Digital Gateway Rezoning is Coming

 On November 1, 2022, the Prince William Board of County Supervisors adopted Comprehensive Plan Amendment for the PW Digital Gateway. They did this without performing a watershed study as requested by Fairfax County and Fairfax Water.  The Digital Gateway Development could very likely endanger the Occoquan watershed, the most urbanized watershed in the nation and currently experiencing degradation; and the Occoquan Reservoir, the source of water for 800,000 Prince William and Fairfax residents. The data center companies and landowners and seemingly the democratic majority of our Prince William County Supervisors could not care less. To move forward, the proposed data centers have to be rezoned and get a Special Use Permit, SUP.

Now, three rezoning applications have been submitted within the area of PW Digital Gateway Comprehensive Plan Amendment, Digital Gateway North, Digital Gateway South, and Compass Datacenters. The proposals also request a waiver to requirements that the proposed data centers must have an approved SUP. The rezoning request lacks a detailed layout of the site, despite detailed requests for additional information from PWC staff. The proposed rezoning requests are too general and do not provide sufficient details to even determine the location of site features and resource protected areas under the Chesapeake Bay Protection Act. It appears that the data centers propose using the RPA as the path for the power lines. That is forbidden by Virginia Law- the Chesapeake Bay Protection Act.  

For waiver of the SUP requirement, PWC staff would need the same level of detail in the rezoning request as would be required with the SUP, and that all relevant impacts should be appropriately mitigated to protect our water, our grid and our citizens as a SUP would. Yet, the data center developers think that on such a large and complicated site, asking for this level of detail is unreasonable. They failed to submit the requested information, address the impacts to the properties to the west, or develop adequate mitigations to impact to the Battlefield and historical resources.

Data centers are the physical factories of the internet. Standard data centers are warehouses filled with row upon row of servers, routers, wires, and other information technology hardware spanning hundreds of thousands of highly cooled square feet per building and sucking up incredible amounts of power. Now we have the emerging demand for AI data centers. These specialized data centers run high performance chips like the Nvidia graphics processing units that use seven times the power of traditional data centers. This requires additional power infrastructure, and the extra power generates more heat and requires liquid cooling to prevent the equipment from overheating. The applicants have not submitted the maximum daily water demands and peak wastewater flows for each phase of development, so the hydraulic capacity studies by the PW Service Authority cannot be completed.

The intension to migrate these 2.5 million square feet of data centers to AI might be in the proposal for water usage. The comment from PWC staff: “The CPA policies encourage efficient water usage for data center development using closed loop water, or no water-cooling systems. What is proposed is not consistent with the CPA policies.” Furthermore, the Applicants are proposing increasing the height limits to 100 feet for the building and not counting the roof mounted cooling equipment in that height calculation. Though, the view shed analysis was done using a lower height and only done for points in the Battlefield not the western property boundary.  

Though the rezoning request provides numerous notes and labels throughout there are no assurances that proposed improvements, standards, and locations of these items will be complied with. The Applicant describes items as “typical” rather than specific for the plan.  In addition, substation locations shown are “approximate.” Limits of development shown are “approximate.” Wildlife crossings shown are “approximate.” Basically, the data center Applicants are saying trust us. It’s a blank check and they can don anything they want -endangering our environment, water supply and our power supply.

Last spring Dominion Energy released their Integrated Resource Plane (IRP) which details how it plans to meet electricity needs and demands of their customers over the next 15 years. The picture they painted is that Dominion cannot both meet the power demand of the exploding number of data centers in Virginia and the mandates of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA). The 2020 VCEA is the state’s law outlining a path to decarbonize the electric grid by 2050. With the specter of seven times the power usage Dominion may not even be able to meet the power demand.

Dominion Energy Virginia does not produce all the electricity it delivers and sells. Dominion Energy is a member of PJM Interconnection, LLC (PJM), the regional transmission organization coordinating the wholesale electric grid in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. PJM other members supply a significant amount of the energy used in Virginia- about a fifth. PJM recently identified increasing reliability risks due to both the growing demand for power in Virginia and the profile of that power demand and from the premature retirement of dispatchable carbon generation facilities across the region.

The load growth of the Data Center in Northern Virginia is according to PJM will grow at 7% annually. That means that electricity demand will more than double over the next 10 years for traditional data centers only, it will be multiples of that for AI data centers.

In the rezoning request for the Digital Gateway the Applicants treated the specific details requested by staff to ensure that the plans comply with federal and state law, regulations and rules was too much on such a large scale development. They ignored them. These rules and regulations exist for a purpose-to protect our water supply, our grid, our environment and us. The details are necessary.  Afterall the devil’s in the details.