Spokane council delays data center moratorium until at least next week

The Spokane City Council is lightly tapping the brakes on a moratorium on new data centers within city limits, pushing a resolution to next week after questions about where to draw the line without affecting desired projects such as an aerospace tech hub.

The council was set to vote on an emergency moratorium Monday, days after news broke that the massive power customer working with Avista was, in fact, a data center. On Friday, amid community concerns about the effect of a 500-megawatt data center project, Avista announced it was putting negotiations with the potential customer on pause.

Avista has a nonbinding memorandum of understanding with the company seeking to build the data center. The utility is not disclosing the name of the data center company, nor where such a facility would be built in Avista's Eastern Washington service territory. The utility also hasn't disclosed how or where it would generate, purchase and deliver such a large electricity load.

Speculation is that one site under consideration may be the former Kaiser Aluminum smelter complex in Mead that has been shut down for more than 26 years. The site sits adjacent to the Bonneville Power Administration's Bell Substation at 2400 E. Hawthorne Road.

BPA sold the smelter hundreds of megawatts of electricity for decades. Spokane city officials have speculated that while the data center likely wouldn't be located in city limits, it may well look to the city as a water supplier.

Even though the moratorium wouldn't stop a data center at the Mead smelter property, it could still help establish framework on how data centers use city water supplies, Councilman Paul Dillon said.

A moratorium would give the city time to deliberate on how best to regulate data centers, he argued Monday afternoon.

"I think a moratorium would allow us to create the regulatory framework that the city does not have," Dillon told his council colleagues. "We all should be concerned about what does the future of water usage, energy usage, the impact to our utilities look like?"

Despite the pause from Avista, a majority of council members appeared ready to vote Monday evening on a blanket one-year ban on new data centers over a certain energy capacity - though not the supermajority required to take fast action. There was some debate regarding how and where to draw the line for energy use, but ultimately the decision was delayed by at least a week as council members navigate how to ban mega projects that could possibly harm the environment or existing utility customers without accidentally banning other project seen as benefiting the community.

City officials have lobbied for years in favor of the Spokane Aerospace Tech Hub, a consortium of nearly 50 companies, agencies and schools working to make the Inland Northwest a global leader in manufacturing advanced composite materials.

That project has faced numerous hiccups, and Councilman Michael Cathcart on Monday warned that a moratorium could accidentally become another.

"My understanding is the tech hub is doing something with a data center," Cathcart said. "That has been such a major priority for the community, so I think we need some clear understanding about whether this (moratorium) will impact that project."

Dillon and Councilwomen Sarah Dixit and Kate Telis expressed disappointment by the delay, believing the community wanted rapid action. If necessary, they argued the council could go back and amend the moratorium to create enough wiggle room for projects such as the tech hub.

"I would have much rather dealt with this tonight," Dillon said. "I think the community has been very loud and clear about their concerns."

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