Image by Jeff Eastland.
The morning quiet is disrupted by the whine of the saw and the din of bulldozers as yet another large swath of older woodland gets decimated.
Virginia, a state of great beauty and diversity and a history that is unmatched anywhere in the United States, is currently under attack by a reckless onslaught of data center construction.
These data centers, huge buildings that house supercomputer servers, are being constructed in the Old Dominion at a frantic pace as the U.S. strives to keep up with China in the rapid race for Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency dominance.
Data centers obliterate wildlife habitat, emit noise, heat, and toxic pollutants as well as producing electronic waste. They also require massive amounts of electricity to run and copious amounts of water, as much as 500,000 gallons per day, to cool the servers. (though efforts are reportedly underway to use recycled water and air cooling, the water usage is nonetheless a heavy strain on the region’s fragile waterways and aquifers).
Owing to the proximity to Washington DC, the data center boom in Virginia started in Loudon County, and has spread like a cancer to nearby Fairfax and Prince William counties in Northern Virginia. Virginia now hosts 70% of the entire world’s data centers. Some of these are gigantic. Fairfax County recently approved a 110 foot tall data center, the tallest in the country. It spans 402,000 square feet. For context, a football field is 57,600 square feet. So this data center is the equivalent of 7 football fields.
Currently the data center boom sits on the doorstep of Stafford County, a relatively small county (280 square miles) north of Fredericksburg that was the boyhood home of George Washington, and is also home to many historic sites and sensitive environmental areas consisting of creeks, rivers and wetlands which are home to heron rookeries, large bald eagle and osprey populations, that feeds into the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay.
Local Boards of Supervisors, in their zeal to obtain needed revenue, and fearful of losing a data center to a neighboring locality, have succumbed to the intoxication of the immediate tax revenue the data centers afford.
However, the problems are myriad. First of all, the data centers in Stafford county receive a very favorable tax rate, in addition to rapid depreciation rates, that together vastly limit the comparative amount of property tax revenue received. In addition, if the data center is in what is called a “Technology Zone” they receive rebates. We are thus literally giving away the ranch while destroying it. Apart from some construction jobs, which end when the facility is finished being built, there are no jobs to speak of. The small amount of workers that maintain the centers are mostly supplied by the companies rather than from local workers. So the local communities do not benefit, while paying a price in potential physical and mental health and environmental impacts.
In Stafford alone, 4 data centers have recently been approved, and there are 11 applications pending for rezoning to M-2 (heavy industrial) that were set to be ‘grandfathered’ under the old standards (including 100 foot setbacks !! from residences), when an public outcry at a recent Board meeting caused the Board to pause new applications pending further Planning Commission reviews.
Another troubling issue is the presence of Dominion Energy, the utility behemoth that literally runs the state of Virginia. The law requires that Dominion supply energy to anyone who asks for it. Dominion has recently signed large contracts with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta to provide electricity, when they do not possess the capacity at present to provide the electricity these large data centers require. So then what happens? Dominion is in the process of “unretiring” toxic coal fired plants that were sent to go offline, and is also building out new LNG plants which emit harmful amounts of methane. New plants have been approved by the State Corporation Commission. Who pays? The ratepayer, the average homeowner, now on the hook for 1.5 billion in payments over time. In fact, the household electric bill in Virginia is slated to double in the next five years.
Needless to say, the potential negative environmental implications of such a fossil fuel buildout, at a time when the warming planet is rapidly approaching a tipping point, are staggering.
The non partisan Virginia Joint Legislative and Review Commission (JLARC) has done a study and has stated emphatically that data centers are heavy industry that have no business being built near residential areas or sensitive environmental areas. Yet that is exactly what is being done. For example, in nearby Fredericksburg, officials are squeezing a data center in a U shape, surrounding an apartment complex and assisted living facility, in an unfathomable act of irresponsibility. Here in Stafford, the recently approved Eskimo Hill data center, the largest so far in the county, abuts Accokeek Creek, a tributary of the Potomac and an area of great beauty, with rare bird life, and a Civil War Park.
Further, some localities are now having buyer’s remorse. In neighboring Prince William County, one ‘tenant’ of a data center has declared itself to be a “bank”, avoiding, by law, any taxes. So the county is not getting the revenue promised. And there is apparently nothing the county can do about it. Moreover, Prince William County has somehow seen fit to approve a huge “Prince William Digital Gateway”, billed as the world’s largest, a literal campus of 34 tall data centers right next the the historic Bull Run Manassas National Battlefield Park, potentially ruining that priceless and sacred Civil War site in the process. The project is currently held up in a lawsuit.
Finally, rapidly emerging technologies (edge computing, quantum computing, satellite computing, many others) have the potential to greatly reduce the reliance on large centralized data centers, which could render them obsolete in the future, eventually creating an industrial wasteland.
In 1999, Stafford County was 36% developed. In 2024, the figure was 54%. On the present course, if unchecked, it is projected to be 75% (!!) by 2035.
The only recourse is to try and slow down and stop some of this construction by educating the public and appealing to the local Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors, to impress upon them on the dangers of this crisis, and somehow reverse course. Local residents, and groups such as ProtectStafford and SlowDown Stafford, are doing just that.
A battle awaits. The future of the Commonwealth, and our quality of life, is at stake.
