Emails show how Virginia regulators downplayed data center health concerns – POLITICO
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality stepped into a fight over powering AI facilities with natural gas turbines. It could shape the industry’s future.
…The Piedmont Environmental Council had sent the report to Michael Rolband as a courtesy two days before publicizing it in March. It ignited a scramble within the agency to poke holes in the analysis, which raised concerns about the health effects of an AI facility that stands at the vanguard of the state’s fastest-growing industry.
Internal emails obtained by POLITICO through a public records request paint a portrait of an agency that moved quickly to defend the only data center in Virginia that is powering itself — in what former officials and environmental health advocates described as an unusual effort to shape the debate around an industry whose global epicenter is in the state.
The agency’s pushback focused on the report’s findings that the facility in Loudoun County could release harmful amounts of air pollution through eight bus-sized natural gas turbines — as allowed by permits granted by DEQ itself.
Behind the scenes, Rolband’s request was met by opposition from some DEQ staffers who said that assessing the report’s assertions on health effects fell outside of their environmental training.
…The report commissioned by Piedmont raised concerns that the data center’s on-site power system, which also includes dozens of backup diesel generators, could cause tens of millions of dollars in health damages to people living around the facility, owned by Vantage Data Centers.
In the emails, Rolband told staff that the Piedmont Environmental Council “wants to criticize DEQ” and that the agency “must take the time to do a defensible critique” of the group’s analysis.
…Robert Burnley, who led DEQ between 2002 and 2006, said the agency’s report was “unusual” and amounts to “editorializing.”
“The DEQ is not the health department, it’s not their job to determine the health of a community,” he said. “If you’re trying to defend a permit, you just say these emissions don’t contribute to a violation of the air quality standards. That’s what I would say, and that’s all I would say.”
…The emails show that Rolband shared his agency’s report with officials at Vantage and the Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group. The coalition then blasted it out to reporters and lawmakers as supposed evidence that the Piedmont analysis had been wrong.