An environmental group is speaking out against a dozen proposed data centers that are planned for the region.

Two of those proposed centers, according to Save Carbon County, would be located in Packer Township, as well as Nesquehoning.

In a letter to Nesquehoning Borough Council last month, Linda Christman, president of Save Carbon County, voiced the group’s concerns about the “coming tide of data center proposals.”

“Our county has exactly what data centers wants,” she wrote. “They want a connection to a reliable electrical grid, massive amounts of water, a temperate climate and easy access to Philadelphia and New York.”

Save Carbon County urged boroughs, as well as counties, to act now and suggested a model ordinance from PennFuture.

Data centers are large buildings ranging from 100,000 square feet to approximately 1 million square feet constructed to house banks of computers and other telecommunications equipment that run 24/7.

According to IBM, a data center “houses IT infrastructure for building, running and delivering applications and services. It also stores and manages the data associated with those applications and services.”

These centers then utilize water sources to continuously cool equipment, with large data centers consuming upwards of 5 million gallons per day while smaller centers using between 500,000 and 800,000 gallons daily.

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute, says that “water consumption is expected to continue increasing as data centers grow in number, size, and complexity.”

“According to scientists at the University of California, Riverside, each 100-word AI prompt is estimated to use roughly one bottle of water (or 519 milliliters). This may not sound like much, but billions of AI users worldwide enter prompts into systems like ChatGPT every minute,” the institute cited.

Save Carbon County also noted that the Lehigh River has been named one of America’s Most Endangered Rivers because of the impact of warehouse and distribution center developments.

The group urged municipalities to look at other options to require proposed data centers use instead of continuous freshwater, including a closed loop cooling system or an air circulation dry cooling system.

The group also urged municipalities to require stringent pollution standards for both water and noise, as well as look closely at any requests for property tax relief companies propose as part of the plan.

According to Nesquehoning Borough secretary Deborah DelFranco, as of Oct. 9, there has not been a scheduled meeting date with Bitfarms, which owns Panther Creek, the cogeneration plant that currently uses coal burning to mine cryptocurrency, to go over their proposed data center.

The area in question is located to property adjacent to the current operations off Dennison Road at the far west end of the Hauto Valley Estates portion of the borough.

Last week, PPL Electric Utilities held an open house to discuss a proposed transmission line that would trek from Tresckow/Banks Township to Nesquehoning and over to a property next to Panther Creek, however, the use for that transmission line at the property was not discussed other than to “service a customer.”