Joel EngelhardtPalm Beach County Zoning Commission approves plans to allow nearly 1.8 million square feet of data storage on Southern Boulevard despite Arden’s objections.
A proposal to build the first hyperscale data storage center in Palm Beach County, nicknamed Project Tango, passed the county’s Zoning Commission Thursday despite objections over noise and other concerns from neighbors.
The center would cover about 1.8 million square feet, nearly twice the size of twin office towers proposed in CityPlace.
It would be built west of the Arden development next to the Palm Beach Aggregates rock pits at 20-Mile Bend, the point about halfway along Southern Boulevard between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Okeechobee.
The 202-acre site is just east of Florida Power & Light’s West County Energy Center, a natural gas-fueled plant that can produce 3,750 megawatts of power, enough to serve 750,000 homes.
The proposal is on a fast track after the county’s Business Development Board brought a potential tenant to the owners, who had first gotten approval for data storage on the vacant site in 2016.
State law allows the potential end-user’s identity to be shielded from public records to improve the state’s competitive edge, thus the code name, Project Tango.
The owners have not identified the end-user but the biggest tech companies racing to build data storage facilities across the country to meet the demand for artificial intelligence computing are Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
The move comes after the St. Lucie County Planning and Zoning Commission voted 4-2 on Oct. 16 to reject Sentinel Grove, a 15 million-square-foot data center proposed about 50 miles north of Southern Boulevard in rural St. Lucie County. Afterward, the owner withdrew the $13.5 billion proposal, Treasure Coast Newspapers reported.
While the power needs of hyperscale data storage facilities, which consist of racks of computer serversthat consume vast amounts of electricity to perform trillions of calculations per second, are a growing public concern, the amount of power this facility would require has not been made public.
The developer said it has a binding power service agreement with FPL that would have “strict timelines to develop the required substations and AI use needed to accept the power, and to begin utilizing the power.”
The changes approved 7-2 Thursday in Palm Beach County increase the square footage allowed for data storage at the Aggregates’ site by about ninefold. The board voted 8-1 to extend a parking variance over the entire site to sharply limit the number of spaces that must be built.
In an unusually swift move, the proposal will appear in less than a week before the Palm Beach County Commission, sitting as the Zoning Board. It is scheduled for a hearing Wednesday.
Editor’s note: The commission voted 7-0 on Dec. 10 to postpone the hearing until April 23.
Click here to read Stet’s coverage of the Dec. 10 meeting.
AI says stay away
To residents of Arden, a 2,300-home community built on land once owned by Palm Beach Aggregates, the center would be too close to their homes and the new Saddle View Elementary School, which opened in August.
A dozen Arden residents addressed the Zoning Commission, saying they already hear noise from the nearby power plant and are worried that nearly a 1,200-foot buffer of berms, canals and landscaping would not be enough to insulate them from the constant sound of air-handlers cooling 11 buildings full of computers.
“If you actually ask AI if it’s good to live next to a data center it will tell you absolutely no,” Arden resident Janice Ridenour said.
“A project of this magnitude, essentially an industrial power- and water-intensive campus, does not belong next to thousands of families who moved to Loxahatchee specifically for peace, open land, clean air and a healthier environment for our children,” resident Avi Baecht said.
“A hyperscale data center is not a commercial building,” she said. “It’s a 24-7 industrial operation with constant noise from cooling systems, massive HVAC stacks, vibration, security lighting and weekly diesel generator testing. No amount of landscaping can hide the industrial reality of a facility of this size.”
Ben Brown, an Arden resident running for the first resident-controlled homeowners association board, said he only learned of the proposal four days ago. Others said they had no idea a much smaller data center had been approved as long ago as 2016.
The developer’s representative, Ernie Cox, said he would work with the residents to find solutions to noise issues and invited them to meet with him on the site. He agreed to consider more landscaping, building placement to deflect noise and noise walls.
The approval is conditioned on the developer conducting noise studies before it would be allowed to proceed with construction.
“We don’t want to have a noise impact on our neighbors next door,” Cox said, pointing out that he had played a role in winning county approvals for the development that became Arden, which opened in 2017.
The property’s owners, PBA Holdings, have turned thousands of acres of rock pits into a lucrative water storage business. The ownership group includes Palm Beach Aggregates founders Enrique Tomeu and Michael Klein and executives with the Phillips Cos. of Knoxville, Tenn.
They’ve teamed with WPB Logistics Owner LLC, which is made up of executives from Atlanta-based TPA Group, and is committed to building warehouse space alongside the data center. They’re calling it the Central Park Commerce Center.
Warehouses, with trucks frequently coming and going, have much more traffic than data centers, Cox pointed out.
How big is it?
The proposal calls for about the same amount of warehouse space as previously approved, 1.9 million square feet, but raises the amount of space devoted to data storage, from 206,000 square feet to 1.79 million square feet, with plans for at least 11 data center buildings up to 75-feet tall.
The first of four phases is devoted to building a 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse, with three 119,000-square-foot data center buildings in Phase 2.
Phase 3 calls for eight more data center buildings, each at 143,772 square feet.
By Phase 4, the developer would have 700,000 square feet of warehouse space remaining and 284,620 square feet for data storage.
The variance granted Thursday would reduce the number of required parking spaces to 896 from 7,168.
The developer based its calculation of parking needs on the Equinix Data Center in El Segundo, Calif., because Palm Beach County does not have a parking standard for a data center.
“A building full of computers doesn’t need very many parking spaces,” Cox said.
Asked by Zoning Commissioner Lori Vinikoor what would happen if the board refused to grant the parking variance, Cox said rather than reduce the development to build surface parking lots, the developer would erect massive parking garages and “have 6,000 empty spaces in a parking garage.”
To concerns about excessive water demand, Cox said the developer is weighing cooling options that don’t require any extra water. Even if water is needed for cooling, it would be limited to reused sewage water, already piped to the site to cool the FPL energy center.
The site is ideal for a data center, Cox said in an interview with Stet, because it’s next to a power plant, outside all flood zones, on elevated land with appropriate zoning.
“A lot of people are working on these (centers) but this is one of, if not the best, site for a data center,” Cox said.
Click here to watch the Zoning Commission meeting.
Joel is a founder, reporter and editor at Stet News. His award-winning newspaper career spanned more than 40 years, including 28 years at The Palm Beach Post, which he left in 2020. Joel lives with his wife in Palm Beach Gardens. He volunteers on the board of NAMI Palm Beach County and the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society.
