The Delaware Coalition for Open Government is committed to promoting and defending the people’s right to transparency and accountability in government.
For New Castle County residents — and other Delawareans — who haven’t yet heard, Starwood Digital Ventures and its partners have proposed building an enormous and extraordinarily expensive data center beside the Delaware City Refinery. Without disclosing a single known customer nor fully explaining its true impact on county or state residents, Starwood’s publicity campaign is an attempt to convince Delawareans that approval of the project is a winning outcome.
The clear and growing evidence across our nation, however, is that data centers built without oversight and controls result in environmental damage, negative health impacts, diminished real estate values and substantial electricity rate increases. Will this project benefit Delawareans in the long run? New Castle County commissioners and our state legislators need to pause the approval of a hyperscale data center until we think it through and get needed answers to this complex project.
Why you should be concerned
Most of the project’s details and its impacts are largely unknown to the public, to New Castle County Council or to the vast majority of the state’s electricity ratepayers. Yet Starwood has already partnered with local unions to support the data center project, promising short-term, high-wage union jobs, despite the likelihood of few well-paying, long-term jobs and with the almost-certain long-term harm cited for similar projects across the country.
The Delaware Coalition for Open Government — as well as other nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations that strive for public accountability and awareness — believes that the public needs to know what’s at stake and has even more questions.
Consider these details, critical for understanding the scope and impact of this project:
Protecting Delaware’s precious water resources
About 25% of the land area of our small state (tidal and nontidal) is wetlands, lands often or permanently covered by water (fresh-, salt- or brackish), that not only are critical for food security but, according to the World Wildlife Fund, “are the planet’s natural wastewater treatment facilities and carbon-storing champions ... (that) provide flood control, clean water, shoreline and storm protection, materials, medicines, and vital habitat” for birds, animals and fish.
It is worrisome that the proposed data center site — consisting of two tracts that straddle Red Lion Creek and are near the Delaware River — is land covered by the Delaware Coastal Zone Act, established to protect wetlands and our environment but gradually being undermined by projects such as data centers. Of the two parcels, which include flood zones in the Red Lion Creek watershed, the south parcel nearest the Delaware City Refinery is zoned as a heavy industrial site.
Project Washington name
Starwood has given the proposed 6.1 million-square-foot data center the distinguished name of “Project Washington” in an effort to reflect its importance if connected to the Delmarva power grid situated between Washington, D.C., and New York City.
Large amounts of water, electricity
The magnitude of this project, the hundreds of large diesel generators and the required use of a tremendous volume of water could damage our fragile wetlands and return the warmed water back into the environment, adversely affecting plants and wildlife. And the enormous amount of electricity the proposed data center would consume — at least as much or more than all of the existing homes in the entire state — raises many serious health and environmental concerns. There are major worries about significant electricity rate increases, similar to escalating rates around the country where large data centers have been built.
The health of many residents, especially those with post-traumatic stress disorder or on the autism spectrum, can be harmed by prolonged exposure to loud and low-frequency noise. Other health consequences — such as aggravation of cardiovascular conditions, reduced quality of life and impairment of cognitive performance — can result from persistent 24/7 exposure to low-frequency noise.
We — and the general public — don’t understand why, when there are so many serious questions about harm from data center operations, so few New Castle County Council members are willing to demand further evaluation of this issue. Nor, it seems, is Delaware’s Department of Health and Social Services, which is responsible for the health of all Delawareans, looking at the grave health dangers of the proposed data center project.
Ordinance not addressed
Despite these and other issues being raised, many members of New Castle County Council failed to seriously consider the data center ordinance draft proposed by Councilman David Carter, which would have established strict standards — covering all data centers in New Castle County, including this project — for location, energy efficiency, water use and noise, with a regulation for a 1,000-foot buffer from residential communities.
Worse, those same members of County Council have largely ignored the pleas of constituents and ridiculed various aspects of the draft order without discussing the legitimate concerns with experts. Nor do they seem to understand or care that, under the current land use review process, you, the members of the public, are cut out of the process of considering the first phase of the project because, under the “by-right” provision of existing land zoning and usage, this entire phase is essentially invisible to and removes the public from being able to raise its concerns and have them considered.
That’s right, despite this being one of the single-largest industrial projects ever in Delaware, New Castle County makes no provision to mandate consideration of legitimate health and environmental issues raised. But, rather than having an in-depth discussion about the issues cited in the Carter ordinance draft and without evaluating the disturbing implications and nearly irreversible consequences of this project, a majority of New Castle County Council is essentially choosing to ignore the serious problems about data centers and to treat this like any other conventional development project. The only way these issues will ever get a fair and thorough hearing is through the passage of Councilman Carter’s data center ordinance at the state level.
Meanwhile, Starwood Digital Ventures, New Castle Campus Development LLC (the owner of the land for the data center) and their advocates are well underway with a publicity campaign to make Project Washington sound like a win-win situation for all Delawareans.
Starwood began its publicity campaign in August 2025, at a public information session in Delaware City. Starwood never divulged much about this massive project, choosing to make vague references or deferring answers to specific questions about the source of the 1.2 gigawatts of electrical capacity it will need and also evading questions such as who its artificial intelligence client(s)/customers will be. Starwood and other project representatives filed documents with the county Land Use Department and state officials in June 2025. Because the Project Washington application beat Councilman Carter’s late-August introduction of his data center ordinance draft and because of the “by-right” zoning provision, Starwood officials consequently believe they can argue that the ordinance shouldn’t apply to Project Washington.
Because the public has little insight into this serious matter, most Delawareans are unaware that the June 2, 2025, engineering letter submitted to the New Castle County Land Use Department requesting a “preapplication” meeting states: “The project will be phased and is being submitted in 2 concurrent applications.” But, based on a review of the project documents, that seems not to have happened. In its June 4 letter to the general manager of the Land Use Department, Starwood Digital Ventures provided “a high-level overview of the proposed Project” but goes on to describe only Phase 1, which is focused on the parcel known as the “South Campus,” at 825 Gov. Lea Road. But there is no mention of Phase 2, referred to in other documents as “North Campus,” a site on a completely different parcel on the north side of Red Lion Creek, which would require a public hearing because it would involve rezoning.
Further, the only application filed with Delaware’s Preliminary Land Use Service is for the South Campus but includes details about the North Campus. This latter point may pertain to the need for multiple “electrical yards” in the North Campus area, which is zoned suburban and, for the project to work, requires some administrative actions invisible to the public. Again, the public and New Castle County Council seem to be largely unaware of these filings and actions, and their lasting consequences.
Delawareans and County Council members should be very concerned. For example, why do these filings contain details and unexplained maps and drawings that are not part of Project Washington? The details are not discussed in the key project letters and the PLUS application. One example is an adjoining parcel on the east side of the South Campus, known as 755 Gov. Lea Road, which shows drawings that include additional buildings. Another parcel farther east, known as 750 Gov. Lea Road, shows an undisclosed 353,500-square-foot building. Even more perplexing is one document that clearly notes that it is not to be used or relied upon in making decisions about it! The primary question, then, is: Why are these parcels and buildings that supposedly are not to be part of the project even included in the drawings?
Equally concerning is the certainty of significant increases in the state’s residential electricity rates over the long term. Yes, labor union workers will receive good wages for this big project for a few years, but — as numerous news articles, especially in the high-tech finance sector, continue to point out — electricity rates across the country have increased dramatically in recent years, as mega data centers have been built. Data center demand for power has outstripped electrical generation capacity, driving up prices. Moreover, since there are few local or state requirements for data centers to produce their own electricity, demand has driven electricity prices ever higher.
Starwood officials stated at the August community meeting in Delaware City that it will not produce even 1 kilowatt of its own energy and will instead rely on the market to meet the demand. Translation: Because Delaware produces less than one-third of the electricity the state consumes, our electricity rates will rise substantially over time, especially if more large data centers come into New Castle County and other areas of the state! Delaware’s Public Service Commission and the public advocate are already struggling with this issue. The dire projections are that Delaware will be in such short supply of electricity in a few years, brownouts will be implemented. Yet we want to build a 1.2-gigawatt, energy-consuming data center? A few legislators — particularly Sen. Stephanie Hansen, D-Middletown, and Rep. Frank Burns, D-Newark — are in the early stages of addressing this issue, but we, the public, need to demand a place at the table.
New Castle Countians and other Delawareans need to demand that County Council members either step up to the plate, open up this process to full public disclosure and participation or get out of the way and let the General Assembly take charge. We no longer can be kept in the dark and continue to sit back, while something as massive and impactful as Project Washington happens, without answers and forward thinking.
Every citizen in the First State has a stake in this enormous project and should work toward raising a collective voice to pause any action until we clearly understand what’s going on, what the possibility of more data centers would mean for our future and with the knowledge that responsible government oversight is in place. The time to think things through and to make responsible decisions is now, while we still can. The citizens of Delaware deserve no less.
To contact your state legislators, go to legis.delaware.gov/findmylegislator, enter your address and click “Find my Legislator.” You will get the name, mailing address and email address of each of them.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
