Eyebrows were raised at the May 21 Wawarsing board meeting, when Town Supervisor Joe Stoeckeler revealed that some data center developers checked in with him inquiring about large parcels of land in the town. The board moved quickly, and at the June 4 meeting, they presented a temporary zoning moratorium on both “data facilities” and battery energy storage systems (BESS).

Data centers, which are effectively warehouses full of computers used for compute-heavy tasks like cloud storage, machine learning, and artificial intelligence models, have quickly acquired a bad reputation. There are concerns about their often-enormous scale and the massive draw on water for cooling and electric power, not to mention the noise, potential for pollution, and a general uneasiness about the employment impact of the AI industry. Locations that host data centers report horror stories – from Morgan County, Georgia, where drinking water turned turbid as soon as a Meta data center went online to Phoenix, Arizona, where the power company wants to raise rates by 14.5% because of data center usage.

While data centers are considered the backbone of the AI industry, BESS facilities are considered the backbone of the green energy transition. They store large quantities of lithium-ion batteries in one place, and dole power back out to the grid when demand is high. The fear with this technology is fire, as lithium-ion battery fires, when they start, are very hard to stop.

Thus, a motion was passed unanimously on Thursday, June 4, to send a temporary zoning moratorium on both usages to the town planning board and Ulster County’s planning board for review and comment.

The moratorium would last six months and block any development of either a data center or a battery storage project in the town. In the meantime, the New York State Legislature pushed through a statewide moratorium on large-scale data centers which waits for a signature from Governor Kathy Hochul. Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger praised the bill as “a smart and necessary step to protect our communities.”