Maine lawmakers are considering a two-year pause on building large new data centers in the state.
State Rep. Melanie Sachs, D-Freeport, added the moratorium to her bill proposing a broad-based data center “coordination council” that would study benefits and risks of data centers in Maine and offer recommendations to local governments, utilities and state agencies.
“These data centers as we have seen in other states have impacts for grid resilience, they have impacts for environmental resources, so we just wanted to take a proactive approach and do it unlike any other state has so far,” Sachs said.
Data centers house computing networks that process information for applications including artificial intelligence. New centers have been growing across the U.S. and raising concerns about their huge appetite for electricity and water.
Sachs said the proposed council would spend the next year studying the potential impact on electric ratepayers, the environment, power grid and other matters and offer guidelines for building new centers in the future.
In the meantime, Sachs is proposing a moratorium through mid-2028 on new centers that use more than 20 megawatts of power.
The plan was opposed by some Republican members of the Legislature’s Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.