by DAN DeWITT and JACK EVANS
One fact about the exploding data-center industry became clear before the Asheville City Council imposed a one-year moratorium on their construction at its meeting last week:
People have a lot of questions.
Council members and speakers asked about these facilities’ vast consumption of water and power. They worried about their potential to disrupt neighborhoods, undermine the city’s character and inflate utility rates.
Mayor Esther Manheimer questioned the worthiness of the generous state tax incentives awarded to developers of centers, while one speaker said a long moratorium could cause Asheville to miss out on the economic benefits of what one report called a “$7 trillion race” to scale up global data processing capacity by 2030.
There’s also an overriding question about the urgency of the moratorium: With Asheville’s limited supplies of water, energy and, especially, land, is it a potential location for large, energy-gobbling facilities?
Buying time to find answers is the reason Asheville — whose land-use rules don’t even include a definition of “data center” — joined the list of about 30 North Carolina localities that have temporarily blocked construction of the centers as a path toward permanent regulation.
Data centers “are forever,” Manheimer said at the meeting, “so I think we need to take a pause and make sure we put in measures that address all the concerns that we have as a community.”