Upper Burrell residents hadn’t expressed many concerns about an incoming data center — until this week.
At Wednesday’s township supervisors meeting, they asked for assurances on health, noise and environmental concerns.
The only assurance they got was news the township is writing an ordinance for the project — a process supervisors Chairman Ross Walker said should ensure protections.
Still, residents said they feel the project has too many hanging questions.
Allen Uhler said he’s lost sleep from noise at a Marcellus shale well 1,600 feet from his property.
“It’s very unnerving to not sleep at night,” he said. “I wonder if these data centers are going to be the same.”
Uhler said he also is worried about increased consumer costs, emissions and whether the site will try to expand. He hopes the township will explore taxing options.
In 2024, Florida-based data center developer TECfusions bought the 1,395-acre site, formerly the Alcoa/Arconic Research and Development campus.
The facility has the potential to host three gigawatts of electricity — about three times more than the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Dauphin County could produce.
The data center will draw power from natural gas wells already beneath the site to power wind turbines and will employ a closed-loop water cooling system, which TECfusions spokesperson Melissa Farney said make it more sustainable.
“The big thing people worry about tends to be the generators,” Farney said. “It’s not something that runs exhaust all the time.”
Farney said the company hopes to address concerns and highlighted the financial benefit.
“We want to partner with our communities,” she said. “We often meet with them and want to sit down and have conversations.”
Resident Dan Myers said he’s not against the data center, he just wants assurance it will be done in compliance with state laws to protect the community. Right now, he isn’t certain the township has the right resources to guarantee that.
“I think we need more education,” Meyers said. “How are they going to write an ordinance to regulate this thing if they don’t even know what it takes to build this thing?”
He said he would like to see the township collaborate with experts through the policy writing process.
Walker said supervisors had a “nice meeting” with TECfusions several months ago, where they expressed noise and pollution concerns.
He said they left feeling excited, but that TECfusions didn’t provide any sustainability or health studies.
“They did ease our concerns because they said they’d keep it (the data center operation) quiet,” Walker said.
He said they also suggested that TECfusions make the facility walls thicker to muffle noise. The township and its engineers are gathering information from ordinances used in other communities and that the “primary issue is safety and health.”
“The protection will come from the ordinance,” Walker said.
The township discussion comes shortly after consumer-advocacy group Food and Water Watch released a report outlining environmental and financial pitfalls of the national data center boom.
The report claims data centers raise household energy costs and threaten electric grid reliability.
It also states that closed-loop water cooling systems “suffer from bacterial growth that can cause equipment to corrode, adding to maintenance costs.”
Farney said TECfusions hopes to produce enough of its own power to recycle some electricity back to the power grid.
Two weeks ago, state Sen. Katie Muth, D-Montgomery County, announced she’s working on bipartisan legislation that would impose a three-year moratorium on hyper scale data center development and data center infrastructure such as power generating facilities in Pennsylvania.
Though the Upper Burrell data center was announced in 2024, residents haven’t made vocal opposition until now.
Myers said residents are likely coming out now because a January town hall to discuss the center was cancelled due to weather.
“A lot of people are having concerns because of what’s going on in other areas,” he said.
Residents at the meeting expressed fear the Upper Burrell project would be similar to a community-contested one in Springdale.
The town hall, which Township Secretary Melissa Cortileso said is being rescheduled, would have been a chance for the public to speak with TECfusions representatives.
Walker said a new date hasn’t been decided, but that it will be held at the Penn State New Kensington campus.
In January, TECfusions confirmed it landed its first tenant for the Upper Burrell site, artificial intelligence cloud system company TensorWave.
