Virginia Wrestles with Cost, Impact of Data Centers. Others Should Watch.

Notice that I did not say that Virginia has figured things out, only that they are trying to figure it out.

Virginia has the most data centers in the country, hence the biggest challenges. Challenges include COST of energy to non-data center customers, noise from diesel generators, massive water usage and other challenges.

Data center developers have told Dominion Energy, one of the state’s largest energy providers, that their upcoming projects will require 40 gigawatts of electricity.

That is the equivalent of multiplying the number of Virginia households nearly four times.

They plan to work on that by building more power plants.

The legislature introduced 33 bills in the last session to deal with data centers and their impact. Nothing of any significance became law.

Virginia is now the top importer of electricity – something all households and small businesses who don’t need that have to pay for.

It also means that if they screw up they could take down the entire mid-Atlantic power grid. I used to live on the east coast and have been through that at least twice that I can remember. Now they have better load shedding ability, so hopefully, blackouts now will be more localized. Computers will instantly kill power to entire neighborhoods to stop from damaging the grid. Bringing the power back online turns out to be much harder to do. And slower.

And even though the data centers’ massive generators are an environmental problem, at least the utilities can kick them off the grid if they need to.

This also pretty much destroys the state’s efforts to become carbon neutral any time soon.

The majority of the bills never made it out of committee.

This is a worldwide problem and not one that is easy to fix.

The president is considering pushing for small nukes. Whether that happens or not is unclear. Of course that has never been tested at scale, so I am sure it will work perfectly.

It is an interesting problem and not one that is easy to solve. Credit: Route 50

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