The company CyrusOne is planning to build a new 600 megawatt data center on agricultural land 14 miles southwest of Springfield.
The data center would lease storage to different companies. The estimated $500 million project is expected to create approximately 100 permanent jobs.
The Illinois Times reports the location is at the northwest corner of Thayer and Clark roads in Talkington Township. That’s near a large solar farm that started earlier this year, near Waverly.
Ryan McCrady, President of the Springfield Sangamon Growth Alliance, supports the plan. He said the increase in assessed valuation will benefit local taxing bodies and CyrusOne will pay the full property tax amount for the buildings.
"I do hear a lot of questions about will they get a huge break on their taxes? Will the rest of us have to pay extra taxes because they're not going to pay taxes? And the answer to that question is no. The property taxes will be significant," he said.
CyrusOne, which operates dozens of other data centers, would pay for power line upgrades to the Sangamon County site.
Data centers require a lot of energy and are being partly blamed for rising electricity rates. McCrady dismisses that issue.
“This data center is going to use a large amount of electricity. And they have no financial interest in driving up rates because they're the ones that will pay the most for a rate increase because of the amount of power that they use,” McCrady said.
Nick Dodson, Chair of the Sangamon Valley Sierra Club, isn’t convinced.
“It seems extremely shortsighted to build [a data center] and then leave the rest of it up to the state and the community to figure out. This is going to pass on some serious costs, in my opinion, to Ameren ratepayers and to the REC ratepayers,” Dodson said.
He also said other data centers have created light and noise pollution.
The development planned for Sangamon County would include as many as six large one-story buildings, which the IT said would be the size of 26 football fields. Construction is scheduled to start in 2026.
The Sierra Club is raising concerns about the project and the lack of transparency from the local government.
Dodson said meetings regarding zoning approval are happening with a lack of transparency or accountability.
“There haven't been any public meetings to ask questions or get real answers. Instead, the county's already set up votes to potentially approve this. One on November 10th and one on December 9th. Before most folks even know what's going on,” Dodson said.
Dodson said the Sierra Club wants to see a 180-day moratorium for people to learn about the data center, have questions answered and then make a final decision.
He said there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the chemicals being used to cool the data center and what electrical upgrades will be needed.
McCrady said the data center will be using a closed cooling system. He added data centers are becoming more important.
"If you send a text message, use GPS in your car to drive somewhere or use telehealth to interact with a healthcare professional, you're using a data center," he said.
The Sangamon County Board expects to give final consideration on the data center construction at the December 9th meeting.
