North Coventry residents and leaders reject data center plan — before it was even formally submitted

The developer of a “boutique data center” will look elsewhere after public outcry and a preemptive board of supervisors vote showed no appetite for the facility in North Coventry Township.

The data center, informally proposed by Envision Land Use, would have been situated adjacent to Route 100 at 299 W. Schuylkill Road, in an industrial lot sitting near a Peco utility substation and a residential development.

But swift and early public discontent — and the township’s leadership— stopped the data center before a formal application was even submitted to the municipality.

The township’s board of supervisors voted 3-2 Monday that they would reject a proposal for the site eyed by Envision Land Use, said Erica Batdorf, the township’s manager. It was the first data center to be proposed in North Coventry.

The board’s chairman did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment.

Though the developer could still formally submit its plans, it will scrap them for the municipality, said Envision Land Use’s Reiss Rosenthal.

“[With] this much public pushback, we just thought at this time it didn’t make sense to try to go forward with this,” he said.

On Monday, the crowd of roughly 100 residents booed when the supervisors discussed pushing back the vote to a subsequent meeting, Rosenthal said.

The vote follows a growing public pushback of data centers in the region, particularly in Chester County. Last week, East Vincent’s planning commission told the township’s board of supervisors they should reject a massive data center project there after months of tense public meetings. A proposed project in East Whiteland also saw backlash from residents last month after it sought to expand the footprint of its project.

Though roughly 38% of Pennsylvanians support data centers being built in the commonwealth, residents are less likely to support data centers in their own backyards, according to a December survey, even as Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro seeks to entice such projects to Pennsylvania by cutting some regulations. There are more than 150 data centers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.urvey

Data centers are buildings or campuses that handle cloud-storage and computing needs of massive corporations, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Meta.

And while those kinds of corporations are eyeing setting up shop in Pennsylvania, at about 17 acres the North Coventry project would have been smaller than its proposed counterparts in other pockets of Chester County, the developer said. These smaller centers have been around for longer than the ones making recent headlines, Rosenthal said.

The proposed site would have been a 120,000 square-foot three-story building, making it relatively small compared with the sprawling plans in East Vincent and East Whiteland, which would both exceed 1 million square feet.

Plans for the site say it would have preserved and added trees, and its proximity to the Peco station would have required minimal additional power supply.

The proposed project would have been within the township’s residential zoning district that has an industrial overlay. It would have had six full-time employees.

“We were kind of surprised that this ended in a vote already,” Rosenthal said. “We thought it was possibly going to be a little bit more down the line, after we were able to meet with the neighbors as well as show our hands on what we were actually planning on doing.”