Suzanne Brand held the starting stance of a runner, prepared to launch from her seat towards the microphone. Her right knee bounced on a spring. She checked her phone, then referenced the handwritten script in her notebook.
At just 17, the lifelong resident of Concord had never testified before the city’s planning board or any other municipal body. She’d only ever attended one other public meeting, by way of completing a civics assignment. Her voice quivered, but she looked board members in the eye, gaze steady, as she spoke.
“We don’t want data centers. We want to inherit a world that isn’t too damaged to fix, and that starts here,” Brand said. Boisterous applause rattled the room.
Ultimately, the board urged the company and engineers proposing to build a “micro” data center on Concord’s Locke Road to return with more precise information about the center’s electricity usage and its foreseeable effect on the regional power grid, as well as its potential for growth in both energy consumption and footprint.
Ryan Howard, CEO of Levitate Inc., the AI infrastructure company behind the center’s design, estimates that excluding overhead energy consumption, the micro data center would draw about 13.5 megawatts of energy strictly for its servers, enough to power up to 12,150 residential homes.
If the facility ran uninterrupted, 24/7, at this capacity, as data centers are designed to run, multiplying this capacity by the number of hours in a year, the center could use 118,260 megawatt-hours of energy annually.
By comparison, Concord Hospital’s electricity usage, including energy dedicated to parking lots at its campus off Pleasant Street, amounts to 16,940 megawatt-hours annually, according to a hospital spokesperson — one-seventh the energy used by the proposed data center.
Preceded by other agenda items, the public hearing inviting community input on the proposal began around 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday and ended two hours later, with subsequent board deliberations stretching past midnight. The public hearing will be continued on November 18, the board decided, to allow sufficient time for the AI infrastructure company and engineering firm that originated the project to respond to a laundry list of concerns.
The center’s cooling fans, according to Howard, would emit a humming sound at the volume of a conversation, quieter or comparable to the rush of vehicles along the neighboring Interstate 93. The next meeting should include a demonstration of that level of noise, suggested Councillor Brent Todd, a city council representative to the planning board. “Just how loud is this thing?” he asked.
The proposed center is one of three concurrent pilot projects Levitate has undertaken across the country, including one in Montana and another on Howard’s damson plum farm in Mill Creek, Washington. All are collaborations with the U.S. National Laboratory, where Howard said his technology has been tested in a research setting. No other commercial examples of his “micro” design exist nationally, he said.
Unitil, the utility connecting the center to the grid, or a third party, was asked to produce an independent analysis for the board’s review.
“There’s too many unanswered questions at this point. This is new. I mean, it’s just not like we have hundreds and hundreds of examples that we could look to,” Todd said.
Residents, none of whom testified in support of the data center, lambasted the proposal, wary that Concord might be treated as a testing ground and warning of perceived vulnerabilities, in particular the little available information about the possibility that the dielectric fluid in which servers will be submerged for cooling could leak from the facility. Diesel-powered backup generators behind the center, and their potential as targets for extremist violence or their explosiveness during an emergency, also roused uneasiness.
“Concord is their guinea pig. […] What if many, many data centers start applying for approval in the next several years? What would the cumulative effect of those be? And if you don’t know that, this application is premature,” resident Dave Hilts told the planning board. “I see absolutely no compelling reason why Concord needs to be out in front of this, in light of the fact that there’s bipartisan support gathering for a moratorium on this activity.”
While residents encouraged the planning board to consider whether there should be a data center of any size in Concord, Ari Pollack, a land use attorney representing the applicant, portrayed these scruples as immaterial to the approval process.
“The comments and the opinions are legitimate, but they are opinions. It’s our opinion that we have put together a comprehensive, compliant, complete application that, frankly, plays by the rules,” said Pollack, a lawyer with Gallagher, Callahan and Gartrell. “There is no current city or state moratorium. I understand the reasons why there may be one at either or both of those levels, but currently it doesn’t exist, and the application is complete and in front of you.”
“I’m relying on the process to move us along as we’re entitled to,” Pollack added.
Residents assigned the city homework of its own: to seal the loophole that allowed a data center proposal to be validated as a permitted use in an industrially zoned area in June.
Data centers are not an expressly permitted use in the city’s zoning ordinances, and when such cases arise, city staff review the operational characteristics of a facility to arrive at an administrative classification that’s comparable to a use already on the books. Earlier this year, city planner Kellie Caron deemed the micro data center “more appropriately classified based upon its data processing function than as a manufacturing or warehouse use,” making it similar to computer processing and data preparation, an officially permitted use.
Meaghan Gardena, a Concord resident, reiterated concerns that such a development would detrimentally impact the protected wetlands that bound the Locke Road parcel. Her bottom line, she said, was that the city should stall or outright deny the application.
“I don’t think that the discussion tonight is a choice between building this micro data center and one of those giant ones that we’re all afraid of that are being built elsewhere,” Gardena said. “These points about how this data center is so much better than the other big ones — I don’t think we’re choosing between a big one and a little one. We’re choosing between this little one or none at all.”
Nevertheless, the board’s agency in deciding the micro data center’s fate became severely limited when city staff designated it as a permitted use.
To deny the application would be to accept a measure of legal liability.
“We are bound by laws, rules and regulations. And so maybe we will, in the end, maybe we will deny this and get sued, and then we will be paying attorneys’ fees for hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said board member Matthew Hicks. “That might be worth it. That’s what we have to decide.”
