By Logan Wells, News Director | Logan@kymnradio.net
Last week, the Northfield City Council passed an ordinance to rezone the Northwest Area of town (near the Hospital) from Agricultural Land to Industrial Land. In doing so, the council has now opened the area up for developing an industrial park. As part of the rezoning, the council had to decide what industry would be allowed, and one of the main debate points was whether to allow a data center.
You can see a previous story we wrote about the debate around the data center at both the city council and the planning commission on our website.
PREVIOUS STORY (11/26/2024) Planning Commission Recommends No Data Center for Northwest Industrial Area
PREVIOUS STORY: (12/6/2024) City Council Approves Rezoning Northwest Area For An Industrial Park
Some residents previously at the council meeting and planning commission meeting expressed concerns about noise, light pollution, electricity and water usage, and the city’s climate goals. In the meeting, Community Development Director Jake Riley proposed a set of efficiency standards for any new data center in the industrial park.
Riley stated that the efficiency standards Northfield would be implementing would be higher than those of any other city in Minnesota but not in the United States.
As I suppose they would be held to a higher standard than typical, and it’s not a standard that is unable to be met. It is met in other places. It does not happen to be shown necessarily to be met many places in the United States, certainly none of. In Minnesota, are doing these things, but there are sites in Texas. – Northfield Community Development Director Jake Riley at the 11/26/2024 City Council Meeitng
The adopted standards address noise, exterior lighting, building height, electricity use, air quality, amount of heat produced, and vibration. Riley noted that any new data center would have to meet these standards to receive their certificate of occupancy.
So in the whole thing I looked at what other places do all around the country, especially those that sort of went all in on data processing facilities early in the 2000 and since reconfigured how they about. So places like Manassas, VA, have have first had a lot of them and sort of thought about it differently and then started to approach them differently. And so I tried to look at those newer approaches and then I looked at how places measure things like heat and humidity, energies, water use. And use those as the floor. – Northfield Community Development Director Jake Riley at the 11/26/2024 City Council Meeitng
You can see the full text of the efficiency standards below (starts on page 9):
