The city of Leominster will hold a public hearing next month on a proposed one-year moratorium on data centers and battery energy storage facilities.
The hearing will take place at 6:15 p.m. Sept. 14 in the City Council chambers on 25 West St., according to a council agenda.
Leominster City Council President Claire M. Freda introduced petitions for the proposed moratoriums on data centers and battery storage sites. If approved, the moratoriums will last until July 31, 2027.
Data centers are facilities containing IT infrastructure that process, store and distribute digital data — often used to train and power artificial intelligence tools. Data centers also support cloud computing, video streaming, phone communications and financial transactions.
Battery storage facilities, meanwhile, are large-scale installations that store electricity and release it during periods of high demand, serving as a backup power source for an electrical grid.
The city should learn about the impacts of data centers and battery storage sites to prepare for hypothetical project proposals, Freda said during a phone interview on Monday. She said there are no current proposals for either type of project in Leominster but stressed the need for a thorough review.
“There are just so many unknowns about both of these that I think we need to have a moratorium,” Freda said. “It would stop everything for a year. Nobody would be able to apply.”
The council president said concerns about data centers and battery storage sites are similar, despite their different purposes.
Freda cited the risk of fires as a key concern about battery storage facilities.
A 2025 study from the American Clean Power Association found 35 large-scale battery storage system fires from 2012 to 2024. The study found that the most common contributors to these fires were design and integration failures at the storage site rather than the batteries themselves.
Freda also raised concerns about the significant water and electricity demands of data centers.
Data centers use water to cool their servers and, indirectly, also consume it to generate electricity, according to Bloomberg.
A 2025 report published by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, an independent nonprofit organization, found that large data centers can consume 5 million gallons of water per day, equivalent to the water use of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.
The MIT Energy Initiative found that data centers in the United States consumed more than 4% of the country’s total electricity in 2023. By 2030, that could rise to 9%.
“Those seem to be the two biggest issues and the strength behind these data centers that seem to be pushing their way into communities,” Freda said.
In 2026, Lowell became the first Massachusetts community to impose a data center moratorium. Other communities, such as Southbridge and Agawam, are also considering moratoriums on data center development. Fitchburg, which is next to Leominster, is considering its own data center moratorium, along with a pause on battery storage site development.
While she supports a moratorium, Freda said she does not want a full ban on data centers and battery storage sites.
“I don’t think we should be banning something we don’t know enough about,” she said. “I think banning is the wrong move, but I think we need to have something in place that will give us some ammunition to stop something that we don’t want.”
Holyoke is the only Massachusetts community to have banned data centers, implementing the ban in June. No communities in the state have enacted a similar ban on battery storage sites.
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