Durham County Passes Data Center Moratorium, Keeps the 100,000 Square Foot Exemption
This week, the Durham County Board of Commissioners voted 4 to 1 to adopt a nine month moratorium on applications for new and expanded data centers, running through May 2027. The pause itself was not what was in question. Residents turned out to ask the board for one specific thing: strike the exemption for data centers under 100,000 square feet, but the board did not do it.
The carve out survived at the request of the Research Triangle Foundation. Speaking for RTP's 400 companies, its representative asked the board to "pass the moratorium as written." Residents asked for the opposite, and for good reason.
Square footage is a poor proxy for a data center's effect on a river. Water demand tracks megawatts and cooling design, not floor area. A dense, evaporatively cooled facility at 99,000 square feet can draw far more water, and discharge far more treated cooling water, than a sprawling air cooled building twice its size. The 300 megawatt facility proposed in Apex would have used up to a million gallons a day, roughly a third of it evaporated and gone. Nothing in a square footage test would have caught the difference. Worse, a threshold like this invites a campus to be split into a series of buildings that each land just under the line.
Durham County recently experienced extreme drought conditions and are still under Stage 2 Water Shortage Response restrictions. Little River Reservoir is more than twelve feet below normal, Lake Michie (drone picture below) is down six and a half feet, and residents have been under these restrictions since June while the city buys water from Cary out of Jordan Lake. Residents are under mandatory conservation targets. Facilities below the exemption threshold face no equivalent limit, and the county does not require them to disclose projected withdrawals.
Now, the county only has nine months to write a real ordinance. Our ask is simple: replace the square footage trigger with thresholds based on water withdrawal and electrical load, and require every applicant to disclose projected daily withdrawal, the source, and the full chemical composition of cooling discharge before a permit is considered.
Durham City and Durham County now have two different moratoriums to navigate with the same planning staff.
City of Durham council voted unanimously in early May for a 60 day pause on data centers, data processing facilities, and cryptocurrency mining, then extended it on June 15 to a full twelve months, running through May 2027. Council members had wanted 24 months and were told the city's development ordinance capped moratoria at twelve, so they also amended the ordinance to remove that local limit. No square footage exemption has been reported in the city's version.
Durham County commissioners voted nine months instead of twelve, adopted 4 to 1 rather than unanimously, and carrying an exemption for facilities under 100,000 square feet that the city's does not have.
Both expire around the same time, which is useful for coordination. But the county's is shorter, weaker, and full of a hole that the city declined to cut. Anything the county writes over the next nine months should meet the city's standard, not fall below it.