where new data centers can be built, limits noise and water and electricity usage
Aurora has put new restrictions on where data centers can be built, the noise they emit, the water and electricity they use and how they handle biometric data.
The vote Tuesday came as a six-month moratorium on building data centers is expiring.
“These innovative ordinances will help establish significant safeguards for our residents and the environment moving forward,” Mayor John Laesch said in a news release after the city council meeting.
The city council added a definition of “data center” to the city’s zoning law, and decided they can only be built in areas that are zoned for some manufacturing, or for office, research and light-industrial businesses.
Data centers will be allowed only as conditional uses, requiring public hearings and city council approval. Previously, data centers were treated as warehouses, and did not need conditional-use permits.
The council added regulations about how far away chillers and generators have to be from the lot lines of residences, schools and hospitals, in an effort to avoid disturbing neighbors with noise. Rooftop generators will not be allowed. Rooftop chillers have to be at least 1,500 feet away, and ground chillers and generators 1,000 feet away.
The chillers help keep the servers in the buildings from overheating. Generators provide backup emergency electricity, so the servers operate without disruption.
With those parameters, city zoning administrator John Curley pointed out that there were few areas in the city where a data center could be built, unless they were on sites where existing buildings would be razed.
Alderman Shweta Baid tried, unsuccessfully, to get the equipment to be at least 2,640 feet — a half-mile — away.
In a city survey of residents, respondents’ top concerns were about their utility bills increasing due to data center developments, water use, air pollution and noise.
The new regulations also require new or enlarged data centers to have on-site renewable energy generation that can provide at least 25% of the electricity needed during peak demand, or an on-site “resilience storage” that can handle at least 50% of the load during a 15-minute disruption. The measures are meant to address concerns about the effect on the overall electrical grid.
The largest data center in Aurora is the CyrusOne data center at Eola and Diehl roads, which was built starting in 2009.
Tuesday, nearby residents reiterated complaints about the noise from the center — not just the decibel levels, but constant, low-frequency noise. City officials have said they are working with CyrusOne to address those complaints.
There are five data centers in the city. Five more are in development, and another two have applied, according to a city spokesman.
Developers will have to submit a baseline pre-development sound study, a noise modeling study, a water consumption and quality modeling report, and an energy consumption modeling report, to get permission to build.
The biometric privacy protection measures are designed to address the concerns about selling or otherwise sharing data from fingerprints, voiceprints, iris scans, and facial and hand geometry captures, even if the state rescinds or lessens its current law regarding the use of biometrics.