HONEY BROOK TWP, PA — Honey Brook Township supervisors will consider opening the township’s Business Industrial District to data centers and battery energy-storage systems on Oct. 14 while imposing extensive restrictions on their power, water, noise, and public-safety impacts.
The Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing at 7 p.m. at the Honey Brook Township Building, 500 Suplee Road, followed by a meeting at which supervisors may enact the zoning amendment. The proposal has not been adopted.
The draft would permit data centers and battery energy storage systems, or BESS, only as conditional uses in the Business Industrial District. Hyperscale data centers — defined in the proposal as facilities exceeding 75,000 square feet or 25 megawatts of power capacity — would be excluded from the permitted data-center use.
The ordinance would represent a significant expansion of the township’s zoning rules for infrastructure-intensive development. It describes data centers as potentially imposing noise, vibration, water, environmental, and utility burdens while stating that the township intends to accommodate appropriately designed facilities rather than prohibit the use outright.
Data centers would be prohibited outside the Business Industrial District and would require conditional-use approval from supervisors following a public hearing. Facilities primarily devoted to high-density digital processing, including cryptocurrency mining and artificial-intelligence model training, would be subject to the data-center standards.
The proposal would generally require a minimum 25-acre site and establish a 35-foot maximum building height. Buildings and major equipment would have to be at least 750 feet from sensitive uses such as homes, schools, day care facilities, hospitals, places of worship, parks and playgrounds.
Smaller facilities of no more than 5,000 square feet or 2 megawatts could qualify for a minimum five-acre site and reduced setback requirements while remaining subject to the ordinance’s other performance standards.
Water use would also be tightly constrained. The draft requires closed-loop air-cooled chillers or equivalent dry-cooling technology resulting in no net water consumption for cooling during standard operations, and prohibits once-through, evaporative and open-loop cooling systems. Private high-yield wells could not be used for cooling or humidification.
Applicants would have to obtain public water service and submit a hydrological analysis addressing peak demand and drought conditions. The developer would bear the full cost of public-water system improvements needed to serve a facility.
The ordinance similarly places the cost of necessary electrical infrastructure on the applicant. A developer would have to provide utility certification and an interconnection agreement showing that a proposed facility would not reduce electrical capacity or reliability for existing township customers, along with a grid-impact study identifying peak load and required upgrades.
Noise rules would generally prevent a data center from raising sound levels by more than 1 dBA above the pre-construction ambient level at the property line of a sensitive receptor. The proposal also establishes maximum 24-hour equivalent sound levels of 55 dBA during the day and 52 dBA at night at those property lines.
Facilities exceeding 2 megawatts would be subject to permanent real-time monitoring of noise, power consumption, and water use. Operators would also have to provide annual third-party compliance certifications, with monitoring data available to township officials.
Public-safety requirements would include an emergency response plan prepared by a fire-protection engineer and reviewed by township and local emergency officials. Applicants would have to identify gaps in specialized equipment or training available to emergency responders and propose measures to address those needs at the developer’s expense.
Battery energy storage would be treated separately from a data center. The ordinance expressly bars BESS installations as an accessory use to a data center, requiring them instead to obtain approval as a separate principal use.
Data-center applicants would also have to submit an Environmental and Community Impact Analysis covering traffic, natural resources, hazardous materials, emergency services, sewage, water, electrical infrastructure, visual effects, and potential impacts on neighboring residential property values.
The analysis would assess cumulative effects from existing, approved, or pending data centers, solar-energy facilities, or similar high-impact uses within five miles, including developments outside Honey Brook Township.
The proposed standards reflect the township’s stated concerns about the demands data centers can place on the electrical grid, water resources, and emergency services. The ordinance also explicitly states that its purpose is not to prohibit data centers but to allow them in the industrial district when applicants demonstrate compliance with the performance standards.
Residents and other interested parties may comment during the Oct. 14 hearing. Supervisors may consider enactment immediately afterward.
The township’s public hearing notice is available at https://www.honeybrooktwp.com/media/3481.
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