Earlier this summer, I set off for a self-guided tour of Data Center Alley in Loudoun County, Virginia. This is the worldwide hub of data center development. Tech companies flocked to Northern Virginia after AOL opened its headquarters here in the 1990s and haven’t looked back.
Virginia has an astounding 680 data centers in operation, under construction, or planned, and most are in the northern part of the state. These are basically server farms that power the internet, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, and now, most often, artificial intelligence (AI). For the tour, a friend and I followed a route provided by the Loudoun Climate Project, one of the many local environmental organizations in Virginia’s Data Center Reform Coalition.
This wasn’t my first drive through the data center corridor—I grew up nearby and still live here with my family. And at this point, I’m fairly well versed in the many climate and health impacts of fossil-fuel powered data centers. I didn’t expect to be surprised by what I saw. I was so very wrong.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution
This is what I learned:
1. There are a lot of data centers in Northern Virginia, and they all come with dozens of diesel generators.
It’s hard to picture what the data center capital of the world looks like. Try to imagine data centers and construction sites literally lining roads for miles and miles. In Loudoun County, there hasn’t been a single day without data center construction for 15 years. And each new data center has at least one massive stack of backup diesel generators.
There are about 10,500 diesel generators permitted to provide backup power to data centers in Virginia. These generators emit pollutants, like soot, benzene, and formaldehyde, that increase the risk of heart disease, lung disease, asthma attacks, neurological issues, and cancer. Unfortunately, these generators aren’t only run during power outages; they are routinely turned on for testing maintenance and to save money by reducing the amount of power a data center is buying from the utility during times of highest demand, among other reasons.
2. The data centers and their dirty generators are in the middle of bustling neighborhoods.
For decades, data centers in Loudoun County and across Northern Virginia were classified as office parks so they could be built quickly and without public approval or notification (for the policy wonks out there, this is “use by right zoning”; Loudoun eliminated by right zoning for data centers last year, other localities have not). This means these buildings are often immediately next door to neighborhoods, playgrounds, shopping centers, and schools.
Picture this: The first cluster of data centers on the tour is about six miles from my house. We parked at soccer fields, where kids were playing at summer camp. A community center and townhome neighborhood bordered the fields on the right. To the left and behind the fields were massive data centers with over 100 diesel generators permitted between them. (Is your heartrate spiking? Mine is remembering this.)
Later on the tour, we arrived at Tippets Hill Cemetery, a historical site dating back to the nineteenth century. Originally located on Tippets Hill Plantation for the interment of enslaved people, this cemetery is now surrounded on most sides by data centers. And it isn’t the only historic site threatened by data center construction where I live. Until a few months ago, the Prince William Digital Gateway, planned to be the world’s largest data center complex, was proposed to sit next to Manassas National Battlefield Park, the site of the Civil War’s Battles of Bull Run. (The Digital Gateway faced enormous public scrutiny and was canceled in April.)
3. Data centers need a lot of power, which means new gas plants, massive powerlines, and so many substations.
The Vantage 2 data center, across the Tippets Hill Cemetery fence line, is the first in Loudoun to have its own on-site gas power plant—eight gas turbines that run 24/7 to power the facility. More data centers are expected to come online with on-site fossil fuel power sources locally because there is currently a seven-year wait for a new data center in Virginia to connect to the regional electric grid. This means Virginians are not just facing dirty diesel emissions from generators but pollution from potentially dozens (hundreds?) of mini power plants speckled across the region.
It’s not just on-site power stations, though. The last stop on our tour was the Potomac Energy Center, a gas plant built in 2017 to provide reliable energy to Data Center Alley. This power plant is representative of local gas infrastructure buildout that is about to get a lot bigger. Seven new gas plants have been proposed for Virginia—all across the state—to cover now exponentially larger energy needs. And this despite my home state’s bedrock climate law, the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which is meant to put us on a path to 100% clean electricity by 2050. News flash: methane gas isn’t clean energy. It is a potent climate pollutant.
The road to Potomac Energy Center is flanked with otherworldly extra-high-voltage powerlines, which look like something out of Star Wars. It’s also hard to miss all the new electrical substations. The powerlines and substations are necessary because our regular old electric grid cannot safely supply the power these facilities require, and they are sprouting up all over the region.
From the soulless, windowless buildings, to the terrifying stacks of generators, to the overwhelm of new energy infrastructure—and all right next to people’s homes and children playing and schools—the feeling that’s stuck with me since taking this tour is grief. I’m mourning all the natural beauty my state has lost, all the history being bulldozed, a Virginia I grew up with that my daughter will never know. The change in landscape crept in so slowly but is so drastic. It’s heartbreaking.
After seeing this all up close, I worry this development isn’t worth all the destruction, it isn’t worth sacrificing our children’s health or future, it isn’t worth rolling blackouts or exponentially higher electricity bills. AI isn’t worth any of this. And also, AI is not going away. We know this. So we have to call for data centers to be powered with renewable energy backed up by battery storage. And we have to advocate for strong pollution controls.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution