Outside report names 14 ways Colorado Springs can address data centers
By Brennen Kauffman November 3, 2026
A third-party report released Tuesday provided an overview of how Colorado Springs currently addresses data centers and policies the city could enact as more facilities look at opening in town.
The report was issued by the Romer Institute of Evidence-based Policy, a Colorado nonprofit firm that seeks to provide research for elected officials. The report looked at existing data centers in the city, policies from the city and Colorado Springs Utilities and comparisons across Colorado and the country to come up with 14 potential policy changes.
Mayor Yemi Mobolade requested that Romer study the issue in July, but the city did not pay anything for the independent report.
“The data center space is a relatively new phenomenon, so there is a limited area of evidence to rely on,” said Billy Wynne, principal researcher at the Romer Institute who worked on the report.
Of the 14 options in the report, four of them were identified as having a high level of supporting evidence and being easy to enact in the immediate future. Those four proposed policies were:
A City Council ordinance to add a clearer definition of “data center” to the city’s Unified Development Code
Changes to Colorado Springs Utilities’ large load rate requirements to address some facilities that use less than 10 megawatts
A public list of all of the current data centers in Colorado Springs, along with aggregated reports on their utility usage
A city-run public feedback session about data center regulations
Wynne said the proposals at the end of the report were not a ranked recommendation, in large part because of the limited track record for regulating large data centers. However, Wynne said the major concern was whether municipalities should establish strict rules or evaluate each potential data center individually.
“A recurring theme relating to the approval process is that a clear standard for approval be established and applied on a consistent basis, rather than generated ad hoc for each new site proposal,” the Romer report stated.
The initial request came around the time that the proposed Project Taurus artificial intelligence data center was going through an appeal to the city’s Planning Commission. The Colorado Springs City Council voted to postpone a final decision on the Project Taurus data center until April 2027. Several of the councilmembers said the city needed to address the lack of specific rules for the industry.
“Colorado Springs deserves an honest assessment of what is working, where gaps exist and where we can do better. We will consider these findings alongside community input and the expertise of our City and Utilities teams,” Mobolade said in a statement Tuesday.
The report repeatedly identified the unique situation Colorado Springs had with its municipal utility. Through the large load tariff requirements and potential future requirements from Colorado Springs Utilities, the city could address issues around water and power demand that would otherwise go through the Public Utilities Commission or a for-profit utility provider like Xcel Energy.
The report identified a total of seven existing data centers in Colorado Springs and received detailed utility usage for four of them. The largest placed a 6 MW load on the power grid and used just under 67,000 gallons of water per day.
None of the existing data centers identified in the report used enough power to trigger the utility rules for large load tariffs, which begin at 10 MW. The report said that because none of those projects had set a precedent, Colorado Springs had “essentially a clean slate for determining the tiers it might apply to different categories of data centers.”
The Romer report also recommended that the city issue requirements for neighborhood investment and workforce benefits that could also apply to data centers that qualified as a large load customer.
City spokesperson Joe Hollmann said the Planning Department was revisiting the city’s Unified Development Code to consider potential data-center-related changes. No other immediate next steps were identified to implement the report’s suggestions.