In response to the hard reality that Dominion Energy CANNOT meet the demands of the data center electricity hogs that are currently in operation (NOT to include all those which are proposed and under consideration), the energy solution which has been proposed is running our grid on dirty diesel generators. Currently, the issue is transmission constraints that threaten Loudoun County’s Data Center Alley. The trajectory of Prince William County expansion of data center development outside of the data center overlay, in addition to the 27M sq. ft. of data centers in the proposed Digital Gateway, will be more than double that of Data Center Alley. It’s obvious this issue will go well beyond this year and all across the region.
When the Executive Director for the Coalition to Protect PWC dragged 40 lbs. of coal to the front of the County Board of Supervisors’ dais on December 13th of last year, she said: “This is your Christmas gift to citizens. If you do not stop approving data centers, the only way to power them will be from dirty coal.” How could the Coalition have predicted, a mere six weeks later, that the threat had expanded to dirty diesel?!
This article has finally spoken the unthinkable truth: Report: Retiring fossil fuel generators could cause electricity shortage | Cape Gazette
“A PJM Interconnection graph shows how announced plant retirements along with others expected to retire due to government policy and economic pressure will affect energy capacity in gigawatts. A gigawatt is a unit of power that is equal to 1 billion watts or 1,000 megawatts. One gigawatt of electricity generated would power between 800,000 and 1 million homes, according to PJM. In terms of sustainable energy, the U.S. Department of Energy says it takes 3.125 million photovoltaic panels or 333 utility-scale wind turbines to make one gigawatt. SOURCE: PJM”
“…In addition, PJM expects electricity demand to increase 1.4% per year over the next 10 years. A large part of the increase, the report states, comes from data center activity, namely the Data Center Alley in Loudoun County, Va., which is the largest concentration of data centers in the world.”
Although solar and wind power COULD EVENTUALLY provide SOME relief to our reliance on fossil fuel, the truth is that in Virginia the unchecked expansion of data centers has created a power grid crisis.
To help people understand how quickly just ONE gigawatt of electric power is consumed by data center development: In a one mile radius that includes just four data center projects outside of the data center overlay in Gainesville: the projected load for the Gainesville Crossing data center complex, plus the approved Rte. 29 Technology Park data center complex, the under-construction Villages Technology Park data center complex, and the proposed John Marshall Technology Park – these together approach one gigawatt of required electric power.
WHERE are you going to erect 3.125 MILLION solar panels sufficient to provide just this ONE gigawatt of power? A single megawatt of utility-scale solar requires 7-10 acres of land. This means that 7,000 to 10,000 acres would be required to produce the needed power for just these 4 data center complexes. And that is not considering the land needed for transmission line upgrades and battery storage to address intermittency limitations with solar!
The millions of acres of land that would be required for solar facilities to power all the millions of sq. ft. of data centers already constructed and proposed across Virginia would have a devastating impact on the natural resources of the state, but realistically could not even be built fast enough… demonstrating there is no plan, and our grid, our natural resources, and our very quality of life are all at serious risk!
There is enough blame to go around.
- Our elected leaders approve data centers with no thought of ALL of the consequences.
- Dominion Energy believes they are the stars in a Kevin Costner movie, “Grid of Dreams”: “If you build it (data centers) “we” will come with our magical infrastructure” — who knows when.
- The data center industry, believing if THEY build it, of course there will always be power magically provided.
- And finally, ALL of us, across the globe, who create the data without ever deleting it.
In the middle of all of this mess is the beautiful state of Virginia, the home of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the rivers, and the coast, the birthplace of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Booker T. Washington.
Our Virginia carbon emission goals will not be met, cannot be met, with the specter of data center blight and their associated energy needs looming over the state.
The internet “cloud’ is NOT an innocent looking fluffy white thing in the sky – it is massive concrete buildings and the web of everything it takes to run them.
Our agricultural lands are turning into data center campuses enveloped in a tangle of massive transmission lines and substations. If they are not taken over by the data centers themselves or their infrastructure, our fertile lands will be turned en masse into solar facilities as their GREENWASH. Solar facilities that will be a mere grain of sand on the required beach of energy needed to feed the data centers’ insatiable appetite for electricity.
The future of Virginia, as the epicenter of the world’s internet and data center storage, is bleak if we do not look this challenge square in the face.
This IS a solvable problem.
More:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73IiCG51_VI Watch this to the hopeful end!
Virginia Mercury: Across the country, a big backlash to new renewables is mounting
Driving data center success despite the headwinds – DCD (datacenterdynamics.com)
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