Alabama Town’s Residents Seek Preemptive Strike Against Massive Data Center Project

WILSONVILLE, Ala.—The people of Wilsonville aren’t about to let it happen to them, at least not without a fight. 

After seeing residents of nearby Bessemer, Alabama, get blindsided by a proposal for a massive data center, with little public disclosure and public officials silenced by non-disclosure agreements, Wilsonville residents sprang into action when word got out that a developer was looking to build a similar data center in their town. 

More than 100 Wilsonville residents packed the town hall for Monday night’s City Council meeting to voice their objections to the proposed “hyperscale” data center in the small, riverside community of fewer than 2,000 residents about 25 miles southeast of Birmingham. 

The 3 million square-foot data center project wasn’t on the agenda for Monday’s council meeting, but people showed up anyway, 50 of them carrying red signs that read “No Wilsonville Data Center.” There weren’t enough signs, or chairs, for everyone as the overflow crowd spilled out into the hallway. 

Former Wilsonville Mayor Lee McCarty, who was in the crowd among the protesters, said the project, if it proceeds, would be “extremely detrimental to the community.”

“A lot of people live in Wilsonville because they want the country repose,” McCarty said. “They don’t want gigantic power lines and water lines and traffic. They don’t want a Walmart, much less one of these.” 

Project planning documents obtained by Inside Climate News from a resident show the site would encompass 664 acres and contain 14 buildings, each 219,000 square feet, more than the size of a typical Walmart Supercenter. 

The residents say a data center that size would disrupt their peaceful community that includes multi-generational family farms and million-dollar waterfront homes on Lay Lake. 

“All I know is, the people selling this land and the people brokering the deal, that’s going to be their legacy, to potentially destroy a small town,” Wilsonville resident Renny Stanhope said after the meeting. 

The Wilsonville data center project is just one in a series of new data center proposals sweeping the country. 

In Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan, Iowa and elsewhere, data center projects are popping up, often in rural or low-income areas, leaving local residents to deal with noise pollution, air pollution, destruction of forest land and likely higher electricity costs due to massive demand. 

The Trump administration has announced plans to waive environmental rules and other regulations for data centers that might slow their development in the midst of an arms race for computing power to run AI systems.

Alabama Power, which will likely provide electricity for the Wilsonville project, has already gotten approval to buy an existing natural gas plant for $622 million, increasing customer bills in anticipation of higher loads from data centers. 

In Wilsonville, Monday’s council meeting lasted less than 15 minutes, including the opening prayer and Pledge of Allegiance. After some brief council business, Mayor Ricky Morris said that there were no updates on the project, and that any future rezoning or annexation requests for the project would be on the council agenda. 

“When we have something to discuss, it will be on the agenda,” Morris told the crowd. 

The data center proposal came to light during the council’s August 4 meeting, when a resident asked the council about the project on the outskirts of town. 

At that meeting, council members said they had been approached by representatives from NorthPoint Development, a Kansas City commercial real estate company involved in data center development, which  inquired about annexing parcels of land into the town for a data center project. The project location includes land within Wilsonville town limits and land in unincorporated Shelby County. Annexing the land would put the entire footprint under the control of Wilsonville instead of the county, for zoning purposes, documents show. 

Council members said Monday they have not yet received a formal application for annexation.

“We’ve had no other contact with them, they have not requested nothing,” Morris said. “So it’s just like it was last meeting.”

NorthPoint Development did not respond to requests for comment or to authenticate the document.

During a brief public comment period, residents pressed the council members for any updates on the project, and asked whether either they or the mayor would pledge not to sign non-disclosure agreements, which have become common in data center development across the country. The council members did not make such a pledge, with Morris saying they could not promise that for legal reasons. He did not elaborate and declined to answer additional questions from Inside Climate News after the meeting. 

Shelby County probate records show NorthPoint Development reached a two-year option on approximately 687 acres from Richard Cashio, a Birmingham steel industry magnate, on Feb. 27. The purchase price was not included in the document. Cashio did not immediately return messages seeking comment. 

The project would be located off of County Highway 61, alongside Lick Branch, a small Coosa River tributary. It would be located about 2.5 miles northwest of the Ernest C. Gaston Electric Generating Plant, a coal and natural gas-fired power plant operated by Alabama Power alongside the Coosa.

According to the feasibility plan, the projected peak power demand is 1,008 megawatts, more than half of the maximum output from the Gaston Plant, which is 1,880 megawatts, according to Alabama Power’s website. 

Running a 1008 MW data center 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, would use 8.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s about half as much as all of Alabama Power’s 1.3 million residential customers used in 2023, according to company filings with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. 

The Wilsonville data center would use about 20 percent less power than the proposed data center in Bessemer, which would use 1200 megawatts at peak. 

The plan also states that developers need to “verify volume of water available and capacity of wastewater treatment plant,” as well as “verify if the site is subject to air quality standards,” and “verify power source, location, substation size & location will be adjusted as needed.”

Coosa Riverkeeper Justinn Overton helped distribute signs at the meeting and share information on social media, and said the large turnout should send a message to the elected officials on the dais. 

“Although there was not a lot of information shared tonight, our purpose was to apply gentle pressure and let them know how many people are watching and listening,” she said. 

If the council approves the data center request, voter ire would take a while to reach them at the ballot box. According to a post on Wilsonville’s web site, the town will not host municipal elections this year, because the candidates for mayor and five council seats are all unopposed.