Brunswick council weighs 180-day moratorium on large data centers

Brunswick officials are preparing a 180-day brake on large data centers, and they have already widened the draft so it would cover any project with electrical capacity of 1 megawatt or more. The Town Council set a public hearing for June 1 on the moratorium, a step that would give the town six months to gather information and rewrite local rules before a major proposal comes forward.

The change in the draft is significant. Councilors initially tied the policy to facilities of at least 10,000 square feet or 20 megawatts, but they removed that language and replaced it with a lower power threshold. That broader definition would sweep in a wider range of projects and give Brunswick more flexibility to regulate the industry before developers lock in a site, a utility load and a buildout plan.

Town Manager Julia Henze said Brunswick has no data center proposals currently on the horizon, but town leaders want the rules in place before that changes. The concern is not only whether a project would fit existing zoning, but also what it could mean for utility demand, water use, industrial land use and the scale of development allowed near neighborhoods and business districts. For a town already balancing growth pressures at Brunswick Landing and elsewhere, the question is how much infrastructure a future data center could consume and what kind of return it would bring.

Brunswick already hosts a smaller FirstLight data center at Brunswick Landing, and town leaders say it has not created problems. In February 2025, FirstLight said that facility had completed a major expansion, adding more floor space, more power capacity, redundant generators and UPS units. The company described the site as a 2N facility with fully redundant electrical feeds and said its power came entirely from renewable energy.

The local move comes as Maine communities and state officials wrestle with the pace of data center growth. Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a statewide moratorium bill on April 24, saying she supported a pause in principle but would have signed it if lawmakers had carved out an exemption for a project already underway in Jay. The Legislature failed to override that veto on April 29. Since then, at least four Maine municipalities have proposed their own moratoriums, including Sanford, which enacted a 91-day pause on May 20 over a proposed 1,000-acre project along the Mousam River, and Westbrook, which advanced a 180-day pause of its own.

The broader fight has centered on how much strain large facilities could place on the electric grid, electricity prices, the environment and water resources. With the June 1 hearing now set, Brunswick is deciding whether to buy itself time before the next data center proposal arrives, or to leave those questions to be answered after a developer is already at the door.