Protect Alamance County's Water: Ask for a Two Year Data Center Moratorium, Monday, August 17, 7:00 p.m.

Written By Haw River Assembly

Public hearing: Monday, August 17, 7:00 p.m., Alamance County Historic Court House, Graham

Alamance County's commissioners will hold a public hearing on August 17 about pausing new data center development in the unincorporated parts of our county. This is one of those rare moments when showing up genuinely changes the outcome, and we hope you will join us.

We want to be clear about what we are asking for, because the specifics matter.

What we are asking of the commissioners:

We are asking for a 24 month moratorium on new data center development in unincorporated Alamance County, so that the county has time to complete a land use study, adopt zoning, and confirm that we have a safe and adequate water supply for the homes, farms, and communities already here.

That is the whole ask. It is reasonable, it is temporary, and it is exactly what the county needs.

Why we are not asking for a ban:

Some of you have asked us why we are not simply asking the commissioners to prohibit data centers outright. We want to explain our thinking honestly, because we think it will make you a more effective advocate on August 17.

A ban would not pass, and asking for one would cost us the seat at the table. At their July 20 meeting, a majority of commissioners spoke favorably about data centers while also agreeing that a pause makes sense. If we walk into that room asking for something they have already ruled out, we hand the reasonable middle ground to the industry and we get written off as opposed to any growth at all. We are not opposed to growth. We are opposed to permitting industrial scale water and energy users before anyone has studied what they would do to our rivers, our wells, and our communities.

A moratorium is the stronger tool anyway. Moratoria are a well established planning practice in North Carolina, tied to a defined study period and a clear purpose. A moratorium is what gives the county the legal footing and the calendar space to write rules that actually hold.

Alamance County would be in good and growing company. Dozens of North Carolina local governments have adopted a data center pause since late 2025, including many of our closest neighbors in the Haw River basin.

Counties:

  • Surry County, 24 months, adopted unanimously in July 2026, with a citizen steering committee

  • Orange County, one year, adopted unanimously in April 2026

  • Chatham County, one year, adopted in February 2026

  • Rowan County, one year

  • Northampton County, adopted May 2026

  • Davie, Clay, Madison, Swain, and Watauga counties

Cities and towns:

  • Charlotte, 150 days, adopted unanimously in June 2026, the state's largest city

  • Durham, 60 days

  • Hillsborough, two months

  • Apex, one year

  • Holly Springs, one year

  • Wendell, through December 31, 2026

  • Boiling Spring Lakes, one year

  • Boone, Brevard, Canton, and Clyde

Orange County, Chatham County, Durham, and Hillsborough all sit in or beside our own watershed. Their commissioners and councils are not anti-business, and several of them acted before any developer had approached them at all. Hillsborough Mayor Mark Bell put the reasoning plainly: his town's ordinances did not cleanly address these facilities, and "we have very constrained water and sewer capacity and could not support a hyperscale data center." Boiling Spring Lakes town manager Gordon Hargrove said much the same: "It wasn't to say that we don't want data centers, but it gives us the opportunity to say if and how we want them."

That is exactly the position Alamance County is in today.

** One important note, and please carry this one with you: state law does not allow a moratorium to stop projects already in development.Charlotte and Rowan County both learned this the hard way, and their pauses could not touch the facilities already underway. Alamance County has no pending data center proposal right now. That is precisely why acting today would actually protect us, and why waiting until a project is announced would be too late.

The real question on August 17 is how long, not whether. County Attorney Rik Stevens has confirmed that the board can decide the length of the moratorium on the night of the hearing. Every commissioner has already indicated some openness to a pause. So our job is not to win the idea. Our job is to make the case for a period long enough to do the work, and to make sure the pause covers all of the unincorporated county.

Sixty days produces a memo. Two years produces an ordinance.


What two years actually buys us:

We are not asking for time in the abstract. Here is the work that has to happen.

A real land use assessment. Alamance County has no zoning outside its cities and towns. Development in our rural areas is governed by a patchwork of ordinances that has already struggled to manage industrial projects and large subdivisions. That patchwork was never designed for a facility that draws millions of gallons of water a day.

Zoning, drafted and adopted. Writing standards, taking public comment, moving through the planning board, and adopting an ordinance is a multi year process when it is done well.

A safe and adequate water supply was confirmed. Not just whether there is enough water, but whether the water we have is clean, and whether we know where it is not.

Binding conditions. Water metering and reporting, withdrawal limits, closed loop cooling, discharge standards, noise limits, buffers and setbacks, air permits for backup generators, protections against shifting energy and water costs onto ratepayers, and decommissioning requirements. None of this exists in Alamance County today.

There is one more reason time matters, and it is a hopeful one. Cooling technology is changing quickly, and a moratorium lets our policy catch up to it rather than lock in yesterday's practices. Facilities designed today can use far less water than those built even a few years ago. If the county writes its rules now, it can require a better approach instead of hoping for it.

Surry County commissioners voted unanimously for a 24 month moratorium in July, and paired it with a citizen steering committee and site visits to existing facilities so members could see the impacts firsthand. We would like to see Alamance do the same. Surry's commissioners are not opponents of industry. They simply wanted to get it right.


Water supply and water quality concerns:

Haw River Assembly was founded in 1982 to protect and restore the waters of the Haw River and Jordan Lake. Our mission is to promote environmental awareness, conservation, and pollution prevention, to speak as a voice for the river in the public arena, and to put into people's hands the tools and knowledge they need to be effective guardians of the river.

Alamance County is one of the eight counties in the Haw River watershed, along with Guilford, Rockingham, Caswell, Orange, Chatham, Durham, and western Wake. For more than forty years our Haw Riverkeeper and our volunteers have monitored these streams, organized annual river cleanups, tracked industrial contaminants like PFAS and 1,4 dioxane through this basin, and advocated for clean water policy at the local and state level. We have sat through a great many permit hearings in this county.

That work is why we are speaking up now. Water supply and water quality are the parts of the data center conversation we know best, and they are the parts most likely to be decided before anyone has studied them.

How much water these facilities use:

A large hyperscale data center can use between one and five million gallons of water per day for cooling. Five million gallons a day is roughly the daily water use of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.

Now put that next to what we have. Graham-Mebane Lake holds about 2.8 billion gallons when full, and its treatment plant produces about 3.8 million gallons of water per day. That plant serves Graham, Mebane, Green Level, and Swepsonville. A single hyperscale facility could ask for more water in a day than that entire plant produces.

We are also in drought. As of June, Graham-Mebane Lake was down more than a foot, the City of Graham cancelled its Slice of Summer festival, and residents were asked to conserve. We think it is fair to ask whether a county that is requesting conservation from its families this summer should be permitting an unstudied industrial water user this fall.

For a sense of what happens when this scales up without planning, data centers in the Phoenix region currently use about 385 million gallons of water a year, and that figure is projected to reach 3.7 billion gallons a year as planned facilities come online. That is an increase of roughly 870 percent, and nearly twice the water needed to supply a city the size of Flagstaff.

Safe water, not just enough water:

This is the point we most want Alamance County residents to carry into that room, because it is specific to us.

The question is not only how much water a data center would draw. It is what is already in the ground here, and how much we still do not know.

  • In Swepsonville, private drinking water wells have tested above 3,500 parts per trillion for total PFAS. The EPA's drinking water limit for PFOA and PFOS is 4 parts per trillion. That is roughly 875 times the limit. The likely sources are a pre regulatory landfill built without modern protections and fields where treated sewage sludge was applied.

  • In Eli Whitney, 39 properties near the fire station are currently eligible for free private well testing.

  • NC DEQ has identified 1,4 dioxane as a priority contaminant in the Haw River basin.

  • The State Auditor has reported that Alamance County contains 11 old, unassessed former landfills.

Heavy groundwater withdrawal near a contaminated plume can pull that contamination toward wells that are currently clean. We do not yet have the mapping to know where those plumes are or how they move. Until we do, no one can honestly tell a family on a private well in this county that a large new withdrawal is safe for them.

A county that does not yet know where its groundwater is contaminated is not in a position to permit a facility that uses millions of gallons a day. Doing that mapping and that modeling is exactly the kind of work a two year moratorium makes possible.

Who pays for the water infrastructure:

A facility of this size does not simply connect to the pipes we already have. Serving one typically requires new transmission mains, storage tanks, pump stations, and treatment plant upgrades. These are costs that would not exist but for the project.

Those costs usually land on the rate base, which means they are spread across every household, farm, and small business on the system rather than charged to the company that made them necessary. Nationally, the water infrastructure needed to serve projected data center growth has been estimated at somewhere between $10 billion and $58 billion.

We think the principle here is simple and worth saying plainly at the hearing: if a facility needs the system expanded, the facility should pay for the expansion, not the families already on the line. A moratorium gives the county time to write that requirement into its ordinance before a developer is at the table. Legislation filed in Raleigh this year, House Bill 1063, would require exactly this kind of full cost recovery along with water use reporting, but it has not passed, and Alamance County cannot count on it.

We would not be told how much water they use:

This is the part that concerns us most as an organization that spends its time reading permits.

North Carolina currently has no statewide requirement that data centers disclose their water use. Permits do not require a developer to report total consumption, and there is no requirement to account for how several facilities might together draw down a shared supply. Water arrangements are frequently handled through negotiated agreements between a company and a local government or utility, and those terms vary from project to project and are not always public.

Lawmakers in at least eight states have introduced bills to require water use reporting. North Carolina has not adopted one. The NC Collaboratory at UNC Chapel Hill has been directed to study data center impacts on the state's water supply, wastewater treatment, grid, air quality, and noise, and that work is still underway.

So the honest situation is this. Alamance County has no zoning in its unincorporated areas, no water use reporting requirement to fall back on, no completed state study to rely on, and no cost recovery rules in place. A moratorium is how the county gives itself the authority to require disclosure as a condition of approval. Without one, we would likely learn what a facility actually draws from our reservoirs and aquifers only after it was operating.

What the county could require, if it takes the time:

We want to end this section on what a moratorium makes possible, because this is not only a list of worries. Cooling technology has moved quickly in the last few years, and a two year pause lets Alamance County write rules that match where the industry is now instead of where it was. Commissioner Powell is right that newer facilities can be built to use far less water. The way you get one of those is to require it in writing.

Here is what the county could put in an ordinance:

  • Transparency about water use. Require any applicant to disclose projected and actual withdrawals, report them on a regular schedule, and make those reports public. This is the foundation for everything else.

  • Closed loop cooling. Closed loop and air cooled systems recirculate water rather than evaporating it away, and can cut consumption dramatically compared to open evaporative cooling. The county can require it rather than leave it to the developer.

  • Hard limits on water demand. Cap withdrawals, and require reduced use or curtailment during declared drought, the way our own families are asked to conserve.

  • Standards for what gets discharged. This one is often overlooked. Evaporative cooling concentrates whatever is in the water, and the resulting blowdown can carry high total dissolved solids along with the biocides, anti scaling agents, and corrosion inhibitors added to the system, including metals like zinc and chromium. In a basin already carrying PFAS and 1,4 dioxane, we should know what would be going back into our streams and our treatment plants, and we should set limits before, not after.

None of these are radical asks. They are ordinary conditions that a well run facility can meet. However, a county with no zoning and no study period has no mechanism to require any of them.


The other impacts worth knowing.

Energy, and who pays for it:

Energy demand across the Carolinas is projected to grow by 80 terawatt hours over the next 15 years, and data centers account for more than 85 percent of that projected growth. A single 300 megawatt data center uses about as much electricity as 200,000 North Carolina homes running around the clock.

To meet that demand, Duke Energy is extending the life of coal plants it had planned to retire. Belews Creek in Stokes County, a 2.24 gigawatt coal facility, could now run until 2040. Duke had aimed to retire its remaining coal plants by 2035. The delayed retirements alone will add millions of tons of carbon dioxide, and legislation moving in Raleigh could push those dates further still. After years of progress moving off coal in North Carolina, we are reopening and extending the plants we had already agreed to close.

Ratepayers are being asked to carry the cost. Duke sought an 18 percent rate increase this year, citing load growth that includes data centers. A proposed settlement reduced that to 9.5 percent. If approved, a household using 1,000 kilowatt hours a month would pay roughly $280 to $355 more per year by 2028.

Protections for ratepayers are still being negotiated. Advocates have pushed for a mandatory large load tariff requiring customers with 25 megawatts or more of demand to pay for at least 85 percent of their projected usage over at least 20 years. Duke and the Public Staff have committed to filing a special large customer tariff by the end of September, and the North Carolina Attorney General has publicly called on Duke to make its ratepayer protection commitments legally binding. Those rules are not settled yet. That is one more good reason for Alamance County to wait.

Air quality and neighbors:

Data centers rely on diesel backup generators, which emit fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur oxides. In Virginia, where roughly 10,500 data center generators operate, an analysis of emissions permits found that running them less than an hour a week on average produces a public health impact comparable to five large gas fired power plants. Researchers at UC Riverside and Caltech estimated that diesel exhaust from these generators triggers about 14,000 asthma episodes a year. In Loudoun County, permitted fine particulate emissions have been estimated to cause between $53 million and $99 million a year in health costs.

Residents near existing facilities also consistently report constant low frequency noise, heavy truck traffic during construction, and light pollution in formerly dark rural areas.


Where the commissioners stand:

We share this so you can speak to your commissioners as neighbors rather than adversaries. Several of them have already said things we agree with, and we should say so.

Chairman Kelly Allen has spoken in favor of a pause. In her words, "There need to be buffers and ways to minimize the traffic and the noise. And a moratorium would give us the lead time to do that." We agree completely. Our point is simply that writing and adopting those buffer and noise standards takes closer to two years than two months.

Commissioner Pam Thompson has been the driving force in bringing this issue forward. She told her colleagues, "We cannot keep thinking that this is just not going to happen here. We need to get ahead of the game." She deserves to be thanked publicly for that.

Vice Chairman Steve Carter is open to a moratorium and has pointed to the potential property tax benefit, saying a large data center "would be a big boon in the reduction to your household property taxes." A two year study is precisely how the county would find out whether that holds true here, once you account for infrastructure costs, any incentives offered, and the small number of permanent jobs these facilities create relative to their footprint.

Commissioner Sam Powell, who serves as liaison to the planning board, has said newer facilities are better sound proofed, more energy efficient, and less wasteful with water, and that the county should aim to attract those rather than older server farms. If that is so, then a standards process costs a good operator nothing and screens out the rest. We would also gently flag that the planning board has floated simply adding data centers to the county's existing heavy industrial ordinance. That is not the same as writing rules designed for these facilities, and it could allow a project through without any water, energy, or noise conditions attached.

Commissioner Ed Priola has expressed skepticism about the national campaign around data centers, while also saying, "there's no harm to having a moratorium so we can study the issue and do the right thing." We take him at his word on that, and we would rather earn his vote than argue with him.

It is worth noting that no data center developer has expressed interest in unincorporated Alamance County. That is our best argument, not our weakest one. We are not reacting to a specific project. We are asking the county to be ready before one arrives, which is the only time good planning is ever possible.


How to be heard on August 17:

If you can speak, please do. Two minutes is plenty, and they may limit our standard three minutes to two given the crowd size. Be prepared and be concise. 

  1. Say your name and where you live. A local road and township carries more weight than any statistic.

  2. Share one thing that is personally at stake. Your well. Your farm. Your water bill. Your child's asthma. One is enough.

  3. Use one fact, not five. Choose the one that fits your story.

  4. Make the ask in plain words. "I am asking for a 24 month moratorium so the county can complete a land use study, adopt zoning, and confirm we have safe and adequate water. Two years is what it takes to require transparency about water use, closed loop cooling, real limits on how much they draw, and standards for what they discharge."

  5. Say what you are not asking for. "I am not asking you to ban anything. I am asking you to give the county more time to decide and prepare for this issue.

  6. Thank them. They put this on the agenda, and that was not nothing.

Please divide the topics among yourselves ahead of time. Twelve people repeating the same three facts sounds like a script. Twelve people covering water supply, private wells, utility rates, coal, noise, traffic, farmland, and process sounds like a community, because it is one.

A few things to steer away from:

Please avoid calling for a ban, criticizing commissioners personally, arguing about artificial intelligence in general, or guessing at numbers. If you are not certain of a figure, it is completely fine to say "I have read that" and keep it general. Our credibility in that room is worth more than any single statistic.


Before the hearing:

  • Ask for a specific motion: 24 months, a citizen steering committee, and coverage of all unincorporated land

  • Arrive early. The Historic Court House was reserved because a large turnout is expected

  • Bring a neighbor who has never been to a county meeting

If you would like help preparing your comments, please reach out to us. We are glad to talk anything through.



Sources and further reading:


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