Part 10 of 13 in Thirteen Records. The long article, Data Centers Don’t Have an Environmental Record. They Have Thirteen of Them., rates thirteen kinds of environmental complaint against data centers. This series takes them one at a time.
I work at a local ISP in Northern Illinois and co-founded FD-IX, an internet exchange. I have no customer, vendor, or interconnection relationship with any facility or developer named here and no financial position in any of them beyond broad-market index funds. My industry grows with infrastructure investment in a general way, which is an indirect interest; the full disclosure is at the top of the complete article.
A hyperscale campus is lit to commercial standards 24 hours a day, and artificial light at night does documented things to birds, insects, and the animals that eat them. This is one of the four records in this series that hold at compliant facilities everywhere, alongside construction disruption, farmland conversion, and evaporative wastewater. It is also one of the easiest to address in an approval, and one the opposition material I reviewed never applies to the warehouse across the road.
This post is short because the evidence is settled and the fix is specific. It rates two claims, one Systemic and one Selective, and names the three specification terms that belong in the photometric plan.
How the ratings work. Each complaint below is stated the way it usually arrives at a hearing and rated on the scale the full article uses. Systemic: documented at compliant facilities across multiple geographies. Regional: real, but only under specific geographic or operational conditions. Isolated: documented at one or few facilities due to misconduct or atypical design. Exaggerated: the concern is real but the figures are permit ceilings or worst cases, not operating norms. Selective: a legitimate concern applied only to data centers, not to comparable land uses. Misattributed: the harm is real but the source, geography, or cause is wrong. Contested: a plausible mechanism exists but causal documentation at compliant facilities does not. Fabricated: no credible evidentiary basis exists. Where I say I found no record of something, that means a search of public sources through October 2026, not paid databases or records requests.
Light Pollution: Wildlife and Habitat
Claim: Data center lighting harms wildlife. Tier: Systemic. True of any large facility lit through the night.
Artificial light at night disrupts migratory bird navigation, suppresses insect abundance, alters predator-prey timing, and interferes with pollination, and the peer-reviewed literature on it is substantial. [25] Any large 24-hour campus lit to commercial standards produces the effect, and it matters most near flyways and sensitive habitat. It is addressable with Dark Sky-compliant specifications, full-cutoff fixtures, and motion-activated lighting on non-security perimeters. Cardinal’s developer testified that its lighting would “exceed dark sky standards”; the agreement requires a photometric plan with each building permit. [11y][11x]
Claim: Data center lighting is uniquely harmful. Tier: Selective.
The same mechanism applies to warehouse campuses, 24-hour plants, highway interchanges, and big-box retail. In the opposition material I have reviewed, the objection is not applied to them.
What to ask for. Specify the lighting in the approval instrument: full-cutoff fixtures, Dark Sky-compliant specifications, and motion activation on non-security perimeter lighting, with a photometric plan filed with each building permit, which Cardinal’s agreement already requires. [11x] A developer who testifies that lighting will “exceed dark sky standards” has made a checkable promise, and the photometric plan is where it gets checked. [11y] Where the parcel sits near a flyway, a wetland, or a wooded buffer, ask for the lighting plan to be reviewed against it rather than against the parking lot.
The honest comparison. The same mechanism applies to warehouse campuses, 24-hour plants, highway interchanges, and big-box retail, and a council that requires full-cutoff fixtures of a data center has a good argument for requiring them of the next distribution center too.
This is part 10 of 13 in Thirteen Records, a series that takes the long article Data Centers Don’t Have an Environmental Record. They Have Thirteen of Them. one topic at a time. Previous: land and habitat. Next: light at night and human health, where the physiology is established and the studies measure something other than a neighbor at a setback.
Cover photo: NASA, International Space Station / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Citations
[11x] United City of Yorkville, Ordinance No. 2025-77, approving the Planned Unit Development Agreement for Project Cardinal, passed November 10, 2025 (7-0), signed by the mayor November 13, 2025, published November 14, 2025; city-posted executed copy, mayor’s signature and clerk’s attestation dated November 13, 2025, Pioneer Development signature and date lines blank. Section 2.1: vesting applies “Upon commencement of the Project within three (3) years of the Effective Date.” Section 2.2: “Section 10-4-10 of the UDO is reserved for additional regulations applicable to Energy Industrial Uses. No new or amended standards, code provisions, or special regulations for Energy Industrial Uses shall apply to the Subject Property during the twenty (20) year vested term from the Effective Date of this Agreement, unless Developer agrees in writing or to the extent required by state or federal law.” No reference to Ordinance 2025-53. Section 2.14: “seventy-eight (78) feet, inclusive of any rooftop mechanical equipment or appurtenances.” Section 3.5: water obligations “addressed exclusively in the Utility Agreement.” https://www.yorkville.il.us/DocumentCenter/View/13587/Ordinance-2025-77—record?bidId= (archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20261025151237/https://www.yorkville.il.us/DocumentCenter/View/13587/Ordinance-2025-77—record?bidId=). Annexation agreement, Ordinance No. 2025-78: https://www.yorkville.il.us/DocumentCenter/View/13588/Ordinance-2025-78—record?bidId= (archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20261025151421/https://www.yorkville.il.us/DocumentCenter/View/13588/Ordinance-2025-78—record?bidId=). Packet version: City Council Packet, November 10, 2025 (ArchiveCenter Item 6499), Planned Unit Development Agreement between the United City of Yorkville and Pioneer Development, LLC (Project Cardinal), packet pp. 272 to 290. Section 2.1: entitlements “fully vested and protected from amendments and changes to City ordinances, codes, or regulations for a period of twenty (20) years from the Effective Date.” Section 2.2: “No new or amended standards, code provisions, or special regulations for Energy Industrial Uses shall apply to the Subject Property during the twenty (20) year vested term from the Effective Date of this Agreement, unless Developer agrees in writing or to the extent required by state or federal law.” Section 2.3: approximately ten-year build-out; Phasing Plan “advisory only and non-binding.” Section 2.4: “All data center buildings shall be at least five hundred feet (500′) from the nearest residential or commercial structure outside the boundaries of the Subject Property,” measured “from existing, occupied, residential or commercial buildings as of the date of PUD approval.” Section 2.10: 100-foot Transition Zone Type D buffer with a 12-foot berm facing residential properties and 8 feet elsewhere; “No additional berms or landscape requirements shall be imposed unless Developer agrees in writing.” Section 2.11: “the most appropriate location for Mechanical Equipment is on the rooftops; therefore, whenever practical, mechanical equipment shall be placed on the rooftops”; project subject to the City Noise Ordinance “as it existed when the PUD application was approved by the City Council.” Section 2.14: 78-foot maximum height including rooftop equipment. Section 2.17: “all primary power used for the data center campus on the Subject Property will be delivered from the Commonwealth Edison power grid” unless the City Council approves otherwise. Section 3.4: continuous noise monitoring devices at the onset of each construction phase, a preliminary report within 60 days after each building is operational, devices maintained for the life of the project. Section 3.11: operational testing of generators “during the hours of 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, and not on any Holidays.” https://www.yorkville.il.us/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/6499 (archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20261025154939/https://www.yorkville.il.us/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/6499)
[11y] United City of Yorkville, Planning and Zoning Commission, transcript of the public hearing on PZC 2025-08 (Pioneer Development, LLC, Project Cardinal), July 9, 2025, Vitosh Reporting Service (ArchiveCenter Item 6395, “PZC 7-9-25 Minutes & Transcript”). Sworn testimony of Matt McCarron for Pioneer Development: Ashburn homes “within 500 feet of data center campuses in Ashburn have been appreciated by approximately 70 percent over the last decade” (transcript p. 26); “legacy Ashburn data center campuses are built as close as a hundred, 130 feet from residential property lines. We’re committing to a minimum 500-foot setback” (pp. 26 to 27); generator testing “is only going to occur once or twice a year” and generators “are really never used outside of testing” (p. 25); “all backup generators meet Tier 4 final EPA standards” (p. 29); “if it’s curtailed in an emergency, we would be curtailed first and we would have backup generators. We are not going to cause a brownout” (p. 84). https://www.yorkville.il.us/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/6395 (archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20261025162533/https://www.yorkville.il.us/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/6395)
[25] Gaston, K.J., Visser, M.E., and Hölker, F., “The biological impacts of artificial light at night: the research challenge,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Vol. 370, No. 1667, 20140133, May 2015. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0133 (archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20250906061251/https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2014.0133)