Lawmakers weigh temporary limitation and council as Sanford project proponents warn moratorium could halt investment

The Legislature's Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee held a lengthy work session on a sponsor amendment to LD 307 that would establish a Data Center Coordination Council, temporarily bar municipal or state issuance of permits or approvals for data centers with a load of 20 megawatts or more through July 1, 2028, and require the council to study and recommend standards and permitting protocols.

Sponsor Nicole Grohowski and Representative Melanie Sachs said the measure — which replaces the word "moratorium" with a targeted statutory provision described as a "temporary limitation" — is intended to create regulatory certainty and allow the state and municipalities time to develop consistent standards for environmental, grid, water and community impacts.

Proponents from Sanford presented their planned Sanford Woods Industrial and Technical Campus, a multi‑project campus that would include data centers, industrial greenhouse/controlled‑environment agriculture, cold storage and an on‑site power island. Developer Randy Gibbs said the land has been in his family for decades and that the project would leverage site advantages and partnerships. He said a data‑center development boom is highly time‑sensitive and warned, "This moratorium's passage will kill this deal," and the billions of dollars of investment it would bring.

Technical testimony from a power‑systems team described a plan for a self‑sufficient power island initially using natural gas‑fuelled fuel cells (the witnesses listed Bloom Energy modules as a likely vendor), scalable to hundreds of megawatts, with future transition possibilities to hydrogen. Witnesses asserted the microgrid approach could avoid rate impacts on other customers and deliver lower delivered energy costs to prospective tenants; they estimated a fuel‑cell deployment on the order of 300 MW in modular form and claimed rapid build timelines with equipment in production for other large deployments.

Committee members raised multiple follow‑up questions: whether the proposed campus already met any exemption language in the amendment (purchase or lease before the effective date), how utility interconnection and ISO processes would apply, whether on‑site generation would rely on natural gas in the near term and hydrogen later, the estimated water consumption (estimates ranged from 150,000 gallons/day for a 300‑MW data center to 300,000 gallons/day for the full campus), and what the legal and financing consequences would be if the temporary limitation were enacted.

Sanford Water District superintendent David Parent said the district has excess groundwater capacity relative to recent industrial declines and could serve additional load sustainably; the district's historical peak pumpage was around 2.7 million gallons per day and it currently pumps less due to industrial closures.

The committee asked proponents and agencies for a package of follow‑up materials — legal analysis of exemption language and ownership sequencing, engineering details on fuel‑cell and electrolyzer approaches, interconnection and ISO‑level analyses, water‑utility plans and firm financing timelines. Representative Foster moved to table the measure to allow the proponents and agencies to provide the requested information; the motion passed unanimously among members present.