Screenshot from the Data Center Frontier Trends Summit 2024 Website – note the sold out sign.
Source: https://www.dcftrends.com/2024/home
In early September 2024, Nature Forward Conservation Director Lydia Lawrence and I attended the Data Center Frontier Trends Summit in Reston, Virginia. Thankfully, I was on week three of my new role and was fully prepared to be knowledgeable in conversations with industry experts. In all seriousness, I was nervous about my ability to even understand what the base issues of data centers were, much less be able to find solutions. I was walking into this conference seeking common ground between developers and environmental advocates. Collaboration requires dexterity and relationships, something that I haven’t had enough time to build. Above all, I was worried about being shut down immediately once I said where I work. For a moment, I even thought about lying about my job; though that betrays the mutual respect I was trying to build.
I was surprised to find many summit participants to be open to conversation. One engineer, perhaps with more bald-faced earnestness than I would have liked, asked me why neighbors don’t like data centers. He hadn’t heard of the community opposition in his bubble – which makes sense when you think about how far removed his role is from what every day people are experiencing. I was pleased that he listened to the concerns with good nature. I had another conversation with a fuel cell expert on the different costs of fuels in both real dollars and our environment, and he laughed when I kept hammering him for numbers that turn out to be very top secret.
Data Center 101:
Nature Forward has written several different pieces of data centers; you can peruse our backlog here. Data centers refer to the buildings that house the computing equipment that enables all of us to go onto social media, host Zoom calls, and participate in a digitally connected world. We are most concerned about the unfettered development of “hyperscalers” or the extremely large data centers such as those seen covering Ashburn, Virginia.
Please refer to our previous Conservation Cafes on the different environmental challenges here:
Data Centers: How AI Is Keeping Us from Our Climate Goals!
Data Centers and local National Parks: Do They Compute?
2024 aerial imagery of Loudoun County – notice Data Center Alley circled.
Source: https://logis.loudoun.gov/archive/
Conference Takeaways
Data centers developers want more and clearer standards.
- I was surprised to find many speakers asked to work collaboratively with local governments and even more surprised to find some of the larger, more sophisticated data center developers actually asking for regulation. Unfortunately, it seemed the developers who care about environmental issues and community engagement were being undercut by the “lowest common denominators.” These operators cut corners and offer lower costs to lure business away from more ethical developers. In the end, the best thing regulators can do is have clear, consistent zoning regulations along with a development pipeline to leads to fast answers.
The data center industry is too secretive.
- It was widely acknowledged that data centers have a PR problem and are rushing ahead without concern for neighborhoods. Thus, master planning is paramount; neighborhood input and buy-in allows a project to move smoothly and keep up with the emerging technology for data centers.
- Developers understand that they cannot gain public trust without more transparency, but they are afraid of being undercut or overtaken. Data centers have been touted as job creators; however, in talks with local contractors, many shared frustrations that they were not able to even find the right contact, much less sell their products and win bids.
Data centers use a lot of energy, and developers are acknowledging the gap between supply and demand.
- The energy needs of data centers are mind blowing and renewable energy alone will not be able to keep up. To give you some perspective, a large DC office building using solar panels might generate 100 kilowatts of energy onsite; however, the current capacity requests that Dominion is receiving are on the order of 50 gigawatts (that’s 500,000 DC office buildings with solar). Dominion admitted they aren’t able to keep up with demand and extended their forecast for getting new data center power requests from five years to seven years. This is an extremely speculative industry; as utilities are trying to build out faster and broader, there is no guarantee the data centers will even use all that power we rushed to provide them.
Future Learnings:
If you are still interested in learning more, here are additional resources while I do more digging. You can sign up for action alerts here, and I will keep you abreast of any opportunities to engage more.
Learn more about the energy issues that come from data centers:
- Sierra Club’s Demanding Better Report
- No one in the US has dealt with more data centers than Loudoun County. You can read Ashburn Supervisor Mike Turner’s White Paper on potential data center regulations. He does a great job of defining the different types of players in this space and outlining how we got to this place today. Finally, he has some great gems that sum up the struggle between development and technological advancement: “…We’ve invented the airplane but just realized we haven’t yet invented runways.”
- Look for updates by the end of 2024 on the upcoming Virginia JLARC data center report to come out. JLARC’s current work can be found here.
And finally, if you are a legislator or data center developer, I urge you to email me at [email protected] – I want to find middle ground regulations that weed out the least common denominators so we can hit our state’s environmental and technological goals.