Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: In the Finger Lakes Region, Governor Hochul Highlights First Statewide Moratorium on New Hyperscale Data Centers as Support Continues to[...]

Governor Kathy Hochul today held a roundtable with state, business and local leaders from the Finger Lakes Region to highlight her Executive Order that creates the nation's first moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, establishing the strongest standards for data center development and creating a blueprint to support localities. The Governor is temporarily pausing State environmental permits for up to one year in order to build a nation-leading regulatory framework that protects ratepayers, the environment, the energy grid and communities across the state.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Hi, everybody. Thank you for hosting us, Supervisor. Thank you for allowing us to use - is this where local board meetings are as well?

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I'm just envious. When I was on the town board in Hamburg, years ago, we had to share our town court with our town board meetings. And we didn't have all this nice space you have here. Congratulations, Supervisor.

Great to be here with so many dear friends in government starting with our County Executive. You'll be hearing from him momentarily, but a strong ally. And my ally in Albany, Senator Jeremy Cooney, for his passionate work on behalf of his residents. And again, Stephen Schultz, our Supervisor, thank you. Great to be back in Henrietta. And you'll be hearing from a number of speakers, so I'm going to introduce them as I bring them around this conversation.

It's an important conversation. I want to make sure that people all across the state know that what I've been doing is talk about something that could be a great opportunity, data centers, or it can present challenges. And my job is to make sure we deal with the challenges. And I feel really positive about the direction we're taking.

We know artificial intelligence is changing our lives, our economy, our world, our civilization at an incredible speed. And, there's some anxiety just around that fact. What happens to young people? Are they going to be left behind this technological revolution, or will they be ready for it? Our job is to make sure they're ready for it, and we're already leaning into this and re-educating young people and helping them think about their place in this new future.

I like to be a leader in everything. New York should be the leader. We should set the bar high. We always do when it's looking out for our people, our communities and our businesses.

So we've already invested in Empire AI, which I encourage you all to learn what that's about. But your local major universities are involved in having access to some of the most super computing power ever devised by man. It's happening at the University of Buffalo, and we all know that is going to be a resource that puts positions - it makes us more competitive with our students, our researchers and our businesses.

We're also working on, as I mentioned, the concern about displacement, the future jobs. We have a Future Works Commission that is dedicated to understanding where the opportunities are in this new world, but also how we deal with people who've been displaced, who will be displaced, and identifying those jobs.So that's underway as well.

Also, I learned that leadership is not - doesn't mean saying yes to everything that comes. It's also sometimes questioning, raising the tough questions that others either don't think of, don't have the ability to do, or don't have the clout to do it. And my job is to make sure that no matter what happens in the state, that the right guardrails are in place, and that is the whole genesis of this conversation right now.

That is why I announced the nation's first ever moratorium on hyperscale data centers for one year. And I will restate this over and over. We're not against technology. We're not against innovation. We're not against change. But I want to make sure that this technology works for New Yorkers and works for our communities as well.

So after one year, we'll have the strongest framework in America, the most ironclad, so there's certainty. Businesses want to know the rules of the road. They want to know how things can happen, and New Yorkers want to know that we're protecting them. We're doing both with this initiative.

So one thing I always do is start with listening. I've been around the state so far and happy to be back in one of my home turfs. And every part of the state has a different perspective. In the Capital Region, we heard from business leaders and local officials, environmental advocates and organized labor. Long Island, the focus was on water.

Water is a more limited resource around Long Island and agriculture and protecting their aquifer and the environmental challenges. I was in Tonawanda, we heard about the quality of life issues, the noise associated with these large centers and what that does to the neighborhoods. And there are plans for a data center in that area that would consume as much power as the entire town of Amherst and Tonawanda combined. So how is that supposed to work out? These are the questions I'm asking.

Then we talk about what's the hyperscale data center proposed by Stream at the STAMP site in Genesee County. We'll get into more conversation about that today. That would be five hundred megawatts of electricity. Now, I happen to know that 50 megawatts, which is our threshold, anything lower than fifty megawatts is excluded by our moratorium. Those are the ones that support bank office operations and hospitals and schools and universities, so we're not touching the smaller ones. I happen to know that our threshold of 50 equates to about the power needs of 50,000 homes. Five hundred megawatts is a lot bigger than that. So I just want to put that out there on how we manage the demand, and a large part of this is telling the companies, "Bring your own power or pay a premium into our grid." That's very important to me.

So we have local leaders who understand what responsible planning looks like. They're doing this. They're engaging in this. We have legislators. I want to hear directly from our legislators. I want to hear from residents like Rachel Sherman, a board member of the Board of Education, who understands the importance of data centers and cooperating regional cooperation, and also, an engineering student, Joshua. Joshua here? Okay, Joshua - I was like, you look like one of the older people here - Joshua, it's good to see you, a mechanical engineering student here in Rochester. mechanical engineering. So Josh, you can give us more insights on what people, your contemporaries, are thinking and talking about as well. And Kevin Ellis, who runs a co-op of over 200 dairy farms and can't expand because of power restrictions. And Barbara Grosh from Penfield, who's spoken about the possible harm to the environment.

So these are all different perspectives, and I'm just doing one piece of it, and part of it is by gathering people, talk about it. The other part is already ongoing. The year has already started. My Public Service Commission is already working on how we set up a separate rate structure. So if you don't bring your own power, you're paying this premium price into the grid. We also want to set up a grid fund, so we can have the larger data centers pay into an overall grid resiliency fund, so we can make the investments that have not been made in a long time to help us give the assurance of reliability, which is critical.

We're developing a community investment fund. What does that look like? I have surveyed all the data centers and their host communities around the country, found out what are some of the benefits that have been given to localities in return for the ability to be in those towns and villages and townies. And they're very generous. Either it's support for the grid plus direct money for the community. South Bend, Indiana, $143 million going to - dollars going to South Bend, Indiana. In some areas there's support for schools and bonuses for teachers. There's community centers being built. There's roads and bridges being built. There's more support for the local grid in a way that reduces the cost of utilities for everybody in the area. So I just want to make sure that all of our communities have this template of what sort of the starting point of their negotiations.

Because like I said, I come out of a smaller town, Supervisor, you know this. You don't have the time or the bandwidth to know everything, to be able to negotiate. You kind of come at it at a disadvantage and I want to make sure that my communities across the state have an advantage of knowing what we've already processed, what's doable, what makes sense. So we'll also examine the impact on our water as well.

My thought is also these companies are not receiving tax breaks in many parts of our country. They don't have to get tax breaks, and so let's rethink what that looks like keeping that money directly in the communities and not giving additional benefits to people who really want to come and use your resources. So if you want to come and use our talent, our people, our great workforce, the people who will build this, and our water and our energy and the air, the noise, you just have to make contributions back to the community. So what we'll do, we're setting the standard. We're going to do it smarter, make sure that it's stronger, our projects will be stronger.

Again, I could go on and on because I'm very passionate about doing what's right and finding the sweet spot where policy makes the most sense. But the perspectives I'm going to hear today are going to help me get there. So I do want to open up with our County Executive, Adam Bello.