A 340-Megawatt Data Campus Asks Port Meridian for Twelve Years of Tax Relief
Northline wants the old Kestrel Works parcel. The Channel Flats wants to know what happens to the substation, the aquifer, and the bill.
Northline Data Partners has asked Port Meridian to rezone the 41-acre Kestrel Works parcel on the channel flats for a computing campus that would draw 180 megawatts at first phase and up to 340 megawatts at full build — more electricity than every other private customer inside city limits combined.
The application, filed July 9 and heard for the first time by the planning commission on August 18, also seeks a twelve-year property tax abatement valued by the city assessor at $61.4 million. The commission voted 4-3 to continue the hearing to September 15 rather than forward a recommendation, with chair Delphine Roux casting the deciding vote and saying plainly that she was not ready to vote on a load figure she had received eleven days earlier.
The parcel has been vacant since the Kestrel foundry closed in 2004. It is flat, already zoned heavy industrial for most of its footprint, sits 900 feet from a transmission corridor, and abuts 340 households on Marrow Street and Lowline Avenue — the lowest, hottest, and least green blocks in the city, according to last summer’s volunteer heat sensor grid.
## The load question
Port Meridian’s peak demand last August was 611 megawatts. Northline’s full build would represent a 55 percent increase over that peak from a single customer.
Coastal Power and Light says the first phase can be served with an upgrade to the Marrow Street substation and reconductoring of two 115-kilovolt spans, work the utility puts at $88 million and 31 months. Phase two would require a new substation and, in the utility’s own filing, “generation or firm import capacity not currently committed to this service territory.”
That sentence is the fight. Ratepayer advocate Imani Roskoe of the Coast Consumers Alliance told the commission that the abatement and the interconnection cost point the same direction. “The company is asking to not pay for twelve years, and the wires it needs get paid for by everyone in a rate case,” she said. “Those two things have to be argued in the same room, and right now they are in two buildings four blocks apart.”
Northline’s regional development director, Peter Anselm, said the company will sign a load-ramp agreement that ties construction of phase two to demonstrated generation, and has offered a $40 million contribution toward the substation work. He would not commit to covering the full $88 million. “We pay our interconnection cost of service like any customer,” he said. “We are not going to pretend a substation this city has deferred since 2011 is our project alone.”
The engineer’s word for the aquifer report was “adequate,” and she said it twice, both times slowly.
## Water, and the two numbers
Northline’s application states the campus will use closed-loop liquid cooling and consume roughly 14 million gallons a year — about what 130 households use. Opponents have fixed on a second number in Appendix D: a dry-cooler bypass mode, available on days above 96 degrees, that would run evaporative and draw up to 310,000 gallons a day.
Port Meridian saw eleven such days last summer and nine the summer before.
City water resources engineer Nadia Ostrom said the flats draw from the shallow Lowline aquifer, which already shows chloride intrusion at two monitoring wells. Asked at the hearing whether the aquifer could support the bypass mode, she said the submitted hydrology report was adequate for phase one and did not model phase two at all. Roux asked her to repeat the answer. She did.
Anselm said the bypass is an emergency provision that the company expects to use “a handful of hours a year, if that,” and offered to accept a permit condition capping annual bypass withdrawal. He proposed 6 million gallons. Ostrom’s office has asked for 2 million and metering reported monthly rather than annually.
## The neighborhood, and the case against it
The Marrow Street Neighbors Association turned out 90 people to the August 18 hearing, most of them focused on the substation site, the generator testing schedule, and the abatement.
Association president Corliss Vane, who has lived on Lowline since 1988, walked the commission through a photograph of her block taken at 7 p.m. last July, when the volunteer sensor on her porch eaves read 8.4 degrees above the airport station. “You are proposing to put 340 megawatts of waste heat on the block with no trees,” she said. “Every study this city has done says we are the hot spot. Then this shows up, and the pitch is that it is good for us.”
Northline’s diesel backup fleet — 42 generators at full build, tested monthly — drew nearly as much comment. The company has offered to move testing to weekday mornings and to fund a tree canopy program on the flats at $250,000 a year for the abatement term.
The serious counter-argument came from someone the neighbors expected to be an opponent. Odell Fry, business manager of the Harbor Building Trades Council, testified in favor and did not soften the trade-off. He put construction at 1,100 workers at peak over four years and permanent staffing at 85 to 110 — a ratio he acknowledged is bad on its face.
“Everybody in this room knows the permanent number is small,” Fry said. “Here is what I also know. The Marrow substation is failing. It has been on the deferred list through three mayors because nobody could justify the capital against 340 houses. This project justifies it. If you kill this, the flats do not get a quieter block — the flats get the same substation, ten more years, and no canopy money either.” He asked the commission to condition the abatement on the substation, not to reject it.
Roskoe’s response was that the city could simply build the substation. Fry’s response to that was to ask which of the current council’s members had proposed it, and to wait for an answer that did not come.
## What happens on September 15
Staff will return with three things: a phase-two hydrology model, a memo from the city attorney on whether the abatement can be legally structured to claw back on a missed employment floor, and a comparison of Northline’s offer against the two abatements the city granted in 2019 and 2022.
Neither of those earlier recipients hit their stated job numbers. One paid nothing back, because the agreement did not require it. Assessor Ruth Beaumont has been asked to bring both files.
Roux ended the hearing by asking Anselm one question and holding the microphone until he answered it: whether Northline would proceed at the Kestrel parcel with a six-year abatement instead of twelve. He said he would take it to his board. She wrote the date on her copy of the agenda and circled it.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s technology desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com