Owatonna’s People’s Press reports…
The Owatonna Planning Commission is modernizing its Zoning and Subdivision Ordinance to include and better define data centers.
Greg Kruschke, the city’s community development manager, presented the updates to the planning commission during Tuesday’s meeting. He said the city of Owatonna and Owatonna Public Utilities are “not aware of and currently have no data center projects planned or under consideration.”
“We are not a good candidate for a large scale data center,” Kruschke said.
His reasoning is that the city’s 161 kilovolt transmission lines are not large enough. The city’s electrical capacity is not “overly excessive” at around 20 megawatts compared to the proposed Faribault data center’s electric load size of 120 MW. Other projects in Minnesota can have a load size of up to 1,000 MW.
They are working on definitions…
The city’s existing ordinance has no definition or use category for data centers, and the updated August draft defined data centers and split it into Enterprise and Hyper Scale with the break at 20 MW. Enterprise data centers were a permitted use in the B-2 and B-3 districts (Community Business and Central Business). Hyper Scale data centers were a conditional use in the I-1 and I-2 districts (Light Industry and Heavy Industry).
The official definition of a data center has remained the same between the August draft and October proposal: “A facility used for the storage, processing, management and distribution of digital data and information, consisting of servers, networking equipment and supporting infrastructure such as cooling systems, backup power generation and electrical equipment.”
The October proposal kept the definition of a smaller data center mostly the same, but changed the use category from Enterprise to Minor and decreased the capacity threshold from 20 MW to “up to 5 MW of total designed IT load.”
The same goes for the Hyperscale (now named Major) data center definition, but now the capacity threshold is listed as “greater than 5 MW of total designed IT load (often expanding to 100+ MW over time).”