The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
Hoping to preclude any thought of a developer creating a data center powered by generators burning combustible materials, the Township Council on September 30 took the first step in restricting the use of on-site generators.
The ordinance would prohibit the routine or primary use of on-site generators “when fueled by fossil fuels, petroleum-based products, or other combustible materials, except under limited circumstances.”
Those limited circumstances include during temporary emergency conditions, for maintenance or exercising of generators; emergency or stand-by generators used exclusively to provide power to a single family residential dwelling, for construction activities; or for mobile operations, such as refrigerated trucks or food service vehicles, where both the operation and generator are mobile, according to the ordinance.
“Your home generators are safe,” Mayor Phil Kramer said. “You can still use those when there’s a power outage.”
“We don’t want someone replacing the grid, or what we use as a grid, with carbon-emitting generators,” he said. “If they want to do it with solar and batteries, they can do that.”
Kramer said the ordinance was spurred by a broadcast news report of a Tennessee town in which a large AI data farm is being powered by “acres of diesel generators because the grid can’t handle it.”
“This is the next attack of beyond warehouses.” he said. “This is warehouses meets {Northeast Supply Enhancement Project).” Kramer was referring to a plan proffered by Texas-based Williams Transco to build a natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York, with a large compressor station situated in Franklin.
“And I don’t think we want it in our town,” he said. “I think we’ve written a model ordinance that other towns can use. I’m going to make a personal tour of the towns surrounding us so we don’t have one on the border of our town, which would be just as bad for our residents.”
Kramer said he thought that this was the first such ordinance introduced in the state.
“I think we’re taking proactive measures, and we’re making sure that we’re looking out for a future in Franklin Township so that we don’t have these heavy machinery items that are polluting our air because we’re fighting for clean air,” Deputy Mayor Shepa Uddin said. “And we continue to do that, and we want to avoid anything that’s going to impact our quality of life in Franklin.”
Township Manager Robert Vornlocker noted that there is a Pennsylvania town in which an AI data center is being powered by an incinerator burning tires.
“And the Pennsylvania’s version of the DEP has issued air quality permits to this facility because they’re doing things like scrubbers, but so they have this facility that people have been fighting now for a couple years,” he said.
“So this is real. It’s happening right now, not far from us, so it’s kind of timely that we’re doing something about it before it happens,” Vornlocker said.
The ordinance sets penalties from $500 to $2,000 per day.
A public hearing and final vote on the ordinance is scheduled for 7 p.m. October 28.
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