Starwood Digital Ventures has launched a major ad campaign in support of its 6-million square foot Delaware City data center. Delmarva Public Media's Don Rush talks with Olivia Marble, land use reporter for Spotlight Delaware, about the issues facing the project. The full interview can be heard on Delmarva Today on our website delmarvapublicmedia.org.
RUSH: The proposed data center that will encompass some 6 million square feet near Delaware City is getting some pushback. This is Don Rush. A set of new restrictions have been offered up for such facilities, and it is yet to get a rezoning request approved by the New Castle County Council. We turn to Olivia Marble, Land use reporter for Spotlight Delaware, who has been covering the story.
MARBLE: So this data center would be 6 million square feet, which is huge. And it also would use 1.2 gigawatts of energy, which is about as much energy as needed to power 1 million homes. According to some experts that I spoke to. And for context, Delaware has around 400,000 homes. So this is about equal to half of the energy that Delaware uses as an entire state. So this is a big, big project that a lot of people have been talking [about] since it was first proposed a few months ago.
RUSH: Electrical prices, particularly the kind of energy that these facilities demand. What are we looking at? Because there seems to be some real controversy over just exactly what impact they might have.
MARBLE: Yeah, so one point that the Starwood CEO told me was that this proposed data center would be located along a high voltage power line. And he explained it to me. This data center project is next to essentially a highway of electricity. And if they were planning it not next to this highway far away from the highway, maybe we would need to build a bunch of new roads to get the electricity to the data center. And then maybe that would cost Delawareans a lot of money in terms of their electric utilities bills going way up, but because it's right next to a highway, they don't really need to build too many new roads or electric infrastructure. So he says energy prices aren't going to go up in the state. Now, when I talked to Abraham Silverman, who is with Johns Hopkins University, and he's also worked with several people in Delaware, like Delaware politicians, to try to figure out exactly what these energy impacts would be, he said that it's a little bit more complicated than that. There's not really any way to know what electricity infrastructure updates would be needed until the local utility of Delmarva really studies the area. But in general, data centers are pushing up electricity prices.
RUSH: So there is obviously opposition. New Castle County Council member Dave Carter, he's offered up some measures to impose restrictions.
MARBLE: Carter did propose legislation that would essentially regulate data center operations. Starwood, the company behind the data center did say that this was too much regulation. They called it overregulation and that it would stifle the economic growth of the state. And then also a representative from the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce said that this could send the wrong message to the business community, that it could suggest that Delaware is not really open to business, that we're trying to stop data center growth. But Dave Carter in response basically said, no, we're not trying to stop data center growth. We're trying to mitigate some of the worst impacts of it.
RUSH: Olivia Marble, Land use reporter for Spotlight Delaware, on the proposed Delaware City Data Center. Full interview can be heard on this Friday's Delmarva today at noon on WSDL and WESM. This is Don Rush for Delmarva Public Media.
