Photo: Loudoun County Data Center, Hugh Kenny/Piedmont Environmental Council
John Barth
The Cloud, which stores our documents and photographs, is not a puff of water vapor floating across the sky but a massive concrete building housing thousands of computer servers. And the chances are good that it is in Virginia. The Commonwealth’s nearly 600 data centers make it one of the largest concentrations in the world. It is estimated that 70% of the world's internet traffic passes through Virginia.
Northern Virginia is the epicenter of that concentration. The area around Herndon and Ashburn – known as Data Center Alley – is home to approximately 260 data centers. They currently consume more than a quarter of the electricity generated in the state. One facility there tops out at 1,000,000 square feet. Many are sited near parks, playgrounds, and residential areas.
The current push to create artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the development of additional data centers to manage the numberless searches and calculations it requires. The new computer chips that make those calculations possible use five times the electricity their predecessors needed.
The rapid increase in data centers raises a number of environmental concerns. One among them is noise. Residents who live near data centers report a constant, audible hum from the cooling fans atop the buildings. Of interest to NVBA members is a recent research report from the University of Florida showing that anthropogenic noise creates stress among birds and interferes with breeding cycles, further reducing reproduction rates for a population already in decline. See Yue Liu, Effects of Anthropogenic Noise on Reproduction in an Urban Population of Eastern Bluebirds.
A second concern is water use. We know generally that data centers use significant amounts of water for cooling. But specific, accurate information on their water use is more difficult to secure. Many data center operators consider information about their cooling systems to be proprietary and balk at detailed reporting.
The issue of most pressing immediacy is electricity demand. The rapid expansion of data centers to meet the requirements of AI are pushing the already taxed power grid to its limits. Meta is developing a data center “supercluster” in Louisiana that will use almost twice as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans. Dominion Energy’s projections of energy demand over the next decade expect residential use to remain stable. However, commercial use, driven by data centers, will increase dramatically. The independent monitor for PJM Interconnection, a regional collaborative to facilitate power sharing in response to peaks in demand across 13 states, including Virginia, recently reported that its members are at capacity.
The voracious appetites of data centers for electric power can only be met by increasing generating capacity. This means that the retirement of coal and methane powered generating plants, scheduled to be phased out to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, will be delayed, and the construction of new generation facilities is inevitable. Because they are the cheaper and quicker option, additional methane fueled plants are likely.
Throughout the current year, electricity costs across the country, including Virginia, have been rising. The costs of the infrastructure to meet data center driven demand – generating plants, transmission lines, substations – will be passed on to all customers in the form of higher utility bills.
NVBA is represented in the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition, a group of environmental organizations in northern Virginia seeking to increase state oversight of data centers, require regular reporting to public officials and the public on electricity and water usage and revise rate structures so that the data centers responsible for the soaring demand for electricity and not residential customers pay the lion's share of the infrastructure costs to meet that demand.