Stretching across Loudoun and Fairfax counties is an area in northern Virginia known as Data Center Alley. Large concrete buildings dot the landscape, filled with servers, which drive 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic.
“When you talk about something happening online or in the cloud, you’re talking about something that’s actually happening and powered by a physical data center. It’s actually a building,” explained Jon Hukill, director of communications at Data Center. Coalition. .
The average American home has at least 22 devices connected to the Internet. They have expanded from phones and computers to televisions, lights and smart appliances.
Our digital society creates so much data that massive storage facilities are now needed to process and store it all.
“Instead of each business or individual Internet user having their own server for their data, a data center aggregates all of our collective computing needs into a single facility. And by doing so, that facility is secure, reliable, and more efficient.” Hukill tells CBN News.
While data centers provide a critical service, they also require an enormous amount of electricity.
“It’s not uncommon for a data center to require as much power as, say, 25,000 homes,” Dominion Power spokesman Aaron Ruby explained.
Affordable and reliable energy helped attract these facilities to Virginia; However, its projected growth raises concerns that we could reach a point where utilities, and even the power grid itself, cannot keep pace.
“Think about the last five years, basically the energy demand of data centers and our service territory has doubled. And looking at the next 15 years, we project that the energy demand of data centers will probably quadruple” said Ruby.
Despite the growth forecast, he wants to assure Virginians that plans are in place to address this growing need.
“If energy demand is going to almost double in 15 years, that means we will have to almost double our energy supply in the next 15 years. Which means we will have to build a significant number of new power plants. In addition, we need to build a significant amount of new power lines, transmission lines, distribution lines and substations, to be able to deliver almost double the electricity to our customers,” Ruby told CBN News.
He says Dominion’s plan for the future is based on a mix of energy sources, 95 percent of which are carbon-free.
This includes the country’s largest offshore wind project, second-largest solar fleet, expanding battery storage and exploring next-generation nuclear energy. Only five percent of the new energy will come from natural gas.
Still, these major network upgrades cost money, and some of Dominion’s residential customers don’t want to pay the data center industry’s energy bill.
“The truth is, if you take away the data center industry, Virginia is not experiencing this explosive type of streaming need, this next-generation need,” said Elena Schlossberg, executive director of the Coalition to Protect Prince County. William.
He points out that while data centers pay for their energy use, taxpayers are the ones who have to pay to finance the new infrastructure.
“All of us residents are covering the cost of these huge transmission lines and at some point we will need to build all the generation. What is happening in Virginia is not normal,” Schlossberg told CBN News.
He worries that being the “Data Center Capital of the World” will end up destroying his status.
“These don’t belong in homes, they don’t belong in national parks and they certainly don’t belong in drinking water supply basins. Something has to change,” Schlossberg said.
For example, a lawsuit is underway against a planned resort across from Manassas National Battlefield Park. Dubbed the “Digital Gateway”, many homeowners in the area have agreed to sell their properties, rather than live next to such a massive industrial development.
“Data centers are destroying communities. They are consuming too much electricity, too much fossil fuel, too much water and too much land, and at some point we all have to be part of that conversation, because we are sacrificing the real world for the digital world,” he explained. Schlossberg.
When asked about the costs of the planned grid upgrades, the Dominion spokesperson responded that customers’ monthly energy bills will only increase three percent a year, a rate below historical inflation. He adds that the biggest cost increase is not due to data center growth.
“The vast majority of those costs are due to the clean energy transition we are undertaking in Virginia,” Ruby said.
Meanwhile, Hukill says the data center industry is always looking for ways to be more efficient.
“This is going to be an industry that’s going to be with us for a long time, so data centers want to be good neighbors, they want to participate in the communities that they’re a part of,” he explained.
While these experts say it’s easy to point the finger at the data center industry, consumers continue to drive its explosive growth. And that figure is expected to rise as research predicts that global data demand in 2030 will be 10 times the amount needed earlier this decade.
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