At a meeting Tuesday night, the Spanish Fork City Council worked to establish requirements for data centers and other facilities that generate their own electricity by amending Title 15 of the municipal code, which currently does not allow facilities to generate their own power.

After a six-hour meeting that stretched past midnight, a motion to vote on revisions to the Title 15 municipal amendments was tabled until Sept. 1, giving the council and city staff more time to set guidelines.

“In essence, what they decided to do in not voting in the last meeting was to say either way, we need to take a harder look at and further adjust Title 15 because it will then address any data center in the future that applies,” Spanish Fork spokesman Jack Urquhart said.

The current proposed amendments to Title 15 would cap a data center at 500 megawatts, require closed-loop, air-cooled or dry cooling systems to limit water use,  isolation from the electrical grid and regulations for noise and emissions, among other rules.

“Today we’re talking about setting the rules, the limitations — if something like this was to go in here — the guardrails that would apply,” Councilman Shane Marshall said. “We’re not approving a site plan. We’re not approving a data center anywhere. We’re saying here are the rules.”

Jeff Chavez, CEO of Volition, said his company focuses on different ways to generate power because it is concerned about data centers’ impact on the grid.

The data center, proposed for an existing warehouse at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon, would generate approximately 250 megawatts using onsite power generation and be cooled by a closed-loop water system using  500,000 gallons for the initial fill and 250,000 gallons annually to create humidity in the system, while producing low emissions, according to Chavez.

He claimed the facility would have an on-site value of more than $4 billion, a value that would generate at least $40 million in annual tax revenue distributed to various taxing entities.

The proposal received pushback from residents, who spoke against the proposal during a multihour public comment period.

“I think the No. 1 thing is what the people of Spanish Fork want, and from people I’ve talked to, and the turnout tonight, I’d say the majority of us do not want the data center here,” one woman said. “When they say close to no emission to the air quality, I just want none. I want to keep the air as clean as possible here.”

Another person added: “If everything (Volition) says is true, it eases a lot of my concerns. But when this company eventually gets bought out by whatever mega conglomerates … do we have the proper hard-lined bylaws and city codes to ensure that they can’t with their army of lawyers completely override all the good stuff Volition may have done and essentially screw the community over?”