Commission expands Port data center work hours

The Port Washington Plan Commission last week extended the hours construction will be allowed during the more-than-three year Vantage Data Center project to 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, despite the fact Vantage had already agreed to a shorter work day.

The hours are a change from the 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. originally agreed to by Vantage and city staff members, a suggestion made by Mayor Ted Neitzke.

“I was actually concerned that 7 to 7 was restrictive,” Neitzke said, adding he believes that’s especially true since there are no neighbors nearby.

The extended hours would give Vantage flexibility, especially as the seasons change and daylight hours vary, he said.

Commission member Roger Strohm, the city engineer, said he is also comfortable with the extended hours, noting that farming activities start even earlier in the day.

The extended hours are fine, Strohm told Vantage representatives at the meeting, “As long as you recognize that if we start hearing a lot of complaints, we’re going to come back and say, ‘Hey, we have to dial this back.’”

Work hours, Strohm said, are times when machinery is moving on the site, not when it starts up.

Christopher Welch, Vantage Data Center’s director of preconstruction for North America, told the commission the company welcomes the change, noting it will allow Vantage to stagger some work times.

Construction is expected to begin this year and be completed in the first half of 2029.

The change came as the commission reviewed and approved a site and operations plan for the data center campus, which will consist of four data center buildings totaling approximately 2.5 million square feet on 672 acres north of Highland Drive and south of Lake Drive between I-43 and the Ozaukee Interurban Trail on the city’s north side.

The two largest data center buildings, each about 719,000 square feet, would be built on the south and east sides of the property.

The two smaller buildings, each about 560,000 square feet, would be built on the north and northwest sides of the property, creating a triangular campus.

Each of the buildings would have a dedicated parking lot with between 150 and 200 stalls, as well as generators, transformers, utility buildings and mechanical dry chillers. 

One change from the site plan originally recommended by the Design Review Board is that the 6,500-square-foot operations center will be moved farther to the north, off Lake Drive, Bob Harris, the city’s director of planning and development, said.

The data center buildings will be 24 feet tall, with acoustic panels above them reaching to 43 feet.

The utility buildings will be 35 feet tall, while the dry coolers will be about 65 feet.

The site will be surrounded by a landscaped eight-foot-tall berm, and 2,143 trees are expected to be planted on the site. A 12-foot-high security fence will surround the campus.

The lighting is designed so it will not “leak into the night sky,” Harris said, adding there won’t be lighting near the borders of the campus except near the entrances.

Emily Backus, Vantage’s sustainability director, told the commission that the layout was created to both meet the end user’s needs and to minimize impacts on the wetlands in the area.

She said the campus will be “highly water efficient” with a closed loop cooling system. 

The campus will use 1.3 gigawatts of power and an average of 22,000 gallons of water a day, although the city has agreed to provide as much as 1.2 million gallons a day if needed, officials said. The water will be purchased from the City of Port, not taken directly from Lake Michigan.

Vantage is paying to generate the electricity for its campus, Backus noted, much of it from clean energy sources.

The campus will have diesel backup generators, and Welch said they run “fairly infrequently.”

In addition to approving the site and building plan, the Plan Commission also recommended that the Common Council annex another 393 acres of land for the data center and rezone it for a data center campus.