There are a lot of questions regarding the siting of data centers in New York state.

It didn’t seem like the questions were local ones until last week when the former NRG power plant in Dunkirk was sold to Genover, a company that repurposes old power plants. One of the uses the company has found in the past for mothballed sites like Dunkirk’s is data centers. We don’t know if a data center is Genover’s end use for the former power plant in Dunkirk, but it is, at the very least, a possibility.

That means Chautauqua County now has a very real interest in a one-year moratorium on data centers approved last week by the state Legislature and the decisions the state makes over the next year regarding limits and conditions that are placed on data centers. There are a lot of concerns over the siting of data centers, and those concerns should be investigated before a data center is cited so close to the shores of Lake Erie and near a neighborhood in Dunkirk. The mere idea of a data center project at the Sugar Hill Golf Course in the town of Portland has been met with vocal opposition from town residents as well as those living in surrounding towns. We can only imagine what will come if a data center is Genover’s idea to repurpose NRG.

But, as we follow the mess otherwise known as the city of Dunkirk’s finances, we also know one way to clear up Dunkirk’s budget problems is bringing the former power plant back online. There are millions of financial reasons why a data center makes sense that can’t be simply disregarded.

Residents in the south county should be paying attention. What happens in Chautauqua Lake is a concern for north county residents. In the same vein, what happens in the former NRG power plant affects those of us in the south county. NRG was a major financial contributor to county finances and the financial health of the county as a whole. What happens to the site in the future will have ripple effects for south county residents.

What the state decides on data centers will have an impact on the power grid. Concerns over reliability are one of the factors behind the state Legislature’s decision to delay the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, and putting too many data centers in the state can affect the power grid.

There is one final piece of the data center puzzle worth mentioning today. There are already some pieces of the state’s moratorium bill that can add significant costs to potential data center developers, including the moratorium bill includes energy consumption goals for data center design and operation and a requirement for a certain percentage of power for data centers to come from renewable sources, either through on-site production or power purchase agreements. It will be interesting to see what else pops up in the next year and whether or not those requirements effectively make data centers economically unfeasible in New York state.