To: Oregon Data Center Advisory Committee
Subject: Please Recommend a Moratorium and Responsible Data Center Standards
Hello Data Center Advisory Committee Members,
I am writing to ask the committee to recommend a temporary statewide moratorium on permits and major public commitments for new data centers and substantial expansions.
The moratorium should remain in place while Oregon develops a comprehensive regulatory framework governing electricity, water, land use, public costs, environmental impacts, public health, transparency, and community benefits.
I appreciate the time and work the committee has devoted to this issue. The presentations have assembled a valuable body of information, but they have also demonstrated that Oregon still lacks the basic statewide systems needed to evaluate additional data-center development responsibly.
Oregon does not yet have one authoritative inventory of existing and proposed data centers. The committee has heard different counts based on campuses, buildings, permits, and facilities. The preliminary electricity forecast is consequential but cannot yet be reproduced from publicly available facility-level assumptions. Water-use information remains inconsistent. Tax benefits are substantial, while project-level accounting of public costs, actual employment, infrastructure obligations, and community payments remains fragmented.
These are not minor details that can be resolved after additional projects are approved. They are foundational questions that should be answered before Oregon makes long-term commitments involving electricity, water, land, tax policy, and public infrastructure.
A moratorium should be specific and temporary
I urge the committee to recommend a defined moratorium covering:
- Permits for new large data centers
- Permits for substantial expansions
- New or expanded tax abatements and preferential tax treatment
- Major public infrastructure commitments made specifically for proposed data centers
- Utility commitments that could expose other customers to speculative or stranded costs
The pause should apply to projects that have not received all final approvals necessary for construction and operation. It need not prevent routine maintenance, safety work, or lawful continued operation of existing facilities.
A temporary moratorium would not determine Oregon’s permanent policy. It would preserve Oregon’s ability to create that policy before development decisions become irreversible.
Oregon needs a consistent definition and public registry
A statewide framework should begin with a clear definition of the projects it covers.
One reasonable approach would be to include facilities meeting a substantial electricity-load or operational-size threshold, while excluding smaller institutional systems primarily supporting hospitals or public research.
Oregon should establish a public registry identifying:
- Facility and campus name
- Owner, operator, and expected occupant
- Location and parcel information
- Development and operating status
- Electricity-service provider
- Expected and actual electric load
- Water source and expected use
- Generator inventory
- Tax incentives and public agreements
- Projected and actual jobs
- Permits and approval documents
The state should also reconcile the different facility counts presented to the committee and explain how campuses, buildings, facilities, projects, and permitted sites are being counted.
Secret development negotiations should not substitute for public process
The committee should recommend safeguards against nondisclosure agreements that prevent local governments from discussing prospective data-center projects with the public.
Communities should not first learn about a major data center after essential decisions involving land, utilities, taxes, and infrastructure have effectively been made.
Applications should receive meaningful public review, with:
- Early public notice
- Notice to nearby residents and community organizations
- Public posting of application materials
- Identification of the owner and prospective operator
- Disclosure of projected jobs
- Disclosure of planned electricity, water, land, and infrastructure use
- Written explanations for claimed confidential information and redactions
Public participation is not meaningful when basic project information remains confidential until late in the approval process.
Annual reporting should be mandatory
Oregon currently relies on a mixture of voluntary company reports, municipal totals, permit records, utility forecasts, tax-program data, and consultant estimates.
That makes it difficult to compare projected impacts with actual outcomes.
Every covered data center should file an annual public report addressing at least:
- Total electricity consumption
- Peak electricity demand
- Source of electricity
- Participation in demand-response or curtailment programs
- Total water withdrawals and purchases
- Water source
- Consumptive use, discharge, and reclaimed-water use
- Number of full-time-equivalent employees working on site
- Contractor employment
- Generator testing and emergency-operation hours
- Fuel consumption and emissions
- Property-tax exemptions
- Community-service and school-support payments
- Compliance with employment and community-benefit commitments
Material differences between projected and actual resource use or employment should be explained publicly.
Developers should bear project-related costs
The committee should recommend a clear responsible-party principle: costs caused by a data-center project should be borne by the project, not shifted to households, small businesses, local governments, or the general public.
That should include project-related costs for:
- Electric generation, transmission, substations, and distribution
- Water supply and treatment
- Wastewater infrastructure
- Roads and transportation improvements
- Stormwater systems
- Telecommunications
- Fire and emergency response
- Specialized permitting, monitoring, and enforcement
- Decommissioning, removal, cleanup, and site restoration
Before construction begins, developers should provide financial assurance sufficient to address abandonment, bankruptcy, incomplete construction, decommissioning, and restoration.
This is particularly important because infrastructure may be built years before a facility reaches full operation, and some proposed projects may be delayed, reduced, transferred, or abandoned.
Tax incentives should not continue without demonstrated public benefit
Business Oregon’s 2025 facility data reported approximately $15.35 billion in exempt assessed value and approximately $233.56 million in estimated 2024–25 property-tax savings for 12 operating data-center authorizations.
Those figures do not by themselves establish the net public cost, because companies may also make community-service payments, school-support payments, negotiated contributions, and payments on taxable property.
However, they demonstrate that the public financial stakes are substantial.
Oregon should not approve, renew, extend, or replace data-center tax benefits without a transparent demonstration that the project will produce a net public benefit.
At minimum, the state should disclose:
- Taxes otherwise due
- Taxes exempted
- Payments actually received
- Infrastructure and administrative costs
- Jobs promised
- Jobs actually created
- Wages and benefits
- Local-hiring results
- Compliance failures
- Remedies available when commitments are not met
Prospective investment and employment estimates should not be treated as completed public benefits.
Public-health and community standards remain unresolved
The committee’s work has focused heavily on electricity, water, land use, economics, and tax policy. A comprehensive framework must also address direct effects on nearby communities.
The draft legislation circulating among advocates identifies several issues that deserve formal study and enforceable standards:
- Continuous and low-frequency noise
- Light pollution
- Diesel-generator emissions
- Generator testing schedules
- Fire risks involving fuel, batteries, and electrical equipment
- Wastewater composition and treatment
- Effects on nearby homes, schools, health facilities, senior facilities, farmworker housing, tribal lands, and protected natural areas
I am not asking the committee to endorse every proposed numerical threshold without further technical review. I am asking the committee to recognize that Oregon has not yet established comprehensive statewide standards for these impacts.
That unresolved work supports a moratorium rather than continued approval under a fragmented regulatory system.
Electricity, water, and land should not be allocated without public priorities
The preliminary assessment estimated that Oregon data-center electricity consumption could rise from approximately 14.0 terawatt-hours in 2025 to approximately 24.8 terawatt-hours in 2030.
That represents an increase from approximately 1,598 to 2,831 average megawatts.
The facility list and assumptions underlying that projection have not yet been published. The public cannot determine which proposed projects are operating, contracted, probable, speculative, delayed, or constrained by transmission limitations.
The committee should recommend that Oregon:
- Protect residential and agricultural customers from service degradation or cost shifting
- Separate committed loads from speculative utility inquiries
- Require collateral, minimum payments, and exit charges
- Prevent abandoned projects from leaving other customers responsible for infrastructure costs
- Establish curtailment and emergency protocols before shortages occur
- Ensure that demand response does not simply shift operations to high-emitting diesel generation
- Evaluate whether scarce transmission, water, and industrial land have higher-priority public uses
Water allocations should similarly be evaluated against existing municipal, residential, tribal, agricultural, ecological, and drought-resilience needs.
Oregon should not permit resource-land rezoning for data centers without a clear statewide policy addressing agricultural land, water rights, cumulative infrastructure, and alternative locations such as brownfields and underused industrial sites.
Oregon needs cumulative regional review
Data-center impacts are often divided among separate agencies and proceedings:
- A city or county reviews land use
- A utility plans electricity service
- DEQ permits generators
- A municipality supplies water
- Business Oregon administers tax incentives
- Transportation and emergency-service effects are handled elsewhere
Communities experience all of these impacts together.
Oregon should require cumulative regional review that considers data-center campuses and associated infrastructure as a connected development system.
That review should include:
- Existing and proposed campuses
- Transmission lines and substations
- Water and wastewater infrastructure
- Diesel generators
- Roads and construction traffic
- Housing and workforce effects
- Agricultural-land conversion
- Habitat and cultural resources
- Effects on tribal rights and resources
- Public-service capacity
- Climate impacts
Projects should not be divided into separate buildings, phases, companies, or permits in ways that obscure their combined effects.
Conditions for lifting the moratorium
I urge the committee to recommend that the moratorium remain in place until Oregon has established, at minimum:
- A statewide public data-center registry using consistent definitions.
- A reconciled electricity forecast separating operating, contracted, probable, speculative, delayed, and cancelled projects.
- Publication of the ECOnorthwest facility list, methodology, assumptions, and underlying tables.
- Ratepayer protections, including minimum payments, collateral requirements, exit charges, and transparent cost allocation.
- Standardized facility-level reporting for electricity, water, employment, incentives, emissions, generators, and land.
- Restrictions on nondisclosure agreements involving prospective projects and public bodies.
- Meaningful public notice and review before local or state commitments are made.
- Transparent project-level incentive and compliance ledgers.
- Net-public-benefit analysis rather than gross economic contribution alone.
- Cumulative regional-impact review.
- Public-health standards for noise, light, air emissions, wastewater, fire risk, and generator operation.
- Protection of agricultural land, natural resources, water supplies, and tribal rights.
- Developer responsibility for project-related infrastructure and administrative costs.
- Decommissioning plans and financial assurance.
- Meaningful participation by host communities, tribes, workers, utility customers, public-health experts, agricultural interests, and environmental organizations.
The Legislature may also need a longer-term task force or public process to study technical standards, community benefits, labor protections, environmental safeguards, and enforcement mechanisms. That additional study should occur during the moratorium — not after another wave of projects has already received approvals.
A temporary moratorium would not predetermine whether Oregon ultimately permits additional data centers. It would ensure that future decisions are made using reliable information, enforceable standards, transparent costs, and meaningful public participation.
The committee’s work has shown that Oregon still has major questions to answer. Continuing to approve projects while those questions remain unresolved risks allowing development decisions to outrun the protections the committee was created to consider.
Please include a temporary data-center moratorium and the development of comprehensive statewide standards among your recommendations to the Governor and Legislature.
Thank you for your service and for the considerable time you have devoted to this issue.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Westmoreland
Bend, Oregon
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