The Board of County
Supervisors seems inclined to eliminate the Rural Crescent protections which the
Rural Crescent provided to our regional water resources and protecting the
Prince William County taxpayer and water and electricity rate payer from the
expense of building the infrastructure to bring water, sewage and power to the
rural area (in addition to schools and roads) so that data centers can have
cheaper water and electricity than in the west and northeast and developers can
continue to turn Prince William County into Fairfax where the tax rate
continues to need to be increased to supply services and schools to residences
whose own taxes does not cover their additional costs.
To evaluate the
Rural Crescent you must consider its impact on water resources and water
ecology. While the Rural Crescent may have been the wrong policy to preserve
our agricultural heritage, it has been a success at preserving water resources,
protecting our groundwater and supporting the ecosystem of our county. In
addition, continued redevelopment of areas with preexisting infrastructure would
allow Prince William County to improve storm water management in those areas
and score nutrient points for the EPA mandated TMDL as well as revitalize older
areas of the county and support of sustainable development. The Rural Crescent
is about water, and the costs to build out the infrastructure to support the
rural area and replace the groundwater resources diminished by development.
Prince William
Service Authority, PWSA, obtains most of the drinking water they distribute in
the county wholesale from Fairfax Water. Besides purchased water from Fairfax
Water, PWSA operates the Evergreen water wells that draw water directly from
the Culpeper Basin and thousands of home owners have private wells that also
draw from the aquifer. The Virginia-American Water Company also distributes
water purchased from Fairfax Water. Any changes in land use have the potential
to negatively impact groundwater, the watershed and the Occoquan Reservoir and significantly
increase demand for water.
Back in 2009 Amazon
estimated that a 15 megawatt data center can require up to 360,000 gallons of
water a day- that is equivalent to more than 1,000 households. In addition,
their power usage is a 24/7 load- a base load not easily replaced by renewable
power sources. Northern Virginia reportedly has 166 data centers. This represents 1,027 megawatts of power capacity-more than anywhere in the nation. Sixty percent of the currently planned data centers nationally are to be built in Northern Virginia. That represents a tremendous ongoing demand for power and water.
According to the
U.S. Geological Survey total water consumption in the USA in 2015 was 321
billion gallons per day, of which thermoelectric power used 133 billion gallons,
irrigation used 118 billion gallons and 39 billion gallons per day went to
supply 87% of the US population with potable water. Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory reported in 2014 that data centers consume water both indirectly
through electricity generation (traditionally thermoelectric power) and
directly through cooling. Data centers compete with other users for access to
local resources. Amazon’s medium-sized data center (15 megawatts (MW)) uses as
much water as three average-sized hospitals according to “Data centre water
consumption” by David Mytton an article
published in Nature in last month. In addition, more than half of this water ispotable.
The County Board of
Supervisors need to STOP and study what the costs of these zoning and
comprehensive plan changes are to our water resources and the expense that the
community will have to bear to build out the infrastructure to support these plans BEFORE THEY APPROVE these changes.
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