The Aurora City Council on Tuesday is set to consider regulations on data centers that officials say would be among the most strict in the country.
Data centers are currently considered warehouses under Aurora’s city codes, so they have no special requirements and can be built in certain areas without Aurora City Council approval. The proposed changes would give the City Council the ability to approve or deny proposed data center developments, plus would set requirements around energy use, water use, noise and other emissions.
“What is being recommended by staff is, as far as we can tell, the most restrictive zoning ordinance in Illinois for sure, and very much so among those nationwide,” said Aurora Corporation Counsel Yordana Wysocki, who later called it “the first of its kind.”
Most of these proposed rules would apply only to new data center developments, or to substantial renovation projects at existing facilities, that look to get approval after the city lifts its current pause on these types of developments.
The temporary pause on new data center and warehouse developments was put in place by the Aurora City Council last September to give city staff the chance to create the now-proposed regulations in response to an increased number of data center applications and residents’ ongoing concerns with existing facilities.
That moratorium ends on Tuesday, but staff could extend it by 30 days, and City Council could vote to extend it even further.
As Aurora has been researching and developing regulations around data centers, similar conversations have been happening at the state level.
The POWER Act, which has some similarities to Aurora’s proposed regulations, was introduced to the state legislature earlier this year. The Illinois Commerce Commission also recently approved a proposal by ComEd that requires higher deposits from data center developers to protect against projects that fall through.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence companies are threatening to take their most advanced data centers elsewhere if the state doesn’t weaken certain privacy laws that Aurora is seeking to duplicate through its proposed regulations.
Battles around specific data center developments have also been playing out across the Chicago suburbs in recent months.
In January, the Naperville City Council rejected a proposed data center development through a similar process to what Aurora is now proposing to put in place. Earlier this month, the Yorkville City Council approved a controversial data center after several hours of meetings. And on Thursday, Joliet approved what is set to be the state’s largest data center.
Each of those projects saw significant pushback from local residents.
Some Aurora residents have called for the city to outright ban new data centers from coming to the city. But it is against state law to outright ban a certain type of development, Wysocki said, or to create such tight restrictions that a certain type of development is effectively impossible to build within city limits.
The regulations being proposed by Aurora city staff are the most strict they can possibly be, and at least as strong as other communities’ restrictions, while still being legally defensible, according to Aurora Chief Development Services Officer John Curley.
“This type of ordinance is new to Illinois, so we worked on it very carefully to make sure that we weren’t going to be the test case for litigation,” Wysocki said at a meeting on Wednesday evening.
Still, some residents and city officials are pushing for the proposed regulations to go even further.
The city’s Planning and Zoning Commission recommended that the regulations limit data centers just to the city’s heaviest industrial areas, but city staff have since pushed back against that recommendation, saying it would effectively ban data centers because of the minimum distances proposed to be required between data centers and residential areas.
And at a meeting on Wednesday, most of the Aurora City Council’s aldermen said they were in favor of stricter restrictions around noise than what were proposed by staff.
Noise regulation is a key part of the current proposal. Data centers would not be allowed to produce sound louder than 59 decibels during the day or 49 decibels at night, as measured at the facility’s property line, and the city would require data centers monitor their sound around the clock.
Currently, the city requires facilities to comply with state codes that regulate sound, but those are difficult to measure and to enforce, Curley has said.
The city’s proposed sound requirements are the lowest levels that city staff have found communities to require through their past few months of research.
The proposal package would also not allow data centers to install roof-mounted chiller units within 1,500 feet of residential, educational or hospital uses. Similar space requirements would be set for ground-mounted chillers and backup generators, which would need to be at least 1,000 feet away from residential, educational or hospital uses.
According to Curley, these distances are at least double what city staff have found other communities to require.
With these setbacks and the minimum noise limits, Curley said he expects the noise to be around 40 decibels at nearby residential lots during the day and even less at night. Proposed minimum distances will also help mitigate against vibration, he said.
Sound coming from both chillers and backup generators has been making life difficult for those living near the CyrusOne data center at the corner of Eola and Diehl roads on Aurora’s far East Side near Interstate 88, The Beacon-News previously reported.
Residents’ advocacy around this issue is one of the reasons the city has been working to create these recently proposed regulations, according to Curley. Although these new rules won’t directly address residents complaints about the existing data center, the city and CyrusOne have been working together to address the ongoing noise issues.
Repairs made to that data center in April required the use of backup generators for many days straight, which caused consistently loud noise in the surrounding area that residents called “unlivable” and “horrible.” Since then, CyrusOne has been regularly meeting with residents and working toward mitigating the noise from those generators and from rooftop cooling units that residents say are also an issue.
Permanent measures have been put in place to block the sound from the backup diesel generators, which are tested regularly and used during power outages. Temporary measures were put in place for the rooftop chillers, with permanent solutions planned to be completed later this year, company officials said at a community meeting in mid-January.
And, in October, the city of Aurora signed an agreement with CyrusOne that set a timeline for the company to continue addressing residents’ noise concerns. At various meetings, city officials have said that they are not able to talk about or answer questions specific to the CyrusOne data center due to ongoing litigation.
Under the proposed regulations, both roof- and ground-mounted chiller units as well as ground-mounted generators would be required to have sound walls around them, similar to what is now built at the CyrusOne data center. Plus, rooftop generators would not be allowed.
Incoming data centers would be required under these proposed regulations to do sound studies and modeling at several points in the development process. This would include a baseline sound study before anything is built on the site, a sound modeling study showing that the planned data center would not go over maximum sound levels and a study of the sound the data center actually produces once it is built.
Additional studies would be required if the data center sees major renovations.
If a data center is shut down and the building is set to become something else, the data center’s owner would be required to remove all obsolete equipment like chillers and generators from the site. It is unlikely another type of facility would have use for these things — but if it did, far fewer would be needed, Curley has said.
The proposed regulations would also require new data centers to meet certain energy efficiency levels, to provide energy modeling reports before they can be approved and to follow a number of established energy codes.
Plus, new data centers would be required to either have renewable energy generation on-site, enough to power 25% of the facility at peak demand, or battery storage with the capacity to power up to 50% of the facility for 15 minutes, which is to stabilize the energy grid and help during brownouts. A third option has also been added: data centers can simply buy renewable energy credits.
As for water, the proposed regulations would set a similar efficiency standard to energy usage and would ban evaporative cooling using drinking water. Modeling and ongoing reporting around water usage would also be required.
While performance regulations around water, electricity and noise would only apply to new facilities, all data centers within the city would be required to submit annual reports around these three issues. Aurora’s current data centers have agreed to comply with these annual reporting requirements, according to Wysocki.
Aurora is also proposing what is basically a copy of the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, which are the privacy restrictions that some in the data center industry are pushing for the state to weaken.
While Aurora’s proposal wouldn’t add to what is already protected under state law, it would create local protections in case the state repeals its restrictions, Aurora Director of Sustainability Alison Lindburg has said. Like the annual reports, these privacy protections would apply to all data centers in the city, new and existing.
Some penalties are built into the proposed regulations, but Curley has also said that new data center developments, as a part of the approval process, would be required to enter into agreements with the city that set fines and make it easier for the city to enforce the proposed provisions.
Along with the proposed data center regulations, which would add two new chapters to city code plus make changes to both zoning and building codes, city staff are also using the opportunity to make some comparatively minor changes to the warehouse regulations. Since data centers are currently classified as warehouses, something the proposal seeks to change, warehouse developments have also been largely paused as city staff developed the regulations.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
