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"Virginia Has the Biggest Data Center Market in the World. Can It Also Decarbonize Its Grid?" originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment.
Summary
- Loudoun County, Virginia recently rejected a proposal for a larger data center due to concerns about power availability.
- Data centers in Virginia are driving rising energy demand and pose challenges to the state’s decarbonization goals.
- Environmentalists emphasize the need for innovative ways to manage the grid, but some say it’s possible to balance data center growth with clean energy.
Key quotes:
- Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electric utility, has forecast that data centers will be the most significant driver of rising energy demand in the state over the next 15 years.
- Data centers and Virginia have been hand in glove for almost three decades, since companies like MAE-East, Equinix and AOL built some of the earliest modern facilities in the Washington suburbs. With close proximity to the federal government and the defense firms ringing it, Northern Virginia—and especially Ashburn in Loudoun County, known as “Data Center Alley”—quickly became the beating heart of the U.S. data center industry.
- While data centers’ peak energy usage in 2022 was almost 2.8 gigawatts—roughly one and a half times the power produced at Dominion’s largest Virginia plant, the North Anna nuclear facility in Louisa County—the company forecasts they will require roughly 13.3 gigawatts by 2038. Much of that may be due to Amazon Web Services, which Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin last year announced intends to invest $35 billion in data center campuses in the state by 2040, although Dominion does not disclose information about specific customers.
Read the full post at Inside Climate News.
