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Philadelphia's moratorium campaign beat the first data center proposal to City Hall
Philadelphia has named two candidate data center sites, one of them in the Grays Ferry neighborhood that lived next to the East Coast's largest oil refinery, and residents there are already at City Hall asking for a moratorium.
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What happened
- Philadelphia officials have identified two potential data center sites, one in Northeast Philadelphia and one in Grays Ferry, and no developer has filed a formal construction proposal for either.
- Shawmar Pitts, who grew up next to the refinery that closed after a 2019 explosion, is now managing co-director of Philly Thrive and among those pushing for a citywide data center moratorium.
- New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order that temporarily stops the state from approving new permits for large projects.
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Why it matters
- constraint A siting schedule that puts community engagement after site selection has to absorb opposition that is already staffed and organized at the shortlist stage, before there is an application to negotiate over.
- decision A developer looking at Philadelphia is choosing between two named sites, and one of them comes with a moratorium campaign run by people who spent seven years fighting a refinery.
- exposure Diesel backup generators become the most attackable item in a Pennsylvania permit file, because the state has already told operators to run them instead of pulling from a stressed grid during heat waves.
- precedent New York shows the approval path can be frozen from the top, so a state-level permit pause belongs in the risk register next to local zoning.
Shawmar Pitts stopped at a folding table in his own neighborhood in 2018. Philly Thrive had set it up to hand out information about a proposed expansion of the oil refinery he had lived beside his whole life [2][3].
"I read the information they had on the table about how living near the refinery affects you, and I'm looking at all the sicknesses on this paper, and I'm like, 'My mother has this, my sister has that, my next-door neighbor suffers from this'," Pitts told TechCrunch [4].
He is now the managing co-director of that group and among the people asking Philadelphia for a data center moratorium [5]. Community engagement usually appears in the plan after site selection, as an outreach line item with a budget. In Philadelphia the city named two candidate sites, one of them in Grays Ferry, and residents held a rally at City Hall before any developer filed an application to comment on [1][6][11].
Half the city's named shortlist sits in the neighborhood with the organized campaign against it [12]. Philly Thrive board president Sonya Sanders put the jobs pitch aside at that rally: "We don't want data centers," she said. "We don't want the pollution, we don't want the noise, and we know they're not going to bring us more jobs" [7].
The numbers the campaign is arguing against keep moving in one direction. BloombergNEF projects that by 2035 US data centers will consume more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined, almost double the projection the firm published nine months earlier [8]. Added data center demand is expected to produce an extra 1 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution a day, about 12 percent of present-day US emissions [9], which works out to roughly 365 million metric tons a year [13].
The part that lands in a hearing is smaller and more specific. Clean Air Council attorney Annie Fox said at the rally that "a typical data center planned in Pennsylvania has hundreds of diesel engines that spew air pollution, and even if they're supposedly reserved for emergencies, the government has already said that the data center should use those rather than drawing from an overstressed electrical grid during some heat waves" [10].
Nothing has been proposed in Philadelphia yet, so no data center there has been rejected [6]. The record here is opposition assembled at the shortlist stage, alongside New York, where Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order temporarily preventing the state from approving new permits for large projects [11]. TechCrunch reports the industry's jobs-and-growth pitch has not won over a majority of Americans, who oppose data center construction in their area, often over environmental and energy concerns [1].
Two facts about a candidate site are public before any engineering money is spent. One is whether the neighborhood already hosted a facility residents blame for their families' illnesses. The other is whether a staffed organization there is already carrying that history into City Hall. Grays Ferry answers yes to both. The refinery that shut down after a 2019 explosion processed up to 335,000 barrels of crude oil a day, and the group that tabled about it in 2018 now has a board president telling a rally that pollution killed her husband [2][14][15].
What to watch
- Whether Philadelphia officials act on the moratorium Philly Thrive is asking for, and whether it covers both identified sites.
- A formal application at either site would put this fight on a hearing record for the first time.
- How long New York's temporary pause on large-project permits runs, and whether other governors sign similar orders.