The City of Springfield has been engaging with the public on concerns over data centers and potential city policy regulating their construction. City Utilities has been a part of those conversations.
Amy Derdall is Chief Financial & Supply Chain Officer for CU. She says they’ve been preparing a large load taskforce to review the power needs of any large consumers. Those are potential customers needing 5-megawatts or more of power at any given moment. That's equivalent to about 4,500 homes. A hyperscale data center has a minimum 40-megawatt capacity.
They are also looking to ensure that those consumers bear the cost of any new infrastructure to connect them to the city’s grid, and they're developing a special rate for what she describes as computational use.
“So, if you had a new customer, it could be a data center, it could be a crypto mining type customer that are doing mostly computing that new rate would most likely apply to them. And when I say most likely we're still working, we're still working through that.”
She says it's natural for customers to be concerned about change but emphasized that CU’s goal is to make sure its taking care of its current customers.
“The objective of creating these new rates for consideration by our board and by City Council and these contracts, is really making sure that we are assigning any incremental costs to that new large customer.”
CU’s built a webpage to address frequently asked questions on data centers, you can find it at cityutilities.net
The City of Springfield is still collecting feedback on data centers on their website, find that at springfieldmo.gov/datacenters