Large data center proposed for Yaphank in existing warehouse complex off LIE

An expansive data center proposed for Yaphank would occupy three currently vacant warehouses, employ an innovative closed-loop cooling system to minimize water use and invest upward of $1 billion in the region, according to its owners.

The proposed Brookhaven Digital Infrastructure Facility would occupy all 549,000 square feet of recently constructed warehouse space built by owner WF Industrial, also known as Wildflower, and require no land clearing beyond what has been already done on the 71-acre site, Michael Bowden, director of development for Wildflower, said in an interview with Newsday.

The facility just beyond the north service road of the Long Island Expressway is about 1,000 feet from nearby Yaphank neighborhoods to the west, bordered by woods to the north, and faces other warehouses across the highway. It’s just west and north of a large parcel of land that had been cleared for a planned Brookhaven rail terminal, which now sits vacant. The hamlet of Yaphank has about 6,000 residents.

The new plan for the Digital Infrastructure Facility is to house large amounts of computer processing, communications and data storage equipment. Bowden said the project would provide 50 full-time positions and create more than 1,000 construction jobs.

Outsized data center projects are sweeping the nation, bringing with them huge appetites for power, digital storage and water for cooling. They are hailed by technology giants as needed for the burgeoning artificial intelligence revolution and the need for mountains of data storage. But they also engender opposition in some local communities over concerns that they would overwhelm their utility infrastructure and potentially impact their pocketbooks.

On Long Island, the Town of Brookhaven is considering — and likely to pass — an 18-month moratorium on data centers. The Brookhaven Industrial Development Agency has warned that it would not support any new such projects, and the owners of the proposed facility are in technical default of their prior IDA tax-relief package for the warehouse for failing to meet promised employment levels at the site.

Local community groups wonder why the facility is needed at all, and question whether  greater power demand could drive up costs and worsen climate impacts.

Its owners say the Wildflower project wouldbe powered by the local grid and use no more water than what was anticipated under its prior use as a trucking warehouse. They propose to put rainwater harvesting equipment on its roof to limit its municipal water use, Bowden said.

The project proposes to draw a continuous 176.6 megawatts of power from the Long Island Power Authority grid — an amount that’s around half the output of the nearby Caithness power plant — when it’s in service by the end of 2027 or early 2028. LIPA in the past has indicated it believes it can handle the additional load, but interconnection studies are still underway. (The Sunrise Wind project is expected to come online around the same time, bringing with it 924 megawatts of new power for the grid.)

Working with a tenant Bowden declined to identify, Wildflower wouldmake new electrical infrastructure investments, including building a new substation to connect the three facilities to a 138,000-volt transmission line nearby. It would also house diesel-based emergency backup generators on site to handle the load if LIPA power is interrupted.

"There will be no pass-down costs to LIPA/PSEG ratepayers because of this project," Bowden said. "Any infrastructure costs aligned with this project, whether a substation or something else, will be absorbed by the project."

Given the high cost of power on Long Island, why build here?

"There are very few sites on Long Island that have direct access to a transmission line with this [large] capacity," in an "already built facility that doesn’t require new development," he said.

LIPA, in a statement, said it "does not anticipate reliability concerns associated with serving the proposed [new data center] load, subject to ongoing engineering review and project development milestones."  Under LIPA rules, all transmission and substation infrastructure required to serve such a large-load customer is paid for by those customers, not ratepayers.

Bowden said the project is also close to New York City, has easy access to the LIE, and would "be a project that brings significance for Long Island, a place that I think needs to look at the future and figure out how to harness the opportunity."

But Brookhaven Town Supervisor Dan Panico has cast a skeptical eye on the project.

In a text  Friday, he noted the town has yet to receive an application for the facility, and added, "I fully expect that the 18-month moratorium will be enacted."

In addition, Panico said it’s unclear whether the warehouse zoning originally approved for the center would allow for a data center. The town is seeking a determination on the issue from its chief building inspector and town attorney.

He also raised questions about the power supply issue and said, "That’s why the moratorium is the most responsible path, which I believe will be passed unanimously by the Brookhaven Town Board."

In an interview earlier this month, Lisa Mulligan, chief executive of the Brookhaven IDA, said the IDA board recently told her its members are "not interested in supporting data centers."

"The long and the short of it," Mulligan said, is that "if somebody brings me a data-center project, I’m going to say my board isn’t interested in that."

Monique Fitzgerald, climate justice and campaigns director for the Long Island Progressive Coalition, an activist group, said Wildfire is "not telling us what the need is for the data center in the first place."

"The community is pretty much unified against it," she said. "We don’t want it. Can you produce a reason why we need it?"

Calling the timing of the proposed moratorium "unfortunate," Bowden acknowledged the company didn’t meet its required employment commitment for the warehouse, but said, "The message we want to get across to them [the IDA] is we’ve been hard at work in every way we can to activate this site. Through all that research and work, we’ve identified a data center, a digital infrastructure facility, as the highest and best use of this site."

Bowden said the company will continue educating the local community and officials and continuing to seek regulatory approvals needed for the project, including from Brookhaven, and for the LIPA interconnection. "It’s more about continuing down this path toward the regulatory review process we’ve been in for some time," he said, noting the project is also under review by the New York Independent System operator, which manages the state grid.

"Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of misinformation about this project and data centers in general, and it’s important for us to identify what this project is actually providing," he said.

He said the facility would comply with all local noise and emissions requirements. "People have concerns about noise," he said. "An important point to make is that we’re fronting on Long Island Expressway. If you stand out front now, you’re listening to trucks and people driving by all day." The company’s site plan is also designed to have "much of the equipment between the buildings to mitigate any sound."

Use of the facility as a data center rather than a warehouse would result not only in a reduction of traffic and truck traffic specifically, "but less air emissions coming from trucks that are going to be coming in and out of the facility," Bowden said. Emergency generators, he said, would be designed to be "within an enclosure and in compliance with all state requirements."

He said the facility also would provide more tax revenue as a data center. "We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars in annual taxes that will have a significant positive impact to the town, county, local school districts, emergency response facilities, he said, revenue that "in itself can really help spur other infrastructure projects around the town that benefit the community."

— With Celia Young and Carl MacGowan 

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.