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It's reasonable to see Gov. Kathy Hochul's one-year moratorium on data centers as a reasonable delay in order to develop appropriate protections and guidelines in state law to govern data centers.
What the governor has done is no different legally than what local towns and villages have been doing over the past year by enacting – and in some cases extending – moratoriums on wind and solar projects and on battery energy storage systems. It's reasonable to see data centers as an emerging issue that requires a pause to manage the development appropriately.
Our concern is that the state's moratorium may not remain reasonable. It wasn't all that long ago that the state was in the midst of a process to better regulate hydraulic fracturing of the Utica and Marcellus shales. That, too, seemed reasonable at first. Before the state's ban on fracking in 2015, the state DEC fairly tightly regulated the process through existing permits and programs. In the summer of 2011, the DEC revised its supplemental generic environmental impact statement for oil and gas wells to more tightly regulate mining the Marcellus and Utica shales through the use of mitigation measures to prevent environmental impacts while banning wells using hydraulic fracturing in or near New York City or the Syracuse area watersheds, near areas that produce municipal drinking water, wells that were too close to wells and on certain state-owned lands. The DEC also established dozens of new wastewater management and mitigation measures. New regulations of the process were proposed a few weeks later. All of that work resulted, by 2014, a state Health Department recommendation that New York not proceed with hydraulic fracturing. That recommendation was later codified in a ban signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
What began as a reasonable process didn't stay reasonable for those who viewed hydraulic fracturing as an economic lifeline for areas of the state that are desperately looking to stay afloat. We can understand, in light of that history, concerns raised by labor unions and business groups after Hochul's data center moratorium executive order was issued. They don't just fear falling behind in the data center construction boom; they fear never getting into the business in the first place as regulations are put in place in pieces over the next year.
We share their apprehension. The data center moratorium is reasonable for now. We can't tell yet if it will stay reasonable.