Before the municipal elections, Meta’s arrival to the small town of Zeewolde seemed to be on track, even though the tech company planned to set up the largest data center in Europe (with the power consumption of the city of Amsterdam) in the Flevopolder. The zoning plan that makes the arrival possible was approved in the city council at the end of December, the permit procedure is in full swing.
That is why from Wednesday an adjusted ‘image quality plan’ and new drawings of the ‘national integration and ecological facilities’ of the mega data halls of Meta (formerly: Facebook) will be available for inspection at the town hall, the municipality announced via a press release on Monday. The moral: Everything is going exactly according to plan.
But if it’s up to the residents of Zeewolde, the data center won’t be there at all. During the municipal elections, a large majority of the population voted for Leefbaar Zeewolde and the ChristenUnie, the two parties that had explicitly spoken out against the arrival of Meta.
The advocates in the council of the arrival of the data center all lost, as a result of which 14 of the 19 seats in Zeewolde (10 for Liveable, 4 for the ChristenUnie) are now taken by outspoken opponents. They have said they are doing everything they can to stop the data center. According to them, the costs for the region and for the Netherlands of the energy-consuming project do not outweigh the benefits.
Minister Hugo de Jonge (Spatial Planning, CDA) is also not in favor of Meta’s plans. “I think the Netherlands is too small for those very large data centers,” said De Jonge a few days after the elections. He pointed to the role of the Central Government Real Estate Agency. That still has eighty hectares of agricultural land to sell to the municipality, which will then sell it on to Meta. De Jonge: “It is our land and we have set conditions for its sale. It is highly questionable whether Zeewolde will be able to meet those conditions.”
Fumbling can cost money
But can Zeewolde still backtrack? Fumbling with the plans can cost the municipality a lot of money, warned the non-party mayor Gerrit Jan Gorter shortly before the elections.
Meta has – through the intervention of the municipality – already bought half of the fields where the data center is to be built for tens of millions. The tech company has also incurred millions in planning and consultancy costs and is paying the bill for all external advisors that Zeewolde has attracted to make the arrival possible. Meta could claim those investments in the event of a sudden change of course from Zeewolde, suggested Mayor Gorter.
There is a simple way out for all these problems, says Member of Parliament and emeritus professor of public law Peter Nicolaï (Party for the Animals). On Tuesday, the senate will vote on a motion by his party to “stop the preparations for construction” in Zeewolde.
Of course, the Senate should not interfere too much with local policy, says Nicolaï. “But everything has changed because of the election results. Almost two thirds of the voters in Zeewolde voted against. Our proposal helps the democratic process and the public interest, especially since it is now government policy that we do not want data centers in the middle of the country.” That is stated in the new coalition agreement.
Also read: The arrival of the huge Facebook data center affects almost all interests in Zeewolde
A second advantage, according to Nicolaï: if De Jonge embraces the motion and because of the public interest decides not to sell the land of the Central Government Real Estate Agency to Meta, the company cannot just claim compensation from Zeewolde, as Mayor Gorter fears.
Hollands Kroon is also watching
Not only in Zeewolde, but also in Hollands Kroon, the vote in the Senate about the data centers is closely followed. The municipality in the top of Noord-Holland has been designated by De Jonge (together with Eemshaven in Groningen) as the preferred location for the data centers.
In Hollands Kroon, where Google and Microsoft have large data halls, the centers were also an important election theme, says councilor Lars Ruiter. He left the VVD in 2020 out of dissatisfaction with the party’s data center policy and is now one of the winners of the elections as a councilor of Independent Hollands Kroon.
“It is unclear locally, but also nationally whether all new data centers should be built with us,” says Ruiter. “We are strongly against that and have won the elections. However, we do not know whether the previous council secretly made all kinds of promises to companies that want to build the next data center in Hollands Kroon. All in all, it will be a very important theme in the formation.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of March 22, 2022
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