Gateway Data Center: Power Plays
Monroe UnfilteredTwo things happened to the Smithfield Gateway data center this week. Residents took apart its power math Wednesday night, and the Oct. 28 hearing quietly stopped being the night anything gets decided.
The hearing. On Oct. 20 the applicant's attorney asked the township to cancel Oct. 28, offering to push the decision deadline to Dec. 31. The township refused the same day, having already paid to advertise and staff it. The compromise: Oct. 28 still happens, but only to settle who gets party status. The hearing that actually decides anything lands about a month later, undated. All four letters are on the township's Gateway page.
The generators. A data center cannot go dark, so it keeps diesel generators on site for when the grid fails. How many, and how big, is what residents were arguing about. One speaker put the backup at 42.5 megawatts, far short of a facility advertised at 150 to 250. Another counted 48 generators at 2.5 megawatts apiece. So we read the filings. The second speaker is right. The project's own acoustical report says “Forty-eight emergency generators are shown for the project,” each one “a 2.5 MW Cummins diesel generator.”
What that actually means. 120 megawatts of diesel engines on Route 209, against a facility the load study puts at roughly 242 megawatts. The gap is the real question: either the generators are meant to carry only the critical systems, or the plan is not finished. Nobody answered that Wednesday. It matters if you live nearby because generators get test-run on a schedule, and test runs mean noise and exhaust. That is why there is an acoustical report in the first place.
The missing pages. The engineer told the commission that eight pages of the power load study were missing. The copy posted on the township's website is indeed incomplete, jumping from the summary to Section 11 with the appendices gone. That is the document meant to show how much electricity this thing will draw.
No vote to report. Two motions went to a vote, one asking the supervisors to look at denying the application outright. The audio is garbled and no tally is clear, so we are not printing a result. The commission only recommends anyway. The supervisors decide. And our account of the meeting comes from a transcription, not a reporter in the room.
Party status, in plain English. Show up on Oct. 28 and you can speak for your few minutes like anyone else. Apply for party status and you are a participant in the hearing itself, able to question the developer's experts and put your own material into the official record. That is the whole fight that night, and the only thing it will settle. Email Township Manager Julia Heilakka at julia@smithfieldtownship.com by Tuesday, Oct. 27, or bring the form. 6 p.m., J.T. Lambert Intermediate School, 2000 Milford Road. Organizers say plan on being there until 9:30.
This story on its own page →
