ROCHELLE — The City of Rochelle hopes to see a data center development within the city limits in coming years, City Manager Jeff Fiegenschuh said Dec. 18.
A data center is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. DeKalb recently saw the addition of a 2.3 million square feet, over $1 billion Meta (Facebook) data center. Land near the Byron Nuclear Plant was also recently rezoned to industrial use with eyes on a data center development. The City of Rochelle could be another site of a data center in the future, Fiegenschuh said.
“We are working on a development agreement with some folks for a potential data center now,” Fiegenschuh said. “We're going back and forth on the language of the agreement. I do think we have the potential within the next year to have an agreement signed to begin moving forward with the process of bringing a data center to town. It takes infrastructure to attract something like that. We didn't recruit these developers. They're coming to us.”
The City of Rochelle owns its own electric utility in Rochelle Municipal Utilities. RMU Superintendent of Electric Operations Blake Toliver said serving a data center would “significantly increase” RMU’s power distribution and consumption. It would have to go into the market and purchase more power, but selling more energy would mean more revenue to go back into RMU infrastructure improvements.
Fiegenschuh said the city’s ability to come to an agreement with a data center to locate in Rochelle would depend on the project’s size. RMU’s current distribution only would allow so much new load. The city manager said RMU could serve a data center up to 100 or 150 megawatts in the next few years. Some developers have inquired with the city asking for much more power than that.
The addition of a larger data center would require ComEd to upsize its transmission lines into the community, which could take years.
“Data centers now aren't just about storing Facebook,” Fiegenschuh said. “They're about things like cryptocurrency mining and artificial intelligence. They're using more and more power. Some data centers are looking at on-site generation like small modular nuclear. We'd love to have data centers here. We get calls all the time about it. But at the end of the day, it's about whether we have the infrastructure in place to serve this type of load. If Rochelle got one, it would be smaller and stair step over time up to a larger one.”
Toliver said bringing a smaller data center in soon would not be a hard feat for RMU because it currently has energy available. Due to power needs, some developers of larger data centers are building as close to power sources as possible.
With industrial electric load growth in mind, the city is currently in the easement acquisition phase of a new electrical substation project on the west side of town on Illinois Route 38. The project will include 10 miles of transmission line between the new substation and others at Ritchie Road and Twombly Road. The project will cost north of $20 million.
Toliver said the completion of the substation and power purchases would have to take place to make a data center happen. He said for a data center with a 50 megawatt need, RMU could be ready to service it within three years. Something like a 150 megawatt facility would require a transmission upgrade and could take 4-5 years.
“That's because we have to communicate with ComEd and do another interconnection into the bulk electric system,” Toliver said. “Those things take time and have a lot of moving parts. If a data center moved in here with an under 50 megawatt expectation, we could start work on that tomorrow because we have the power available in our territory to do that.”
If the city were to come to an agreement with a data center to come to Rochelle, that agreement would include guarantees to financially back up the large purchases of power the city would make to supply one.
A data center would also be a customer of RMU’s other utilities. Toliver and Fiegenschuh said data centers are large users of water and fiber. That would yield increases to RMU’s utility revenues overall. The city transfers 5.5 percent of its revenues from utilities to supplement its general fund, which helps it to do things like hire police officers, firefighters, and public works employees.
“A data center would be beneficial to RMU and the city as a whole,” Fiegenschuh said. “It would generate property taxes which help support our school system. Any economic development is good, but a place like a data center really does offer a huge economic opportunity and benefit to the city and other taxing districts. I think the best approach for the city and RMU if we're willing to hear offers from data centers would be to start small and work our way up. What I'd like about a data center is I'd love to be one of the largest utilities in the state of Illinois.”
