Franklin BOC Approves Moratorium on Data Centers

Franklin County Commissioners have voted to impose a moratorium on allowing data centers.

At last week’s work session, Commissioners had agreed to pass a six-month moratorium. However, on Monday evening, County Attorney Prya Patel suggested a slightly shorter timeframe.

Commissioner Josh Smith raised the question of whether the moratorium would include other kinds of storage facilities.

Data centers are massive storage centers housing hundreds of servers that power everything from cloud storage to streaming videos and more, and they are going up in some locations in Georgia as demand for AI and Internet services continues to expand.

But because of their massive size, many counties and municipalities across Georgia don’t want them in their communities because of the amount of electricity and water they pull to operate.

According to Florida Water & Pollution Control, a standard, mid-sized enterprise data center consumes between 300,000 and 500,000 gallons of water per day for cooling purposes – roughly equivalent to the water demands of 1,000 average U.S. households.

Additionally, according to Data Center Knowledge.com, an average, mid-sized enterprise data center uses between 120,000 and 240,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per day, making a data center’s daily footprint comparable to thousands of residential homes.

After hearing from Patel, the Board voted unanimously to shorten the moratorium to run until December 8, with Commissioner Cory Pulliam and Commission Chair Courtney Long absent.