Letter: Virginia data centers could overwhelm the grid (richmond.com)

Chair Ann Wheeler and her four fellow board members refuse to even entertain the notion that THEIR local decisions on data center development are contributing to these risks to providing reliable power.

Letter: Blame data centers for rising energy costs

The Aug. 7 article “Dominion proposal: Don’t use your air conditioning and get a rebate” was helpful in raising awareness of the need for all of us to conserve energy.

But it left out the elephant in the room: the high and rising energy use of data centers in Virginia. Already, data centers account for 21% of Dominion’s electricity sales in Virginia. And both Dominion and Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection have raised alarms about data center electricity growth that will overwhelm the grid and soon give us two elephants in the room.

These two elephants will create grid unreliability, higher costs for transmission infrastructure, postponing of retirements of fossil fuel plants, higher greenhouse gas emissions, and expensive import of energy from other states. It’s all laid out in Dominion’s 2023 Integrated Resource Plan.

It’s time for the State Corporation Commission and the Virginia legislature to clamp down on data center energy growth. Don’t be fooled by industry claims of increased energy efficiency and renewable energy credits. Renewable energy credits are a shell game, and energy efficiency is not enough to offset the explosive growth.

Here’s a suggestion: The legislature or the SCC should impose a stiff surcharge on purchase/installation of data center HVACs and other energy-intensive equipment. Or impose a surcharge directly on data center energy consumption. The revenue could be used for household energy conservation programs. Data centers should also be required to pay for new electric transmission lines, substations and power plants that are required to serve them. And slow down the approval of new data centers to what our grid can handle.

Our grid is at risk, and costs are going up to satiate the data center energy appetite. Let’s not just turn down the AC in our homes. Let’s turn down data center energy growth.

 

Cindy Burbank.

Warrenton.