Inside the Qualified Data Center Task Force, Part 3: When Standards Stay Optional

Why Performance Standards Matter 

In this series, GCHIC has evaluated the Qualified Data Center Task Force’s recommendations against Smart Digital Growth—a policy framework developed to help Prince George’s County harness the fiscal benefits of data centers while avoiding the land‑use, infrastructure, and community harms seen elsewhere. In Part 1, we explained why the Task Force was created, how it operated, and what its report sets in motion. In Part 2, we examined the Task Force’s siting recommendations and assessed how well they align with a priority‑based approach that protects scarce redevelopment land.

Part 3 turns to the framework’s second pillar: enforceable, measurable performance standards.

A central reason the County Council convened the Task Force was to avoid repeating the mistakes of other jurisdictions. Recent reporting has underscored how unclear or permissive regulatory frameworks have left governments scrambling to respond after the fact. For example, federal energy regulators have warned that the rapid expansion of data centers is outpacing clear rules for how these facilities connect to power sources, creating uncertainty and risk for grid reliability. In places where data center development surged ahead of clear rules, permissive siting and weak performance standards allowed impacts to compound quietly until they became crises: strained electric grids, water conflicts, escalating noise complaints, and mounting public backlash. By the time those problems surfaced, facilities were already approved, built, and difficult to constrain.

That history underscores the nature of data centers as infrastructure‑scale facilities whose impacts are continuous, cumulative, and often invisible until thresholds are crossed. Energy demand is constant and enormous. Water use can spike depending on cooling technology. Backup generators and testing create recurring noise. Once approved, these facilities are costly—and sometimes impossible—to retrofit.

Smart Digital Growth starts from a simple premise: if Prince George’s County wants to avoid the downstream crises seen elsewhere, it must establish clear limits upfront. Predictable, enforceable standards shape better projects, reduce pressure on staff and elected officials, and give communities confidence that impacts are being managed by rule rather than optimism.

Where the Data Center Task Force Makes Progress

To its credit, the Task Force does not dismiss these risks. The report explicitly recognizes that energy demand, water use, noise, and broader environmental impacts are central challenges associated with data center development.

In particular, the Task Force:

• Treats data centers as a distinct land use with outsized infrastructure implications.

• Emphasizes the importance of sustainability planning and coordination with electric and water utilities.

• Calls for ongoing monitoring and reporting to improve transparency over time.

These are meaningful steps forward. They move the County’s conversation beyond the outdated notion that data centers are simply benign warehouses and acknowledge that unmanaged impacts can undermine both community trust and long‑term economic strategy.

Recognition alone, however, is not regulation. The question for Prince George’s County is not whether impacts are identified, studied, or reported. It is whether they are effectively constrained.

The Core Gap: Plans Without Teeth

Experience from other jurisdictions shows a consistent pattern. As Maryland policymakers themselves have acknowledged, the state still lacks a cohesive, comprehensive regulatory framework governing data center energy and environmental impacts, leaving local governments to manage these risks largely on their own. When data center impacts are addressed primarily through plans, studies, and voluntary commitments, development tends to outpace regulatory capacity. Utilities scramble to keep up with load growth. Water systems face unanticipated demand. Noise complaints proliferate. Residents feel blindsided, and public confidence erodes.

Against that backdrop, the Task Force’s recommendations rely heavily on management frameworks rather than binding obligations. Sustainability plans are encouraged. Impacts are to be studied. Performance is to be reported. Incentives are offered to reward best practices.

What is largely missing are hard lines: clear thresholds that must be met as a condition of approval and operation.

Plans and reports are inputs, not outcomes. Reporting does not cap impacts. Incentives reward good actors but do little to constrain bad ones. Case‑by‑case discretion weakens predictability and makes enforcement harder, not easier.

This distinction sits at the heart of the difference between the Task Force’s approach and Smart Digital Growth. One relies primarily on aspiration and oversight. The other relies on enforceable standards designed to prevent problems before they emerge.

Energy: Big Loads, Soft Rules

Nowhere is that gap more consequential than energy.

Under Smart Digital Growth, energy standards are treated as foundational. Because data centers operate around the clock and draw enormous power, approvals should be tied to clear, enforceable requirements: procurement of net‑new renewable energy, phased progress toward 24/7 carbon‑free energy, and demonstrated load readiness before projects are approved.

The Task Force takes a more deferential approach. Its recommendations emphasize coordination with utilities, sustainability planning, and reporting, while relying on market signals, incentives, and future grid upgrades to address rising demand.

What the report does not establish are binding limits. There are no enforceable caps on energy intensity, no requirements governing peak load contributions, and no mandatory timelines for reducing carbon intensity over time. As a result, energy impacts remain something to be managed after approval rather than constrained at the point of decision.

Other regions have learned—often painfully—that this approach carries real risk.

that without clearer, standardized interconnection and energy rules, data center growth can create cascading reliability and cost problems for the broader grid. When approvals outpace grid capacity, the costs of new infrastructure are frequently shifted onto ratepayers and communities. Prince George’s County has an opportunity to avoid that trajectory, but only if energy standards move from guidance to requirement.

Water: Managed, But Not Limited

Energy is not the only area where optional standards create long‑term risk. Water presents a parallel challenge—one that varies widely depending on cooling technology, scale, and operational practices, but that can be just as consequential for surrounding communities and public systems.

Smart Digital Growth treats water impacts as a performance issue, not merely a planning consideration. The framework emphasizes the need for enforceable limits on water use intensity, a clear hierarchy that favors closed‑loop or air‑cooled systems where feasible, and binding triggers that require alternative approaches when water demand exceeds defined thresholds.

The Task Force acknowledges water demand as a concern and encourages efficiency, monitoring, and reporting. But it stops short of translating that concern into enforceable standards. The report does not establish water‑use caps, does not prioritize cooling technologies through a regulatory hierarchy, and does not require projects to meet specific performance benchmarks as a condition of approval.

The result is that water impacts are reviewed, but not constrained. As with energy, reliance on post‑approval management assumes that impacts can be adjusted later, even though water systems—once stressed—are difficult and expensive to retrofit. Other jurisdictions have learned that allowing large‑scale facilities to draw heavily on local water resources without firm limits can create conflicts that surface only after projects are fully operational.

If Prince George’s County hopes to avoid those outcomes, water standards must do more than encourage good behavior. They must define what is acceptable—and what is not—before approvals are granted.

Noise and Backup Power: Studied, Not Bounded

Noise is one of the most common sources of community frustration associated with data centers. Backup generators, testing protocols, and mechanical equipment can create recurring disturbances that persist long after construction is complete.

Here again, the Task Force recognizes the issue. Its recommendations emphasize studies, mitigation plans, and case‑by‑case evaluation of noise impacts. But recognition does not substitute for limits.

Smart Digital Growth approaches noise as a predictable externality that warrants predictable constraints. Enforceable decibel caps tied to zoning context, operational limits on testing, and clear compliance mechanisms reduce ambiguity for operators and protect surrounding communities.

The Task Force’s framework leaves these questions largely unresolved. Without codified thresholds, noise impacts remain subject to negotiation after approval, when communities have the least leverage and enforcement is most difficult. Experience elsewhere shows that this is precisely how localized nuisances evolve into sustained political conflict.

Predictable nuisances deserve predictable limits. Without them, noise becomes another impact that is managed reactively rather than prevented proactively.

Frameworks vs. Rules

The contrast running through the Task Force’s performance recommendations is not one of intent, but of regulatory philosophy.

The Task Force largely relies on aspirational frameworks—plans, reporting, incentives, and coordination—to shape outcomes over time. That approach assumes strong compliance, ample enforcement capacity, and a willingness to revisit approvals if impacts prove greater than anticipated.

Smart Digital Growth takes a different view. It assumes that the most effective time to manage impacts is before projects are approved, when standards can shape site selection, design, and scale. Binding rules reduce discretion, improve consistency, and lessen pressure on staff and elected officials to renegotiate impacts project by project.

This distinction is consequential because data centers are long‑lived facilities. Once built, they lock in energy demand, water use, and operational impacts for decades. Frameworks may guide behavior, but rules define limits.

Why This Gap Persists—and Why It Needs to Close

Across the country, jurisdictions that moved quickly to attract data centers without codifying firm performance standards are now struggling to catch up. Grid constraints, water conflicts, resident opposition, and eroded trust in public decision‑making have followed.

Following intense public scrutiny of proposed data center development at the former Landover Mall site, Prince George’s County established the Qualified Data Center Task Force to assess risks, impacts, and policy options. Whether that effort produces lasting safeguards will depend on whether the issues identified translate into enforceable standards.

Without codified performance standards, discretion expands, consistency erodes, and public confidence weakens. With clear rules embedded in zoning text, subdivision regulations, and objectively verifiable conditions of approval, the County can provide certainty to developers while protecting communities and public infrastructure.

The lesson from elsewhere is clear: if data centers are to be treated as critical infrastructure, they must be regulated like it—before problems become crises.

In Part 4 of this series, we turn from standards to process: how the Task Force addresses public review, Special Exceptions, Detailed Site Plans, and community benefits—and whether its recommendations meaningfully strengthen transparency, accountability, and community integration in practice.