A bill to create a data center “task force” dies in the Montgomery County Council. But two Council Committees acknowledge the need to study the potential climate harms of new data centers in the county. 

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, MD – Disappointingly, a joint hearing of two Montgomery County Council committees resulted in a vote to block Councilmember Evan Glass’s much-needed bill to create a county task force to study the myriad potential impacts of data centers on the county.  However, the committees did strongly acknowledge the importance of studying how data centers could harm the County’s climate goals.

Councilmember Glass proposed an amendment to his own bill that all five members of the two committees supported before rejecting the final task force bill on a 3-2 vote.  His amendment would have required the task force to, among other things, report on “how proposed and projected new data center development in the County will affect the County’s adopted climate goals and greenhouse-gas reduction targets.” 

Voting in favor of the amendment were: Council President Natali Fani-González, Council Vice President Marilyn Balcombe, and Councilmembers Glass, Kate Stewart, and Laurie-Anne Sayles.

“The failure to pass the data center task force bill is a great disappointment, and we thank Councilmember Glass for his strong advocacy on this bill,” said Mike Tidwell, Executive Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) Action Fund. “But the Council committee members clearly understand the pollution threat of data centers as signaled by their amendment vote. Now the whole Council must find a new avenue to protect our citizens from the one million tons of CO2 that would otherwise come from the proposed mega data center in Dickerson, Maryland. It must be powered with 100% clean energy or the County’s Climate Action Plan will be destroyed.”

The County Council passed a resolution in 2017 setting a goal of an 80% carbon pollution emissions reduction by 2027, and zero emissions by 2035.  The 300-megawatt data center proposed for Dickerson, if powered by fossil-fuel-produced electricity, would be the equivalent of adding 200,000 dirty cars to MoCo roads. The company developing the data center, Atmosphere, Inc, has refused to commit to powering the center with clean energy. 

In the discussion leading up to the vote, Councilmember Glass spoke about the County’s climate goals and clearly laid out the stakes by saying: “any new facility of this type…need(s) to have renewable energy, they need to be net zero in some form or capacity, or otherwise we will not meet our climate goals.”

CCAN’s 6,000 supporters in Montgomery County call on every member of the Montgomery County Council to similarly commit to a net-zero goal for the Dickerson data center.

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Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) Action Fund is dedicated to driving change in public policies at the local, state, and national levels to address the climate crisis. Through voter education, lobbying, and participation in the electoral process, we seek to advance our country’s leadership in the global movement toward clean energy solutions — focusing our efforts primarily in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC. We know that a vibrant democracy is central to our success so we work to defend democratic integrity wherever we can.