Representatives of development company EKG had two messages for the dozens of people packed into the West Hill Community Center: The proposed Kenwood data center project isn’t very far along, and it won’t be like those other data centers you’ve seen in the news.
They said they haven’t submitted any formal applications or proposals. They’re still weeks or months away from applying for necessary zoning changes. And they don’t yet know how many megawatts of electricity the data center will need.
“We’ve come as early as possible, once we've done our engineering and once we can say credibly this is what we propose to do, to get that community feedback and that involvement and all of these amazing ideas and real, real buy-in,” Michael-Henry Elghanian, the director of Guild Ventures, a subsidiary of EKG said. “Because I truly think it's an amazing project that will stimulate so much more economic growth and, you know, obviously done in a responsible way with the community in mind.”
Developers with EKG and its subsidiary Guild Ventures say the 250,000-square-foot data center will use an air-cooling system that won’t require lots of water and will use its own meter so as not to raise others’ utility rates.
They project that the development will create 300 housing units that will be "marketed to working class folks" and 500 full-time equivalent jobs, including 125 to 175 full-time jobs at the data center.
An executive order signed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul will pause state environmental permits for data centers that use more than 50 megawatts of power until July 2027. EKG is proposing putting their data center online in December 2028.
The meeting drew about 75 attendees, including members of the Albany Common Council and the County Legislature.
During the Q&A section of the meeting, attendees fired off questions about environmental studies, potential noise and vibrations made by the data center, the cost of the apartments, utility rates and electricity usage.
Bryan Paz-Hernandez has opposed the data center as the co-facilitator of No Kings Collective Albany. He said he’s glad the data center’s HVAC cooling system would use less water and make less noise than other data centers. But he is still “very much against this” over concerns about the proposed facility’s use of electricity, its environmental impacts, and whether the housing will actually be affordable.
“I asked him point blank, ‘How many megawatts of electricity is this going to use?’ They said they don't know that there's a number of studies in process and that they don't have a specific number,” Paz-Hernandez said. “Tonight they claimed, ‘Oh, electricity costs will not go up.’ Well, how can you claim that if you don’t even know how many megawatts this is going to be using?”
One attendee brought up the possibility of EKG posting a decommissioning bond. That would require the developer to give funds to the government that could used to cover clean up and repurposing costs for if – or when – the data center becomes obsolete and is abandoned.
Elghanian said he was open to including a decommissioning bond in the proposed project’s community rights agreement.
“Us as private developers, we’re certainly not looking to abuse that kind of an economics and leave any kind of a stain on the community going forward,” Elghanian said at the meeting. “I think that that should definitely be included in the agreements and make sure that it falls on whoever made the profits from the venture.”
Hochul has floated requiring data center developers to post bonds, citing former factories in her hometown of Buffalo.
“Right now, we're in a phase where this seems like the only answer,” she said during a roundtable with political and business leaders in the Rochester area last week. “But I also ask the question, when the technology does change and data centers become obsolete, who’s cleaning up the mess?”
