The Waxhaw, North Carolina Board of Commissioners voted unanimously on August 11 for a twelve-month moratorium on accepting, processing, or approving development applications for data centers, cryptocurrency mining facilities, data storage and processing operations, and related telecommunications infrastructure, as WBTV reported. No project had been proposed. Mayor Robert Murray III put the reasoning plainly: "The main reason for doing it is because we want to make sure we don't get caught unprepared." The next day the Bellevue, Wisconsin village board voted unanimously for its own one-year moratorium, extendable by six months, joining nearby Wrightstown and Manitowoc County. Bellevue has no proposal either.
In a contested siting fight the operator gets to put a design on the table: closed loop, dry coolers, a published makeup rate, a sound study at the property line, a water balance a hydrologist can check. Those documents are how a project earns a conditional approval, and they are the only mechanism by which good thermal engineering becomes a political asset. A preemptive moratorium has no applicant, so there is no design, so the ordinance that emerges twelve months later gets written against the category in the abstract. That text usually lands as a megawatt cap plus a blanket water restriction, and it treats a zero-evaporation campus and a cooling tower farm as the same land use. Ohio's proposed 25 megawatt cap is the same instrument at state scale, and Millville banned 1.4 gigawatts outright. Eleven states now carry enough moratorium exposure to show up in bond pricing.
Waxhaw sits in a state where the legislature has already worked out a sharper tool. Senate Bill 730 would ban evaporative cooling rather than ban data centers, which is a rule an operator can actually design against and a rule that rewards the vendors shipping closed-loop and dry-cooled systems. Wisconsin has been running the same argument from the water side for a year. The moratorium debate there started over cooling water. Town-level blanket pauses are blunter than either, and they are spreading faster because they take one vote and no technical staff.
The twelve months is the opportunity and almost nobody in this industry is using it. During a moratorium a planning department is actively drafting text and has no applicant lobbying it, which makes it the single most receptive audience a cooling vendor will ever get. Model ordinance language that distinguishes consumptive water intensity per megawatt-hour, sets a property-line sound limit, and says nothing about megawatts would protect the towns and the good designs at the same time. Send it now. After the pause lifts, the text is already written and the argument is over.