(The Center Square) – Virginia Beach has temporarily stopped issuing permits for new data centers while city officials work on rules for where and how the facilities can be built.
City Council unanimously approved the moratorium Tuesday. It will last up to 12 months or end sooner if council adopts a data center ordinance.
Data centers do not have their own category in the city’s zoning rules. Instead, they are treated as “wholesaling, warehousing, storage, or distribution establishments” and are allowed by right in industrial districts, according to city documents.
The issue has been building for months.
The Planning Commission received a briefing in April and raised concerns about infrastructure, utility use, land use and noise. Commissioners later asked City Council to consider changes to the zoning ordinance.
Council received its own briefing June 2 from the departments of Information Technology and Planning and Community Development. Afterward, council directed staff to work on an amendment aimed at banning large data centers.
During that briefing, staff laid out several options, including larger setbacks from homes, limits on facility size, sound studies, restrictions on generator testing, screening requirements and conditional-use permits.
City documents say one of the biggest challenges is deciding where to draw the line between facilities that would still be allowed and those that would be banned.
Staff also said there are no established industry standards for defining different types of data centers or setting rules for setbacks, buffering and noise.
Data centers are not required to publicly report their energy or water use, according to the city’s agenda materials. Information about cooling systems is also often proprietary, and staff said research on long-term environmental and infrastructure impacts remains limited.
The moratorium gives the city more time to study those issues and work on an ordinance.
Virginia Beach has also drawn distinctions among different types of data center infrastructure.
In its June presentation, the city separated subsea cable landing sites, colocation facilities, traditional data centers and hyperscale facilities. The city identified Globalinx and Telxius as existing colocation and cable landing facilities at Corporate Landing Business Park.
Virginia Beach is not alone in reworking its rules.
Chesapeake paused new applications in July, then adopted a new ordinance Tuesday requiring data centers to go through a conditional-use process instead of being allowed by right in industrial districts. The ordinance also requires more review for facilities expected to use at least 100 megawatts of electricity and bars private groundwater systems for data centers.
Suffolk is considering an even broader restriction. City Council voted 7-0 on June 17 to direct the Planning Commission to draft a zoning amendment that would prohibit data centers in all zoning districts.
This post was originally published on The Center Square.
