Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.
When New York became the first state in the country to enact a moratorium on data center development, Adrienne Yocina was excited. For the past two years, the mom of three has been organizing in western Genesee County to stop a 600-megawatt data center from coming to a site close to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s reservation and a federal wildlife refuge.
But almost four months after the one-year moratorium began, Yocina tells me that she’s “getting nervous.” She’s worried that Democratic governor Kathy Hochul won’t sign a stronger bill to impose a stricter moratorium, and is concerned that the state Department of Environmental Conservation is not adequately involved in the process of evaluating data centers in New York.
“I feel like she’s just trying to shut us up,” she says of Hochul.
Data centers are at the center of midterm races across the country, with politicians of both parties making promises to enact regulations or moratoriums on development. After next week comes the tough part: Newly elected officials must either break their word or follow through on those promises as they weigh large infrastructure projects coming to their states and residents who say they’ll reject data centers no matter what.
How will those compromises go—and will they appease voters? New York’s moratorium, and the continued opposition from some groups, may offer clues.
In July, just two months after dismissing the idea of a data center moratorium, Hochul signed the nation’s first executive order to put a pause on development. Her order was a compromise. Just weeks prior, the state legislature had passed an omnibus bill that would have implemented a one-year moratorium throughout New York. The bill contained several provisions that made it more aggressive than Hochul’s moratorium, including stricter limits on the size of data centers and a mandate that the Department of Environmental Conservation conduct a thorough environmental impact review of data center operations. Rather than sign the bill, Hochul issued her own order. (The governor has until the end of the year to sign that bill, and her office says they are still looking at it.)
One of the bill’s State Senate sponsors, Democrat Kristen Gonzalez, has been publicly supportive of Hochul’s moratorium. The governor’s office, Gonzalez says, proactively reached out to her after her bill passed to help design the moratorium for more immediate relief for New Yorkers.