Nesquehoning is asking its planning commission to look into regulations for data centers.

During council’s monthly meeting on Wednesday, borough solicitor Robert Yurchak suggested council look at whether or not the borough should create an ordinance regulating data centers, which have been popping up in proposals all over the county.

“This is not directed at Bitcoin (Bitfarms) or anything like that; (it’s) just that we don’t have anything currently in our ordinances regarding data centers,” Yurchak said, adding that the planning commission could do a study on it and come up with a draft outlining data center regulations for down the line.

“With the power lines coming in, access to water and all the land we have in Nesquehoning, I don’t want to see a proliferation of data centers all around, so that’s the reason I’m suggesting we do some work on it and see what they come back with,” he said.

Council agreed and asked Yurchak to send a letter to the planning commission’s chairman requesting that it begin looking into the matter and then make recommendations if the commission feels it is necessary.

Yurchak said the surrounding communities, including Packer, Banks, Kidder, Penn Forest and Lehigh townships, as well as Beaver Meadows are all looking into this matter.

“It’s all around the county,” he said. “I’m not saying we can exclude them, just so everybody understands, but we can regulate it.”

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.”

The centers then use water resources to continuously cool equipment, with large data centers consuming upward of 5 million gallons per day, while smaller centers use between 500,000 and 800,000 gallons daily.

In August, the Carbon County Planning Commission reviewed a plan for a subdivision/lot annexation at the intersection of Dennison Road and Green Acres Industrial Park in Nesquehoning, owned by Kovatch Enterprises Inc. The plan called for creating four lots on approximately 585.486 acres from eight parcels.

The motion passed and the county’s recommendation was sent to the borough’s planning commission and council to be included with their comments. It has since been approved.

A few weeks before that meeting, Bitfarms Ltd., a Canada-based company that purchased Panther Creek Waste Coal-fired Power Plant earlier this year, announced that it had entered into a partnership with T5 Data Centers to develop an advanced artificial intelligence data center at the Nesquehoning facility.

The current operations at the plant include burning waste coal to create energy for cryptocurrency mining.

A release from the company stated that the partnership “will focus on comprehensive pre-construction design planning and development approval processes to advance this significant digital infrastructure investment.”

It plans to use the center to “meet the demands of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence applications, while supporting Pennsylvania’s emergence as a hub for next-generation data center development.”

The companies cited Panther Creek as “well-positioned for building an advanced AI data center campus.”

In September, PPL Electric Utilities hosted an open house to discuss a proposed 69 kilovolt transmission line that would traverse 7.5 miles from a new substation expected to be constructed in Tresckow, through Packer and Banks townships, and to the Hauto substation. A second line would then be looped from the Hauto substation to a property off Dennison Road in Nesquehoning that is adjacent to Panther Creek.

Once started, PPL anticipates that the new line will be in service by December 2027.