By GARRY RAYNO, Distant Dome
The state may have bitten a bullet when Senate Bill 439 — to limit local regulation of massive “data centers” — was tabled Thursday in the House, essentially killing it for the remainder of the session.
The bill would permit data centers big and small by right and mandate they be treated as any other permitted business in commercial and industrial zones.
Under the bill, major data centers could not face more stringent restrictions than any other permitted entity in the zone.
That is 180 degrees from the intent of the original bill sponsored by Sen. Debra Altschiller, D-Stratham, and Rep. Hope Damon, D-Croydon, which would have authorized cities and towns to regulate data centers in commercial and industrial zones with environmental and aesthetic considerations.
What was before the House Thursday was yet another attempt by the libertarian wing of the Republicans to have the long reach of the state government override local control of an operation that fills a building the size of three football fields and sucks mammoth amounts of electricity and water from the grid and natural resources to operate 24 hours a day. They are also noisy and create few jobs once construction is complete.
The buildings are stacked with networked servers and storage and networking equipment that need constant cooling and power to facilitate such things as video streaming, cloud storage and AI models.
These monstrosities of the digital age are not good neighbors. Just ask folks in Virginia or Georgia who have had their lives upended by these facilities when they moved into their neighborhoods.
The bill attempts to establish a comprehensive and clearly defined statutory structure for the siting and regulation of data centers, according to Rep. Diane Pauer, R-Brookline, and the chair of the House Municipal and County Government Committee.
Pauer, along with Rep. Keith Ammon, R-New Boston, co-sponsored the amendment that reversed the direction of the bill.
The bill “prohibits municipalities from imposing restrictions on data centers that are more burdensome than those applied to other permitted uses within the same district, except through generally applicable ordinances,” Pauer wrote in her report to the House.
She said municipalities would retain their ability to regulate through generally applicable tools but may not single out data centers for disparate treatment and claimed the plan balances local control with predictability.
The bill split Pauer’s committee down party lines with Republicans supporting it while Democrats opposed it.
In other states like Maine, a moratorium on new data centers had bipartisan support before Gov. Janet Mills vetoed the bill due to pressure from the town of Jay where a data center is planned.
Bipartisan support has blocked data centers in communities around the country.
In New Hampshire, the effort to block the bill did turn into a bipartisan effort Thursday when Ammon moved to table the bill which would kill it for this term as Thursday was the deadline for acting on Senate bills before the House. Taking the bill off the table at future sessions would require a two-thirds vote which is unlikely given the controversy surrounding the centers.
The vote to table the bill was 304-11.
But this isn’t the first action before Granite State lawmakers on the massive data centers which do not resemble the more than a dozen small-to-medium-sized data centers in the state in Manchester, Portsmouth, Keene, Lebanon, Bedford and elsewhere.
Several years ago, the legislature approved allowing small nuclear generating plants which are being sold as one possible solution to the great electric demand from the large data centers.
Still in the development stage, the unproven technology would be unregulated by the state’s Public Utilities Commission under the law, and not subject to grid manager ISO-New England’s oversight because the electricity would not go onto the grid.
A recent study done of the PJM power market stretching from Illinois and Indiana to Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina found the growth in electric demand fueled by the new data centers is primarily responsible for spiking wholesale electric prices by 75 percent in the first three months of this year.
The report by Monitoring Analytics states “Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices.”
And the report notes “The current supply of capacity in PJM is not adequate to meet the demand from large data center loads and will not be adequate in the foreseeable future. This is a simple factual issue.”
The report says the impacts go beyond generation, that the centers have raised other costs as well.
“Large data center load additions have already had a significant and irreversible impact on PJM customers that will be paid through May 31, 2028, and will have additional significant impacts on other customers as a result of higher transmission costs, higher energy market prices and higher capacity market prices.”
The New England grid is also not overloaded with generating facilities as grid manager ISO-New England delayed the planned closure of Mystic Generating Station in Everett, which was the region’s largest fossil-fuel generating facility for several years because of the impact its closing would have on the regional grid. The plant officially closed two years ago.
Today the region’s generation can produce about 300 to 400 megawatts of extra capacity without raising consumer prices, which is about what a large data center uses per day.
New England is overly dependent on natural gas for electric generation which currently is a very volatile market with greatly fluctuating prices due to the “troubles” in the MidEast.
The flow of natural gas into the region is constrained, particularly in the winter months when the first priority is for heating not power generation.
And the New Hampshire legislature has followed the presidential leadership in discouraging efforts to expand renewable energy sources such as large offshore wind projects.
Electric capacity is not increased overnight as any major project takes years to site, approve and construct from gas-fired plants to wind farms or large solar displays.
And last week the House and Senate conferees on House Bill 221 reached agreement on a bill that would appear to give nuclear power a leg up allowing electric distributors to enter larger multi-year purchased power contracts if one of the generators is an “advanced nuclear reactor.”
The compromise would allow agreements of up to 1 million megawatts per year for a single source, and up to two million a year if one of the generators is an “advanced nuclear reactor.”
Another section of the agreement allows a contract up to 3 million megawatts a year allowing an additional 1 million megawatts be purchased from existing, new or incremental energy sources if 1 million comes from an advanced nuclear reactor.
While encouraging the development of nuclear power, is the state also encouraging the development of massive data centers?
That is a question to be asked of the legislative leadership. Gov. Kelly Ayotte weighed in on WMUR’s “Close Up” this week voicing her opposition to large data centers because said they could “skyrocket energy costs.”
Maybe that is why SB 439 died without a fight?
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.