Gov.-elect Hannah Pingree said Tuesday that Jay should not be “the testing ground” for data centers before Maine has strong regulations in place, one day after the developer of the town’s former paper mill filed for state permits to build one there.
Her comment to the Bangor Daily News comes one day after the owner of the former Androscoggin Mill site in Jay submitted permit applications to Maine regulators to move forward with his plan to convert the former paper mill into a data center.
“Jay should not be the testing ground for a data center project before Maine has strong regulations in place to protect communities,” Pingree said in a statement.
That position previews one of the ways in which Pingree will distinguish herself from her predecessor, outgoing-Gov. Janet Mills, who vetoed a data center moratorium backed by Democrats in April because she wanted to save the Jay project.
Pingree, who served in Mills’ cabinet for more than six years until she entered the race to replace her, signaled her support for a moratorium on the campaign trail. On Tuesday, she unveiled a transition team that includes the head of Maine Conservation Voters, a Democratic-aligned group working against data center development.
Pushback against data centers has only intensified in Maine and nationally over the past year as the public grows more wary of artificial intelligence and its environmental impact. Eight more communities here added local moratoriums during last Tuesday’s midterm election, mirroring similar restrictions across the country.
Nodding to the election at a news conference in Augusta, Pingree emphasized that she “heard pretty loudly and clearly from Maine people that the development of data centers in Maine without very strong regulations in place is not something that people are interested in.”
Pingree and developer Tony McDonald of JGT2 Redevelopment said they have not spoken to each other yet about the data center plans, although the governor-elect has worked before with the Jay town manager and wants to talk to her and McDonald.
The developer said his data center can provide jobs and property tax revenue to Jay, which has been suffering since losing the paper mill, which employed more than 1,000 people before it closed in 2023. But he faces stiff opposition across the state.
Maine Conservation Voters and another environmental group, the Natural Resources Council of Maine, agreed with Pingree about putting safeguards in place first to safeguard the health and environment of communities considering data centers.
McDonald said his project is different from the very large data centers in other states where residents complain of high water and electricity use. His proposed data center would use power generated on site and not use water except for the initial inflow into the system, which would then operate in a closed loop to keep the facility cool, much like a car radiator, he said in a Tuesday interview.
JGT2 submitted two permit applications to Maine’s regulatory Department of Environmental Protection on Monday to move forward with the data center project, a development first reported by the BDN. The project was on hold since Mills vetoed the temporary ban, causing the data center partners, Sentinel Data Centers, to pause it because their customers were worried about the negative environment for data centers in Maine.
Even with the pause, McDonald said JGT2 and Sentinel never stopped working to move the data center ahead. Sentinel initially put the project on hold because its customers got nervous after the pushback, but the company has since signed on a new customer for the data center.
It uses a new concept known as “neo compute,” which allows for 100 or more smaller customers to use the data center rather than just one large one, such as an Amazon or Microsoft. McDonald said having a group of smaller users might relieve some of the concern about the huge AI data centers elsewhere in the country.
The partners also redesigned the proposed data center to use less water. The initial plan called for using 300,000 gallons per day to cool the computers, which McDonald said was about 1% of the water used by the paper mill. Now the system only uses 260,000 gallons of water and reuses it constantly. The first fill likely will come from the Jay Water District, not the Androscoggin River, as some residents had worried, he said.
One permit application is for an amendment to the existing permit formerly held by the paper mill that would allow the property to be used as a data center, he said. It would cover the mill and the 93 adjacent residential properties that the former mill owners purchased over the years. The second application is related to air emissions caused by two newly proposed diesel backup generators.
A public meeting is scheduled for Dec. 10 at the mill site to discuss the project’s impact on water resources, energy prices and the local economy.
Lori Valigra reports on the environment for the BDN’s Maine Focus investigative team. Email her at lvaligra@bangordailynews.com. Support for this reporting is provided by the Unity Foundation, a fund at the Maine Community Foundation and donations by BDN readers.