By Daniel Berti Times Staff Writer
All three are located outside the county’s Data Center Opportunity Overlay District, a nearly 10,000-acre area created in 2016 where county officials determined there is existing electrical infrastructure to support data centers.
County supervisors voted 6-2 to approve a rezoning and special use permit for the I-66 and Route 29 Technology Park. The board’s five Democrats and Supervisor Jeanine Lawson, R-Brentsville, voted in favor. Supervisors Pete Candland, R-Gainesville, and Yesli Vega, R-Coles, voted against.
The new data centers planned for the intersection of John Marshall Highway and Catharpin Road have been contentious. Some county supervisors and civic groups are worried that new electrical transmission lines will be needed to support the new facilities.
Between 2014 and 2018, Gainesville residents fought Dominion Energy over the creation of a new transmission line to serve an Amazon Web Services data center on the opposite side of Haymarket, near Walmart. Ultimately, an agreement was reached that required the energy company to put several miles of transmission lines underground in the Haymarket area.
“It’s unfair to put the community through this again,” Elena Schlossberg-Kunkel, executive director of The Coalition to Protect PWC, said during a public hearing that preceded the board’s vote.
Dominion Energy provided its input ahead of Tuesday’s public hearing, but “expressed a preference not to address the impacts of new load growth on the area’s electric grid with new electric transmission infrastructure.” An attorney for the project’s applicant, Southview 66 LLC, said Dominion Energy would not provide any energy estimates until the plan is further developed.
In an interview with Prince William Times earlier this year, however, Dominion Energy Manager of Electric Transmission Greg Mathe appeared to confirm that new transmission lines will be needed. Mathe said the data center cluster at John Marshall Highway and Catharpin, “is leading towards what is seeming to be needing new infrastructure.”
“Although we don’t have firm ideas from these land developers or these data center developers on firm load requirements, we are anticipating that those reliability concerns will come into play and that there could be, or will be, a need for new transmission lines,” Mathe said.
Southview 66 LLC has agreed to abandon developing the property for data centers if Dominion Energy determines the data centers would require the construction of new above-ground transmission lines west of the property, in the vicinity of Haymarket. The assurance does not preclude an additional line coming from the east, however.
No data center user has signed onto the project yet. The applicants said they envision a campus with six buildings designed to look like large office buildings. Each building is allowed to be up to 75 feet tall and will have tree buffers to decrease its visibility from the road.
The I-66 and Route 29 Technology Park has been pitched by the applicant as a major economic benefit to the county. It is anticipated to generate between $35 and $64 million annually in local tax revenues for Prince William County at full buildout and provide 7,600 to 14,200 construction jobs and between 500 and 630 permanent jobs, according to an independent fiscal analysis of the project conducted by Glen Allen-based firm Magnum Economics.
Data centers are extremely energy intensive. Data center demand in Virginia reached 1,285 megawatts in 2019, according to Dominion Energy’s 2020 “Data Center Load Forecast.” Northern Virginia, particularly Loudoun and Prince William counties, have the highest concentration of data centers in the commonwealth.
Candland, who voted against the plan, said he had serious concerns about whether the data centers at John Marshall Highway and Catharpin Road will require new electrical infrastructure.
“One of the challenges that we’ve had in working with Dominion is really their lack of clarity in nailing down whether there’s sufficient capacity. There’s serious concern that there’s not enough capacity there and that will require additional power lines and additional infrastructure,” Candland said.
Reach Daniel Berti at dberti@fauquier.com