Lowhill Township Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission members held a joint meeting July 9 to discuss a proposed zoning ordinance amendment to include data centers, bulk containers, non-conforming uses and other general zoning provisions.

Attorney Rocco Beltrami, with Norris McLaughlin, P.A. Attorney At Law began the discussion.

“There is this concept out there of sort of a distributed data center, data center network and as I understand it, the idea is that instead of having a sort of centralized large scale data center you kind of break out the work and separate the facilities across multiple properties,” he said.

Beltrami said a good example would be instead of having a large singular data center that looks like a warehouse, you would have a box connected to multiple houses across the township and each tiny box is processing data as if it were one large system. So the idea is to capture those kinds of evolving uses with respect to smaller scale and decentralized data center systems.

To that end, Mike Siegel, township manager, came up with an ordinance that redefines what has been called a data center, but now is referred to as an edge computing facility.

“We also still retained our definition and concept of a hyper data center, what we refer to as a hybrid digital infrastructure facility,” Beltrami said.

“What’s new is that we’ve added now this concept of a distributed compute node system which is a small-scale digital processing system,” he said. “That’s larger than the example I just discussed. That is our other new classification. That’s the lowest level of the compute node system.”

Beltrami said there are four classifications.

“You start at your lowest which is the residential system I described which is sort of just a box attached to a house that acts as a server. Then you have a step up from that and that’s a similar concept sort of small-scale facility,” he said. “Think of a transformer box in somebody’s yard that you see PPL put in something like that or maybe the size of even like a dumpster. That’s an accessory to not only residences but also businesses and any kind of commercial industrial use as well as institutional use.”

He said it’s the same concept as data center companies going to commercial properties-- maybe institutional properties such as schools--and saying “We know you have space and capacity, so we’d like to put a little small facility here in the aggregate of our other small-scale facilities as a large effort system.”

“So, we captured all four systems,” Beltrami said. “Data centers and hyper data centers. They are not changing in terms of scoping and are only permitted in the two regional use overlay districts where we’ve always had them.”

The minimalist residential system that was described will be permitted in all residential districts. The logic being that they are so small that one won’t even notice it’s there, he said.

Beltrami said the purpose of that night’s joint meeting was to flush out where the board and planning commission members would want the step-up systems.

He also said there was no rush to push this through as the township already has a data center ordinance.

During the discussion, board and planning commission members discussed issues related to data centers such as cooling the data center, kilowatts used, the electrical demand and the different sizes before discussing the second part of the zoning amendment dealing with bulk containers, nonconforming uses and other general zoning provisions.

On the topic of bulk containers, board and planning commission members discussed commercial uses versus noncommercial uses, the size of the containers, the number of days allowed and exceptions for nonprofits.

No formal action was taken on either of the two items in the proposed zoning ordinance amendment as there are some rewrites and further research that needs to be addressed and corrected before formal action is expected to be taken at another joint meeting on Aug. 13.