Upper Burrell, Pennsylvania, Just Wrote Tough New Rules for Data Centers. The One Already Running There Is Exempt From All of Them.

Guy Fuller is 77 years old and lives near a cluster of gas wells in Upper Burrell Township, Pennsylvania, a small community of a few thousand people on rolling land northeast of Pittsburgh. He didn't sign up to also live next to a 3-gigawatt data center campus, and on August 25th he put his name on a lawsuit arguing that nobody ever actually checked whether the township's zoning code allows one. Two months later, on October 22nd, Upper Burrell's supervisors answered a different question instead. They passed, unanimously, the toughest data-center ordinance the township has ever had. It does nothing for Fuller's case.

The rules themselves are specific, and they're real. New or expanded data center buildings now have to sit at least 1,000 feet from any home. Noise at the property line is capped at 75 decibels during the day, dropping to 65 at night, about the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a conversation. Cooling has to run on a closed-loop system instead of evaporating water into the air. Backup diesel generators are limited to 120 hours a year, per unit. Violate any of it, and the fine runs $500 a day. Township solicitor Stephen Yakopec told residents an outright ban on data centers would have opened Upper Burrell to a lawsuit of its own, for exclusionary zoning, and supervisor Scott Brown called the ordinance that passed stronger than comparable rules he'd reviewed from other municipalities.

More than three dozen people showed up to the meeting anyway, and plenty weren't satisfied with what they got. "Something this size in our community should pay for the community," one resident told the township, pointing out that an ordinance full of limits doesn't put a dollar of direct compensation in anyone's pocket. The timing wasn't an accident, either. Upper Burrell's six-month moratorium on new data-center development, passed in May while the township worked out these exact rules, was set to expire on November 2nd. The ordinance landed with eleven days to spare.

The company the whole fight is actually about is TECfusions, a Florida-based developer that started buying up the old Alcoa and, later, Arconic aluminum research campus in Upper Burrell in late 2024, eventually assembling roughly 1,400 acres. Founder Simon Tusha called it the company's "U.S. flagship" when the deal closed, and the ambition behind that word is real on paper: TECfusions says it's planning up to 3 gigawatts of capacity at full build-out, powered by natural gas generation built on-site and fed in part by Marcellus Shale wells already on the property, with talk of eventually selling excess power back to the grid. The first phase, around 336 megawatts, is supposed to come online through next year. A much smaller piece, about 12 megawatts, is already running in a structure the company calls Building J.

Reported details about the project have shifted depending on who's telling it. TECfusions' own acreage figures have ranged from roughly 1,350 to 1,400 across different company statements, and while township officials describe a data center as operating on the site today, at least one industry tracker still lists the project as proposed rather than live. None of that is unusual for a project moving this fast. It's also exactly the kind of inconsistency worth checking against a filed document before treating a company's own description of what's built, permitted, or running as settled fact.

Building J is the piece at the center of the fight, because it's the one project the moratorium never touched. Upper Burrell had already issued TECfusions a permit for it before the pause took effect in May, so the six-month freeze on new development didn't apply. Then, on August 5th, with the moratorium still formally in effect for everyone else, the supervisors approved a land development plan letting TECfusions make electrical and mechanical upgrades, plus door and hallway alterations, at that same building. To the residents watching, it looked like the one project everyone had questions about was also the one the pause conveniently didn't reach.

A lawsuit about whether any of this was ever zoned right

Twenty days after that approval, the environmental group Protect PT, together with Fuller and fellow resident Allen Uhler, filed a land-use appeal in Westmoreland County Court of Common Pleas. Their argument isn't the one that usually drives these fights — it isn't about the gas turbines, the noise, or the water. It's about process. They say the supervisors should have required TECfusions to go before the zoning hearing board and win a special exception before approving anything at all, on the theory that a 3-gigawatt, gas-fired computing campus isn't the use Upper Burrell's existing industrial zoning was ever written to cover. Protect PT says it filed Right-to-Know requests for the zoning approvals that would make this use legal, for either TECfusions or Alcoa and Arconic before it, and came back with nothing. A township building permit exists for Building J. Protect PT says the permit application itself states that no zoning permit is required for it.

A TECfusions representative called the challenge "completely unfounded," though the company isn't actually named as a defendant — the appeal targets the township's supervisors and their approval, not the developer relying on it. It's worth being precise about what the suit doesn't claim, too. Protect PT isn't asking a court to shut down the turbines or the wells feeding them; if that fight comes, it'll happen somewhere else, probably in front of a state environmental regulator. This case is narrower and, in a way, more fundamental: whether the zoning paperwork underneath a multi-gigawatt industrial campus actually exists, or whether a decades-old industrial designation from the aluminum era is being asked to cover a use nobody wrote it for. No ruling has come down yet.

Rules that don't reach backward

Here's the part that makes this week's unanimous vote feel smaller than the headline suggests. Upper Burrell's own code officer has said the township's existing data-center buildings are grandfathered in, regardless of what the new ordinance requires going forward. The 1,000-foot setback, the noise caps, the diesel-hour limits: none of it reaches the building already running, and none of it touches whatever TECfusions builds next under the same approval Protect PT is currently contesting in court. The ordinance governs the data centers Upper Burrell hasn't approved yet. It has nothing to say, one way or the other, about the one it already has.

GridPermit works Colorado, not Westmoreland County, and nothing in our own pipeline looks exactly like a 1,400-acre former aluminum campus turning into a gas-fired computing flagship. But the gap at the center of this fight is one we spend our own work trying to close before a client's money is committed to a site. A zoning map that shows "industrial" on a parcel tells you almost nothing about whether a specific, named use — in this case, on-site gas-fired power generation feeding a hyperscale campus — was ever actually contemplated by the ordinance governing that land, or whether it's riding on a special exception, a variance, or, as Protect PT alleges here, nothing at all. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi, had the opposite problem with a similar-sized campus: no zoning code at all, so there was no permit to appeal in the first place. Upper Burrell had the tool. The open question is whether anyone actually used it before TECfusions started pouring concrete.

Upper Burrell's supervisors did something real this week. A 1,000-foot setback and a $500-a-day fine aren't nothing, and they'll bind the next developer who shows up with a pitch deck and a map of this township. But the people who sued in August weren't asking for better rules going forward. They were asking whether the rules that already applied were ever actually followed. That question is still sitting in front of a Westmoreland County judge, and whatever gets decided there will matter more to TECfusions' 3-gigawatt flagship than anything the supervisors voted on this week.