Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven new data center laws Sept. 21, including requirements for reporting on water and electricity use. Logo courtesy of the City of Dixon

DIXON, CA (MPG) – The Dixon City Council voted unanimously Wednesday night, Sept. 30 to implement a 45-day ban on data centers and battery energy storage systems during a special meeting.

The moratorium gives the city time to study potential impacts involving water and energy use, along with the effect of noise and emissions, connected with data centers and battery energy storage systems. 

City Council is expected to come back within 45 days and vote on extending the moratorium, officials said during the meeting.

“I’m really not for or against at this point, but I think it’s very obvious that our citizens want to know what’s going on,” Vice Mayor Jim Ernest said. “They don’t want to be surprised by some project moving into town when they didn’t even know what could happen,”

The move comes as data centers have become a growing topic of discussion across the state and nation. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven new data center laws Sept. 21, including requirements for reporting on water and electricity use.

The vote came on the same day that a bill aimed at guarding Americans from energy costs attributed to data centers was blocked in the U.S. Senate. 

Called the Ratepayer Protection Act, it seeks to put the costs of new energy infrastructure used for data centers on companies, rather than companies passing costs on to consumers. But it would only require state utility regulators to consider standards to hold companies responsible for the costs rather than making it mandatory.

“There are a lot of questions that we just don’t have answers to, which is what we would try to address during the moratorium,” said Councilmember Thom Bogue.

Dixon has not received an application for either a data center or battery energy storage system project, Ernest said.

“I think the transparency here is what we’re looking for, to get ahead of this, to get a planning process in place so that when what eventually does come, and surely it will, that we’re ready for it," Ernest said.

Data centers, which can vary in size and purpose, are physical structures that run large numbers of computers securely and continuously. Battery energy storage systems, also called BESS, store energy for later use with the idea of boosting grid reliability and supporting renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. 

Eric Shor of Dixon said he’s familiar with the technology employed in data centers and supports the temporary ban.

“If you were asking me as an evil data center bully where I wanted to build, Dixon would be ideal,” he said. “Big companies are targeting small towns because they believe they can push people around.”

The special meeting was prompted by recent city council discussions regarding Dixon’s regulations and ability to manage these specific types of development, as well as a noticeable statewide increase in the development of data centers and battery energy storage system facilities. 

This includes the Corby Battery Energy Storage System proposed by NextEra Energy near the intersection of Kilkenny Road and Byrnes Road in Solano County, just west of Dixon, and the Vaca Dixon Power Center project in Vacaville.

The Dixon Municipal Code does not identify data centers as a permitted use. When a proposed use is not defined, the community development director must classify it as a use substantially similar in character to a listed use. 

Absent data-center-specific regulations, Dixon faces uncertainty in processing, entitling and conditioning a proposed data center. 

An applicant could, for example, seek to classify a data center as similar to a utility or telecommunication facility, whose standards were not designed to address the electricity, water, noise and infrastructure impacts of large-scale data centers.