Genoa's village administration discusses data center concerns

Government officials within Genoa continue to research the positives and negatives of potential business developments at a site near the intersection of 163 and Reiman, which could possibly include a data center.

That process continued Aug. 3 at the latest village council meeting, where council members heard from residents while also sharing information they have discovered with residents.

The Press spoke with village administrator Thomas Bergman after the meeting.

“We told the room full of people, you guys hold a lottery ticket in your hands,” Bergman said. “Genoa stands to benefit in ways that other towns cannot consider because they're not electric providers. If Oregon's looking at $10 million, we're looking at $45 million.

“Now is the process of working through these concerns, seeing what's real and what isn't real, seeing what can be solved and what can't be solved. That's a long process to go through these checklists. And it's thorough. That's our commitment.”

That commitment and Bergman’s history in the town makes him upset when people said council is just going to take the largest amount of money without concern for potentially harmful consequences.

“We stated openly to the room that this council is fully committed to guaranteeing that noise pollution is not going to affect Genoa,” he said. “Full stop. It's not worth it. Unfortunately, you have people portraying that I’m just after the money, therefore I’m willing to harm this portion of town so that you can cash this big check.

“I find that personally disappointing. It makes me nauseous that some people think that I would actually harm this town. It's like, do you know me? Do you think I founded the Genoa Historical Society so I could be the guy known for harming the town? You think I volunteer my time to be the throwing coach at the high school because I secretly hate this town and want to harm it? Are you kidding me?”

Thus, Bergman and village officials hope to “sooner rather than later” have a set of zoning regulations that they can present for a public hearing with “very, very high standards that are going to protect the residents of the Village of Genoa.”

“By the way, that's not just for data centers,” he said. “The same concerns about noise, water, sewer … aren't those the same for anything? A decibel is a decibel.”

Bergman and other officials recently visited data center sites in Hilliard and New Albany, near Columbus, hoping to find out about potential noise and other concerns related to data centers. He also referenced the Community and Environmental Defense Services website, CEDS.org, that helps teach how to regulate a data center and prevent it from harming adjacent neighbors.

The language on CEDS.org said the organization “helps people to preserve the health, safety, and tranquility of their neighborhoods when threatened by excessive traffic, proposed gas stations, landfills, and many other issues.” It has sections on “data center monitoring” and “data centers and preventing neighborhood impacts.”

One of the things learned through the website and seconded by his Columbus-area research in person, is that the hum that people hear from data centers appears to be from air-cooled versions instead of the closed-loop, liquid cooled ones, which are relatively quiet.

“I have nothing to hide,” Bergman said. “We went and talked to people who live right next to this thing. We stood about 230 feet from the building. We brought a decibel meter we bought off Amazon. I'm not saying it's NASA grade, but it gives you an idea. Also, my ears work and I could just tell it just wasn't. You could hear the slightest of hums, but we're 230 feet away from it.

“And we already know that the Genoa Planning Commission is talking about a minimum of a 1,000-foot buffer next to Genoa neighborhoods, so it's four times this. One of the councilmen got a little upset, not with the sound, but he got upset with the hysteria. ‘What’s the big deal? Where’s this horror story we see on Facebook everywhere?’

“So we said alright, we have to go across the area and talk to people. There’s a developer, not only him, but his bank is putting $5 million, $10 million on the line to build this subdivision across the street. They put the clubhouse, with the pool and the pickleball court, right across the street from a data center. There’s people in the pool, there's people at the pickleball court. We walk up to someone and one of the councilmen has a history in sales, so he could sell water to a whale, and he says, ‘Hey, could we ask you guys a question? We're from a town in northern Ohio and we want to get a sense of the impacts of these data centers. What do you guys think on a scale one to ten?’ And I'm not joking. The guy looked at the building, looked back at him and said, ‘I didn't even know that was a data center.’ We were just flabbergasted.”

Bergman and crew then went over to someone leaving the pool with the same question.

“She said, ‘I'm aware that in the beginning there were some noise issues and Amazon addressed them, and we haven't had any issues ever since. I have absolutely no problem with that building.’

“I like that takeaway because it illustrated that it's possible to have noise issues with data centers. It's also possible to solve them, as this lady stated with her experience at this neighborhood. We drove around the neighborhood for 30 minutes, people walking on the sidewalk, looking at the homes that are under construction. We just asked them, ‘What are your guys' thoughts on that thing?’ And not only did no one bring up noise complaints, they all stated affirmatively that they did not have noise complaints. It was so eye-opening.

“Then we drove to the other side of the data center, which is across the street from a park, and we were about 600 feet from it. Again, Genoa was going to require 1,000 feet, and it was at 37 decibels according to our decibel meter. And 37 decibels is like the volume of my driveway at midnight without any locusts blaring. That is a quiet rural night.”

“It would be next to impossible to go see this and see the people just living their lives next to it without any concern for noise from this data center and come back here and say it's impossible to regulate this for our community. It's impossible? Really? That's the opinion? It's wild.”

Bergman said they then went up to another data center and that they could hear the hum of that one.

“That was 52 decibels on our meter, and you could hear that stereotypical hum, so it illustrated to me, and I don't have any inside information, but that one's probably one of the air-cooled ones that people talk about,” he said. “The other one that we could barely hear, it's probably one of the closed-loop ones.

“I tried to stress in the meeting, not all data centers are the same. There’s different technology, but it's all the same concept. You have computer racks and you're removing heat from the computer racks. It's all the same concept, but how they do that can be dramatically different. It's just a fact that some data centers don't have the noise issues that other data centers have.”

Bergman also shared a story of a school board member who went to visit a data center, as well. He relayed that the loudest thing he heard was a guy spreading mulch. Others he spoke with said there wasn’t any concerns living there, both from residents and home developers.

“When we went over to New Albany after we left Hilliard and we could hear that hum off the data center, we drove 1,000 feet away from it across the street to try and get a sense of, all right, can you hear that 1,000 feet away?” Bergman said. “We pulled the decibel meter out of the truck, and it was about 42 decibels. You had to really struggle to hear it, maybe barely. The takeaway was, we pulled ahead and thought we were next to a distribution center, but no, lo and behold, we were 150 feet away from a different data center. We were trying to see if we could hear the one 1,000 feet away, and we couldn't hear the one 150 feet away.”

On the way back from that trip, Bergman and his traveling party wanted to get pre-existing sound levels in the village when they’re producing standards they expect from potential developers.

“Because if a site is roaring at 80 decibels, you can't make an end user create negative sound, right?” he said. “That's just logic.”

So, they tested near Reiman Road.

“I've been to bonfires and you can hear the turnpike (out there),” he said. “We went out and measured that when we got back, and it was 63 decibels on Camper Road — the part of the site that's closest to the potential data center site, and it was in the 50s smack in the center of the site. And it was 43 up near Genoa neighborhoods, once you dodge the traffic from the state highway.

“I just told the room, this strongly suggests that if we get away from Genoa neighborhoods, which has been a public position for years, we get away from the neighborhoods and you get closer to the turnpike, it's already louder than anything we saw in Columbus.”

Bergman emphasized that proper zoning regulations and research ahead of time can establish the parameters that would help prevent the issues people commonly see on Facebook, for example, with data centers.

One concern Bergman heard locally about data centers is the construction site aspect from someone who lives near Castle Ridge, who wondered how long it takes to build one. Basically, how do you build it without it being a yearslong headache for the neighborhood?

“That was a great question,” Bergman said. “Our current codes are proposing to require a 25-foot mound, for example. That's the biggest one we've seen in addition to that 1,000-foot setback. Do we have to put in the development agreement that you have to build the mound first so that we're not looking at a construction site for years on end? Maybe that's what we need to write up. Do we have to put in a development agreement of what the haul routes are going to be? Maybe that's what we have to do, but let's work together and see if we can solve it.”

Back in the Columbus-area, from those who live near those aforementioned data centers, Bergman said there weren’t many concerns.

“One man said it was ugly,” he said. “One man said the water pressure was low in his neighborhood, but he could not attribute it to the data center. He said he wasn't worried about it because they're building a new pipe from the neighborhood into the city, something that’s going to be fixed. Well, is it the data center or is it the new neighborhood, who knows?”

Bergman said he has heard that a data center in Oregon could produce 30,000 gallons of water per 500 megawatts, which he said isn’t a problem.

“We already have users in our system bigger than 30,000 gallons,” he said. “In my talk (at the Aug. 3 council meeting), I gave a comparison to Wildflower Subdivision up in Allen Township, which many people say is the most prestigious subdivision in our community. That subdivision used about 29,000 gallons of water last month, and I told the room that I have a feeling that if we said we were going to build an exact replica of Wildflower behind Miller’s, brick-by-brick, and it was going to use 29,000 gallons of water, I don't think we'd see the people on Facebook saying that we're going to run out of water. It's just unfounded.”

Bergman also said that the preferred closed-loop data centers, which provide little to no hum, also uses less water. The closed-loop ones basically function like a radiator and don’t use as much water, while the air-cooled ones have big fans and evaporative cooling towers.

“That's a win-win,” he said. “I don't want the data center that's going to buy a million gallons of water. I couldn't get it here. And even if I could, I don't know if I'd want the responsibility of having to provide a million gallons of water a day to an entity. If something goes wrong, that's a bad day for me. Thirty-thousand gallons of water, that's one water leak in town. That happens all the time.”

Bergman believes that the Village of Genoa is at the very least among the furthest along in the state among public power providers in terms of their preparation in lieu of potential future offers for a site.

“We have a lottery ticket that, if I'm hearing this correctly, that's bigger than anybody else's,” he said. “People will portray that as ‘you're going to harm the community just to get a check. No, that money is motivation to do the due diligence, put in the effort to figure out what's real and what isn't, and what can be solved and what can't be solved.

Bergman said that there still haven’t been any official inquiries into the site, but that he wants to make sure the village officials have done the proper homework ahead of time.

“We know the world knows we exist,” he said when asked of potential suitors. “That's probably the fairest way to put it. That was not the case a year ago, two years ago. When we said to residents that we expect that there's going to be a lot of interest out there to come talk to Genoa, I still feel that is true.

“Obviously, you'd want to create the correct regulations before they got here, before they came to have a conversation because creating a regulation after someone shows up and wants to have a conversation is not an optimal outcome.

“I am watching the other towns about what kind of codes they're creating. I'm constantly talking to lawyers and experts in the industry who work for us and not data centers, but people who actually have experience about these things. We're working with multiple legal firms on the matter so we’re not just taking one person's opinion.”

Bergman also said Genoa possesses a big hammer separate from making sure zoning regulations are in place.

“Zoning authority is one thing, but as I try to stress, we have a constitutionally protected power monopoly,” he said. “We are the public electric provider inside the Village of Genoa, so that regulatory authority is just another layer of protection that a zoning code wouldn't necessarily provide.”

He used the example of people saying to look at Hilliard because they did fuel cells and Amazon was able to circumvent any zoning codes and go right to the Ohio Power Siting Board.

“You saw the same thing in Wood County, for example that gas plant they're going to build at the Facebook place. That can't occur in the Village of Genoa because we're the power monopoly. We have to agree to sell you power. We have to agree to buy the power to sell to you. Those are totally legitimate concerns, but every place is different and us being a municipal electric provider is that extra layer of protection from some of these bad outcomes.”

He said he agrees that it’s a bad law anyways.

“I've heard from legislators that they think this will get fixed because there was outrage about what went on in Hilliard,” Bergman said. “We'll see what happens there, but it's kind of a non-issue for Genoa.”

All in all, Bergman encourages people to express concerns or questions by visiting village council meetings. The next one is Aug. 17, and they occur regularly on the first and third Monday of each month.

“What we're going through here in Genoa is not any different than other towns, whether it's Findlay or any of the townships out in Lucas County,” Bergman said. “They're all navigating Facebook on one side and trying to navigate what's real, what isn't, what can be solved, what can't be, and what regulations do you put in place to get the outcome you want?”