Digital Gateway Rezoning: Void

In news from the battlefield: Last Thursday Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Kimberly Irving ruled in favor of the Oak Valley Homeowners’ Association and a group of individual homeowners who live near the planned Digital Gateway development at the edge of Manassas National Battlefield Park. Judge Irving said the Prince William Board of County Supervisors’ decision to rezone 1,790 acres of homes and farms for the data center development is void because the county failed to comply with state and local notice requirements in advance of the public hearings, that were held in December 2023.

The only question decided was whether Prince William County complied with public notice laws ahead of the Dec. 12, 2023, public hearing for the PW Digital Gateway rezonings. The defendants- Prince William County and the two data center developers, QTS and Compass Datacenters, will decide whether to appeal the decision or go through the rezoning process again. Another legal challenge to the Digital Gateway is winding its way through the appeals process.

 

A little background:

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 endanger the Occoquan watershed, the most urbanized watershed in the nation and currently experiencing degradation; and the Occoquan Reservoir, the source of water for nearly 1,000,000 northern Virginia residents.

The rezoning heard in December 2023 also requested a waiver to requirement that the planned 37 data centers must have an approved SUP, denying the county and public a final review of the plans for the site before approval. The process was rushed resulting in the notice deficiency as found by Judge Irving; however, there were many deficiencies in the rezoning request itself.

The rezoning request lacked a detailed layout of the site, despite detailed requests for additional information from PWC staff. The proposed rezoning requests were too general and did not provide sufficient details to even determine the actual location of site features and resource protected areas under the Chesapeake Bay Protection Act. It appeared that the data centers propose using part of the RPA as the path for the power lines. That is forbidden by Virginia Law- the Chesapeake Bay Protection Act.  

For a reasonable waiver of the SUP requirement, PWC staff 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 argued (successfully to the Board of Supervisors) that on such a large and complicated site, asking for this level of detail was unreasonable. They failed to submit the requested information, address the impacts to the properties to the west, or develop adequate mitigations to prevent impact to the Battlefield and historical resources, and Occoquan watershed.

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 never 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 were not completed. This was and remains unacceptable.  Impacts on the water supply adequacy and the need for and costs of additional water storage in the system were not addressed.

In a briefing to the Board of County Supervisors in December 2024, the Occoquan Watershed Laboratory Director, Dr. Stanley Grant made it clear that emerging water quality issues are a result of the “built” environment. The Digital Gateway will certainly increase that. As we continue to develop the Occoquan Watershed we endanger the sustainability of the water supply for the up to 1 million people in northern Virginia who depend on the Occoquan for their water supply. When population density increases, the impervious surfaces in a watershed increase. However, the increase is not linear, once the population density reaches 100 people per square mile, the rate of increase in impervious surfaces takes off. Data centers only accelerate this trends because the bult environment increases significantly without any increase in population density.

Alimatou Seck, Senior Water Resources Scientist of the ICPRB found that data centers currently consume about 2% of the water used from the Potomac River Basin rising to about 8% in the summer when adiabatic cooling is necessary. If the industry continues to grow at an unconstrained pace using standard cooling technologies, Dr. Seck projected that number could surpass 33% by 2050, using 200 million gallons of Potomac water per day. This assumes that the cooling technologies remain the same mix as they are now. That assumption is very unlikely given the migration towards AI.

In 2023, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission directed staff to review the impacts of the data center industry in Virginia. Modern data centers consume substantially more energy than other types of commercial or industrial operations. Consequently, the data center industry boom in Virginia has substantially driven up energy demand in the state, and demand is forecast to continue growing for the foreseeable future. The state’s energy demand was essentially flat from 2006 to 2020 even though population increased, it was offset by energy efficiency improvements. However, an independent forecast commissioned by JLARC shows that unconstrained demand for power in Virginia would double within the next 10 years, with the data center industry being the main driver.

JLARC found that a substantial amount of new power generation and transmission infrastructure will be needed in Virginia to meet this energy demand. Building enough infrastructure to meet energy demand will be very difficult to achieve and cannot be accomplished while meeting the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) requirements. The power infrastructure necessary to move this power will have a significant impact on the cost and quality of life in Prince William County. Operating data centers in Prince William County used 862 megawatts of electrical power in fiscal year 2024 that is enough power to serve 646,500 homes. However, the actual number of households in Prince William County is actually about 155,000. Prince William has approved enough data centers to increase that power use more than 10 times.

According to Dominion Energy and the JLARC report, data centers’ increased energy demand will increase system costs for all customers, including non-data center customers, for several reasons. A large amount of new generation and transmission will need to be built that would not otherwise be built, creating fixed costs that utilities will need to recover. It will be difficult to supply enough energy to keep pace with growing data center demand, so energy prices are likely to increase for all customers. Finally, if utilities remain reliant on importing power, they may not always be able to secure lower-cost power and will be more susceptible to spikes in energy market prices. Virginia currently gets more than 20% of its power from outside the state.

Data centers are mission-critical facilities as a result; to maintain operation during emergencies such as grid outages or fluctuations in power, data centers require highly reliable backup power sources and almost entirely use diesel generators which are the dirtiest source of power generation. Data centers must have what is essentially a mini grid to ensure backup power.   Diesel generators are known to emit significant amounts of air pollutants and even hazardous emissions during operation. For example, they emit 200-600 times more NOx than new or controlled existing natural gas-fired power plants for each unit of electricity produced. 

However, data centers bring economic activity. Capital investment in Virginia data centers is substantial, exceeding $24 billion in FY23 alone, and primarily consists of equipment purchases from Virginia-based and out-of-state companies. The primary benefit to Virginia’s economy is the economic activity related to data center construction, which is only 20% of total data center capital investment. Virginia primarily benefits from data centers when we keep building. Virginia-based businesses performing key construction services such as clearing trees and grading sites, erecting steel frames, installing high voltage electrical equipment, installing industrial-scale cooling systems, and running miles of cable, conduit, and piping. Materials used in data center construction are often also sourced from Virginia businesses throughout the state. There are relatively few permanent jobs associated with data center operation.

The question is what do we want Prince William to be. Land use decisions are what will shape our future. There will be a special election for Gainesville District supervisor  to replace the late Bob Weir who passed away on July 20^th from cancer will be held on Nov. 4, the same day as the general election. Democrats will hold an all-day “firehouse primary” today-Sunday, Aug. 10 to pick their candidate and the Republicans will hold a primary on Saturday, August 16, 2025, from 10:00AM until 5:00PM at Bull Run Middle School. Vote in the upcoming Primaries and local elections. Participate in determining the future of our community.