Loudoun County and surrounding Northern Virginia are home to almost 300 data centers, the biggest concentration of such campuses in the world. It’s the crossroads for roughly 70% of global internet traffic.
Prolific construction of the mega-buildings that make cloud computing possible — combined with the accompanying need for transmission lines for electricity and water for cooling — has caused an uproar among community activists alarmed about their impact on local infrastructure and the environment.
Such large-scale growth prompted a tongue-in-cheek comment from Democratic state Sen. Danica Roem about exporting data centers from Prince William, the county she represents, to Tazewell County, just east of the proposed Data Center Ridge.
In an interview with the Energy News Network, Roem said she would only support siting data centers in Southwest Virginia if the projects have widespread community buy-in, are powered with renewable energy, and are built on reclaimed coal mines that don’t require clearcutting of forests, which serve as carbon dioxide sinks. Utility customers shouldn’t be saddled with paying for the expensive buildout of transmission infrastructure, she added.
“I don’t want to simply shift the problems we’re having here to Southwest Virginia and create problems for the residents there,” Roem said. “If they’re building data centers there, are they going to stop digging in my district?”
Roem has joined other legislators introducing bills aimed at reining in data center growth and controlling the resources the buildings require. For instance, compared with a typical office building, the U.S. Energy Department estimates one data center needs 50 times more electricity.
“A lot of potential hurdles”
David Porter, vice president of electrification and sustainable energy strategy for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Electric Power Research Institute, said there are numerous challenges and opportunities when it comes to coordinating data centers’ power needs with utilities.
“These data centers could be a really neat idea if they can work around a lot of potential hurdles.” High on his checklist of limiting factors in Southwest Virginia are access to a reliable electric grid connection, battery storage to fill gaps, and “major league” fiber-optic cable for communications.
He emphasized that even a modest number of data centers can’t rely on renewable energy 24/7. Backup power, typically provided by diesel-powered generators, is needed to keep the centers operating when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
As well, he said, even larger data centers in the gigawatt range generate far fewer jobs than a manufacturing center.
Payne and Clear responded that they are far from naive about the difficulty of solving grid and broadband issues, which they know will take years, not months, to remedy.
However, both took umbrage with Porter’s remarks about the relative impact of data centers in a region where the average annual income is $42,000.
“We’ve heard similar pushback from people in Northern Virginia and Charlottesville who don’t know what’s at stake,” Payne said. “That’s a myopic way to view this situation.
“In Southwest Virginia, we’ve seen plenty of manufacturers pick up and leave, and that wouldn’t be the case with wind turbines and data centers.”
Their models show that one 36 MW data center, considered to be a midsize project, would generate about 50 jobs paying $134,300 a year. In an ideal scenario, the size of Data Center Ridge would eventually expand more than 25-fold to 1,000 MW.
DELTA Lab recently collaborated with a local industrial facilities authority to offer a financial incentive for data center developers, Clear noted. It translates to Wise, Lee, Scott, and Dickenson counties and the city of Norton offering a tax rate on data center equipment of 24 cents per $100 of assessed value. By far, it’s the lowest such rate in the state.
“The more persuasive argument for data centers here is about sustainability for local governments and their citizens,” Clear said. “This creates a new trajectory for tax collections for the next 50 years.”
Water source easy, electricity not so much
The sites they’re eyeing for data centers are atop an estimated 6 billion to 10 billion gallons of underground 55-degree mine water, which offers a less costly method for cooling the hot air generated by hundreds of servers.
It’s not an aquifer. Over the years, rainwater has been filtered by the limestone and sandstone as has it trickled through fissures and cracks and landed in cavities created as coal deposits were removed. The pools of water are as deep as 1,000 feet below the surface.
Four years before ushering in DELTA Lab, Payne and Clear had procured a state grant to study the water supply. Since then, they have been collaborating with engineers to devise a closed-loop water system that could chill the centers and eventually pump the water back underground to be reused after the Earth removes the heat it absorbed.
Drilling of test wells by a geotechnical company is scheduled to begin this fall. That exploration is funded by the federal government and managed by the U.S. Department of Energy.
In the meantime, a looming challenge is securing the flow of electricity to and from Data Center Ridge. Even if on-site solar arrays with backup battery storage are the initial power source, the project needs to have sufficient substations, transmission lines, and other infrastructure to tie into the grid. That way, excess electricity can be shipped out and “imported” electrons can fill any deficits.
Payne and Clear are talking with Kentucky Utilities — which does business in Wise and four other Virginia counties as Old Dominion Power — about upgrading and adding infrastructure. That analysis is part of a larger effort spearheaded by county officials to meet long-term energy demand in Southwest Virginia.
One plus, Clear said, is that siting the buildout of substations and transmission lines will be less difficult on property with one landowner. However, he also knows investor-owned utilities often aren’t keen on asking ratepayers to fund infrastructure built to serve one distant customer.
Davis said his agency would likely pursue federal Energy Department money to construct transmission infrastructure.
Data Center Ridge has the potential to boost the utility’s renewable energy portfolio, which is 1% of a generation energy mix that is heavy on coal, 84%, and natural gas, 15%.
Although every component of their blueprint presents a separate set of obstacles, the entrepreneurs say outsiders’ perception of Appalachia is the chief hindrance.
“Even after making our case since 2019, dispelling myths about the region is our first challenge in getting developers down here,” Payne said. “They think everybody is on meth and lives in shanties.”
They persist to prove their doubters wrong.
“Everything is teed up here to be executed,” Clear said. “It’s getting that first domino to drop that’s really important.”
Correction: David Porter, vice president of electrification and sustainable energy strategy at EPRI, spoke generally about the challenges and opportunities of constructing data centers and coordinating with utilities. He did not speak specifically about the Southwest Virginia project.
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Author Elizabeth McGowan
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