Data centers are back at the fore today, with proponents and opponents staking out their positions.
A report from National Review about a pro-data center gathering on Saturday night in Washington, D.C., covers the participants’ efforts to effect a “vibe shift” around data centers.
The pro-data center event took place at the same time as Loudoun County, Virginia, which has more data centers than any other locality in the country, is having a community debate about how many more it wants to absorb.
The centering topic this week is the move by Amazon to turn the George Washington University satellite campus in the county into a place for data centers. According to a piece in the Loudoun Times-Mirror, the case is “a complicated one that centers on more than 50 years of complex zoning. Amazon Data Services bought GWU’s Virginia Science and Technology Campus in the University Center area north of Ashburn for $427 million this February and applied this summer to build data centers there. An Amazon spokesperson has said GWU will be able to keep operating at the site for up to five years.”
The tension in these two events is a good example of what a story in Utility Drive described as a “contradictory phase” in data center development.
“On the one hand,” the piece reports, “both data center construction activity and credible forecasts for near-term capacity additions to the electric grid to serve data centers remain robust. The Electric Power Research Institute, for example, said in February that data centers will represent up to 17% of U.S. electricity demand in 2030 and as much as 20% in 2035. On the other hand, data center and utility infrastructure projects face a host of challenges. These include both physical constraints, such as equipment and labor shortages, as well as mounting public opposition driven by concerns about large-scale computing facilities’ impact on water supplies, the cost and reliability of power and natural gas supplies, and the quality of life in host communities.”
One of the driving factors in the pushback against data centers is energy. The Utility Drive report, however, puts a focus on some of the innovative solutions to address that challenge.
Among the solutions highlighted are “ Google’s “first-of-its-kind” deal with Voltus for 100 MW of virtual power plant capacity in PJM.” And, ironically, AI will likely have a role in addressing the problem as well.
“Last fall,” according to the Utility Drive story, “Portland General Electric said that by using GridCARE’s AI-powered load modeling tool, it had freed up 80 MW of interconnection headroom — about a fifth of the 400 MW of data center load it expects to add by 2029.
