Mansfield wants no part of data centers, as the Boston suburb is the first Bay State municipality to enact a bylaw that essentially bans the “power-hungry” facilities from town.
Massachusetts planners and people across the country are reaching out to the Bristol County town to learn more about the comprehensive zoning bylaw that residents overwhelmingly approved at Town Meeting earlier this month, as artificial intelligence and cloud computing grow rapidly.
“So many of the planners across the state are interested in reproducing this and seeing what we did,” Mark Corsillo, who spearheaded Mansfield’s bylaw, told the Herald, “because some of the things that we put in here were really novel as far as limiting it based on power usage.”
Corsillo, elected to the town’s Select Board last week after he sparked the idea for the bylaw as a member of the Planning Board, said residents in Georgia and Ohio have also contacted the town to inquire about the ban.
Under the bylaw, Mansfield defines a data center as a facility designed or used to house computer servers and related IT infrastructure for electronic data purposes — storage, processing, management, or transmission.
Data centers may include server racks, data storage systems, cooling systems, “uninterruptible” power supplies, telecommunications equipment, and other infrastructure.
The Mansfield Planning Board determined to classify facility size by maximum electrical demand rather than actual building footprint. Under the bylaw, only data centers that use up to two megawatts are allowed.
Anything more powerful than that, Corsillo said, would most likely force Mansfield’s town-owned electrical department to buy additional capacity on the market. That would risk cost increases for ratepayers, he said.
“Up to two megawatts is not what most people are thinking when they hear the term ‘data center,’” Corsillo said. “I have been saying that we have the first comprehensive data center ban bylaw.”
Corsillo said a data center bylaw came to mind last December while he reviewed existing regulations and noticed a gap in definitions of warehouses and offices. He pitched the idea to the Planning Board.
“That evolved into us deciding, as a group, that the ideal place for them to go was not in Mansfield,” Corsillo said. “We didn’t want these big, power-hungry, resource-intensive uses in town, and more importantly, neither did the residents.”
The data center industry is growing quickly, and with it, planners are becoming increasingly cautious about how their towns and cities can accommodate the facilities.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill in late April that would have been the country’s first state moratorium on the construction of data centers because she said it failed to include a carve-out for a project that would bring needed jobs to a small town that has struggled since the closure of a local mill.
Resistance to data center proposals has risen swiftly amid high-level support for artificial intelligence, tech firms and the data centers they are building.
The Trump administration has touted data centers as a top economic and national security priority that are essential to winning the artificial intelligence race with China. Still, voters are raising concerns about the enormous amount of power data centers use while analysts are warning of the possibility of blackouts in the mid-Atlantic grid in the coming years.
“A lot of the concerns we heard were very similar to concerns being discussed nationally: water insecurity, electrical capacity, generator noise … and concerns about just becoming a data center community,” Sarah Raposa, Mansfield’s planning and development director, said during a forum that the Central Massachusetts Regional Planning Commission held last week.
Late last month, Lowell residents filed a lawsuit against a data center’s owner, Markley Group, and the state Department of Environmental Protection, arguing that the 352,000-square-foot facility had disrupted their livelihoods.
Before Mansfield’s passage of a data center ban, residents in Northboro, outside of Worcester, approved a bylaw at Town Meeting that only allows data centers with a maximum projected electrical demand of five megawatts at full capacity.
Trish Settles, a deputy executive director of the Central Massachusetts Regional Planning Commission, describes herself as a data center “newbie.” But after brief research, she said she grew concerned about how a 100-megawatt hyperscale facility might use energy and water equivalent to a supply for a city of 50,000 to 100,000 households.
“It is a very pressing topic in our region,” Settles said.
At the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Mary Ann Dickinson, director of land and water policy, is studying data center issues in local municipalities across the country.
There are about 5,400 data centers in the United States, Dickinson said, with the “biggest East Coast installations” in northern Virginia. Texas, Arizona and California are all hotspots for growth, while Massachusetts has just under 60 such facilities.
Dickinson said data centers aren’t a new concept, but she’s fearful about whether the country’s electrical grid can accommodate the projected maximum electrical demand of 130 gigawatts by 2030.
“The scale of it is what is new and a little frightening,” she said. “We’ve never had hyperscale facilities before; we always had smaller data centers, but given that AI and digital solutions are going to start to be much more part of the fabric of our society, we are going to see these applications, and we need to figure out how we can accommodate them.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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