Many towns, counties, and states have been passing data center moratoriums to delay these projects so that they could study their impact and create mitigations before this infrastructure even before they get off the ground. However, Ypsilanti, Michigan, is taking a different approach to this issue. Instead of putting a moratorium on data centers, the township put a temporary ban on the underlying electrical infrastructure needed to run them. According to 404 Media, the six-month delay is intended for studying the potential effects that the proposed electrical substation needed to power the project will have on noise pollution and existing customers.
“We need to make sure it’s in the right location from a planning standpoint, and we need to make sure that we have ordinances in place that require DTE or any electrical company to go through a process,” Ypsilanti Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo said in a statement. The township will determine “the nature and scale of electrical infrastructure necessary to serve new high-energy-demand land uses [...] including infrastructure associated, but not limited to hyper-scale data centers, mid-sized data centers, artificial intelligence computing facilities, and high-performance computational centers, industrial facilities, and other intensive electrical users” during the six-month period.
