Roofer in Walterboro, SC

WALTERBORO, S.C. (WCSC) — A controversial proposal for an 850-acre data center property in Colleton County went before the Zoning Board of Appeals Thursday night, where residents voiced opposition to the project during a public hearing.

The massive data center proposal has already received approval from the county council, but the project requires special approval from the zoning board because it would be built outside of the current zoning code.

The proposed artificial intelligence data center would be built south of Walterboro in the ACE Basin area and around other water resources for the surrounding community members.

Resident Richard Burke questioned how the county has already progressed this far in the process with plans for the center.

“It went quietly through three readings, which is how it gets approved, but the body of the legislation was never published, was never put in an agenda, was never put in any minutes. So, the public, to my knowledge, has never seen it until it’s passed,” Burke said.

In response to concerns about water impact, the developer said modern data centers leave smaller environmental footprints and would not impact the general welfare of community members.

“A condition of approval is, if we were to secure one, would be to have a closed-loop non-evaporative cooling system. What that is water cools the data center. It goes outside through a flat plate heat exchanger. The heat is rejected out to the environment. Electricity is used to re-cool that water and sent back inside. Meaning that there is no daily refill of that water,” the developer said.

The developer also said the data centers would create potentially 450 job opportunities for Colleton County citizens.

“Some of the rhetoric that you will hear is that there’s nobody in Colleton County skilled for those jobs, and people are going to be coming in from California to take those. Just not the case. This is all net new growth for our AI industry for our country. Those jobs are not held by somebody else. This is not a relocation. This is new growth,” the developer said.

Burke said the proposed location is inappropriate for industrial development.

“This is the headwaters of the Ashepoo River. This is the headwaters of the ACE Basin. This is a protected area that is under conservation easement. This location will touch the Isaiah United Methodist Church. And this is just not an area that is consistent with this type of development under any scenario,” Burke said.

The developer says they are following in the footsteps of responsibly developing, exampling Google in Goose Creek.

“The site is 859 acres, of which there are 234.5 acres of wetland. We are not touching, going in, or disturbing 233 of those acres. The areas that we are developing are already harvested forest areas or monoculture forests that have been in place for a while, behind significant buffers. So, that covers water, covers power, covers the ecology. Not completely, I know there’ll be objections.”

Multiple residents said few or no county council members were present at the special hearing.

A board member said the meeting on whether to grant the special exception will be posted on the Colleton County website and also says they will pass along community concerns about posting agendas to county staff.

WALTERBORO — A large new data center campus soon could be coming to this Colleton County community, and some community members and conservation groups worry that it could drive up energy costs and harm one of the state’s most pristine ecosystems.

Colleton County’s Zoning Board of Appeals on Dec. 18 will hold a public hearing for a proposed an 859-acre data center campus, which would include nine buildings on Cooks Hill Road, just southeast of downtown Walterboro. Approval from the Zoning Board of Appeals is the last procedural hurdle for the project before it’s officially approved, said Robby Maynor, a climate campaign associate for the Southern Environmental Law Center, which opposes the project.

The vote on the data center comes after Colleton County Council created a process that allows for swift approval of such projects. It’s a system that Maynor, a Walterboro resident, said offers minimal opportunities for community oversight.

Under the new policy, finalized in November, Colleton County made data centers in rural areas allowable as a “special exception,” meaning they can be approved in a single vote by the Zoning Board of Appeals. That means members of the public have less opportunity to learn about these projects, assess their impacts, organize an opposition effort and challenge officials, should they choose to do so, he said.

In October, the same developers withdrew a rezoning application that would have allowed them to build a 1.8 million-square-foot data center in Jones County, GA.

“I don’t think many people knew about these kind of wonky changes to the zoning code,” Maynor said. The data center, he said, does not undergo multiple readings for a special exception request.

Colleton County staff did not return more than half a dozen emails and calls requesting comment from The Post and Courier.

Faith Rivers James, executive director of the Coastal Conservation League, said the conservation community across the state was concerned about how fast the development plan was moving through Colleton County’s government approval process. But she wasn’t surprised, she said.

“We’re always on guard at the end of the year because many developers try to slip through proposals while they think people are distracted by the holidays,” James said, adding that large properties near the site are protected by conservation easements.

The proposed data center sits at the head of the ACE Basin, an ecologically sensitive area of wetland ecosystems defined by the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto Rivers.

“ This area is an important corridor in the ACE Basin, where there has been decades of land conservation work,” Maynor said. “ I'm biased. I live in Walterboro and I've been in the Lowcountry my whole life. If there is one place in the state of South Carolina where we should not be putting data centers, this is the place.”

In its special exception application for the project, the developers said the construction and operation of the center will create 500 new jobs in the county, although they don’t specify what those jobs are, and more than 1,000 temporary construction jobs over the next few years. The document said more than half of the 859 acres on campus will be undisturbed, including 99-percent of the property’s wetlands.

Eagle Rock Partners, one of the developers on the project, did not return an interview request by deadline.

Data center details ‘very limited’

Maynor said information about the project’s impact on the area is “very limited,” even as final approval could come this week. Ahead of the meeting, the data center is drawing increasing scrutiny from community members concerned about its environmental and economic repercussions.

The recently updated S.C. Water Plan is meant to guide the state’s water usage as South Carolina’s population grows, but even its authors aren’t certain of data centers’ cumulative impact on the state’s waters. South Carolina officials don’t have a particularly strong grasp on how many data centers the state even hosts, The Post and Courier previously reported. Tech companies don’t often disclose a data center’s water usage, citing trade secrets.

Depending on their size, data centers can use anywhere from 100,000 to 1.4 billion gallons of water annually, according to the Water Plan. At Google’s data centers, for example, 80 percent of that water is used “consumptively” and won’t be returned to the ecosystem. The Walterboro center isn’t related to the tech company.

"Changes to water demands from energy production facilities and from the growing industry associated with data centers represent an uncertainty with the current projections,” the plan states. “Future updates to River Basin Plans and the State Water Plan will include revisions to these projections based on the ever-changing state of development."

Frank Knapp, president and CEO of the S.C. Small Business Chamber of Commerce called that approach “a plan to make a plan” and “kicking the ball down the road.” Knapp’s group has previously opposed the construction of data centers — including the one planned in Colleton County — over concerns that the operations drive up energy costs for small businesses.

In Knapp’s view, any economic development opportunities the centers might provide don’t outweigh their cost to local residents and business owners. Utilities foot the bill to build out additional energy infrastructure to service the centers, and then proceed to pass the cost of those projects on to ratepayers.

“Small business owners don’t need to be subsidizing Google, Meta and these other big tech companies,” Knapp said. “They ought to be paying their own way. I mean, this stuff is not free.”

Earlier this year, Santee Cooper, the state-owned electrical utility, adopted a new experimental rate that would, among other things, require data centers to pay higher service costs and sign a 15-year guaranteed payment contract with the utility. Santee Cooper will review the policy in 2029 to determine whether to extend it.

But that policy only applies to direct-serve customers, the utility told The Post and Courier in October. It does not apply to areas serviced by electrical co-ops, which buy electricity wholesale from Santee Cooper. A Santee Cooper spokesperson confirmed via a Nov. 15 email that the proposed data center falls outside of their retail service territory.

“So here we have this giant energy user being planned for the Colleton County area, so the co-op would have to supply the energy,” Knapp said. “What does that mean? Where is that coming from? They’re going to basically pass on any new generation costs to everybody else.”

Shortly after the zoning code rule change was adopted by Colleton County Council, Santee Cooper paid about $1.2 million for a 99-acre plot of land on the same tax parcel as the yet-to-be-approved data center campus. Per a Nov. 20 deed of sale, Santee Cooper aims to build a new electrical substation on the property.

Center could be ‘big blow’ to ACE Basin

The data center sits in the upstream portion of the ACE Basin, a swath of land south of Charleston that has been the focus of decades of conservation work. Taylor Allred, the energy and climate program director for the Coastal Conservation League, said the data center would be “a big blow to the ACE Basin.”

“It’s loud and it’s noisy, and it would entirely change the rural character of that area,” he said.

The data center proposal is part of an even larger set of concerns that include the construction of a new gas-fired power station and a large pipeline to supply it, Allred noted. Santee Cooper and Dominion Energy on Dec. 16 moved to gain final approval for the Canadys gas plant. That proposal will be considered by the S.C. Public Service Commission in the coming months.

The power plant, pipeline, data centers, transmission lines and traffic that would be required will “anchor a massive industrialization of the ACE Basin,” widely regarded as one of South Carolina’s great conservation success stories.

The Zoning Board of Appeals will take up the data center proposal at 5:30 p.m. Dec. 18 at 494 Hampton St. in Walterboro. The time and date of the meeting was revised late Dec. 16.

Tony Bartelme contributed reporting.

Editors note: This story has been updated to reflect the new time and date of the meeting, as well as clarify that the meeting will be a public hearing.

Developers are looking to build an 859-acre data center campus near Walterboro, about 45 minutes north of downtown Beaufort, according to a public notice from Colleton County.

The proposed site would be the closest data center to Beaufort County to date. The large facilities, filled with rows of computer servers, data storage devices and networking equipment, are known for consuming high amounts of energy, leading to increases in power bills in surrounding areas more than an hour away.

At the same time, data centers form the backbone of digital services. Every time you send an email, stream a show, save a photo to the cloud, or ask a question to a chatbot, you’re relying on a data center.

Before any proposal moves forward, developers Thomas & Hutton and EagleRock must get a special approval from the county’s elected officials to allow construction on rurally-zoned land. The same developers withdrew an application for a Georgia data center this fall after significant public opposition.

A public hearing is set for Dec. 18, according to a public notice published on Dec. 4 in the Walterboro newspaper The Press & Standard.

What are data centers?

Data centers have been around for decades, but they’ve been expanding in recent years to support the use of generative AI models.

According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, there is no federal registration requirement for data centers, so their estimated number varies. The Data Center Map estimates that the U.S. has more than 4,200 data centers, including 31 in South Carolina.

Data centers require a tremendous amount of energy to run and water to stay cool, prompting strong opposition from some communities. The centers need electricity to keep the systems running water to keep servers and equipment from overheating.

In areas where data centers are popping up in droves, energy bills are rising for surrounding communities more than an hour’s drive away.

The Walterboro data center proposal

Just south of Walterboro, developers Thomas & Hutton and EagleRock are seeking a county-approved special exception to allow a data center campus on the property. While the land is zoned for rural development, data centers are permitted under that zoning if granted an exception, according to the public notice issued by the county.

The property on Cooks Hill Road is owned by Weyerhaeuser Company, a major American timberland owner and forest products company. Property records indicate the land is currently vacant.

In recent months, the same developers withdrew their application for another proposed data center in Jones County, Georgia after facing significant pushback from local residents.

In October, Colleton County Council officials amended their land management ordinance to allow data centers to be built in specific zoning districts as a special exception, according to the council packet.

A public hearing for the special exception request will be held on Dec. 18 on the 3rd floor of the Colleton County’s Council at 109 Benson Street.

The Island Packet requested more information about the data center proposal from Colleton County’s zoning board and their chairman. They did not immediately respond to the request.