Our data center in Prince William County, Virginia, does not generate its own power on site. (Photo by Shannon Hecht/Virginia Mercury)
Virginia’s surge in energy demand is requiring the construction of more power generation infrastructure, a process that is taking longer and delaying the construction of new data centers awaiting connection to the grid.
Dominion Energy, the state’s largest utility, has an estimated 70 gigawatts worth of projects online that need more power before they can connect to the energy network. The company can connect about 10 high-volume customers per year.
Technology companies are responding by creating their own power to skip the line.
Dominion data center customers take an average of seven years to connect to the grid. An increasing number of project proposals include on-site power generation for data centers, including natural gas turbines. This has heightened community concerns about air pollution and created a gap in the state’s clean energy goals.
How data centers plan to generate their own power
The approach to building your own power is called “behind the meter.”
The idea is that the data center industry will be able to acquire and use its own gas turbines and other means of power faster than power companies can get them up and running.
“The data center coalition has a long history of delivering energy to the world,” said Aaron Tinjum, vice president of energy at the Data Center Coalition. “Accessing timely and reliable power is a pace-setting challenge to meet America’s unprecedented demand for data and digital services.” “Given this challenge, data center companies are exploring innovative energy strategies to meet the unprecedented demand for digital services, including on-site generation.”
Gas turbines owned by a data center and used solely for that facility are not subject to the Virginia Clean Economy Act. The law requires power companies to phase out carbon-emitting power sources by 2050.
Because the energy sources operated by data centers typically do not power the general public, they do not have to go through the National Corporation Commission’s approval process to qualify as a “public interest,” as do energy generation projects for utilities.
If your data center’s natural gas turbines are larger than 25 megawatts, you will be required to participate in a carbon auction as part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, but there are ways around this.
“A data center site might have 25 MW of gas production, but that’s spread out over four or five different turbines and doesn’t require a separate fixed source threshold,” explained Lee Francis of the League of Conservation Voters.
Lawmakers and governors also participated
The debate has been at the center of months of legislative action this year as state lawmakers seek to limit the environmental impact of data centers, including some who have opted to use carbon-emitting power sources. budget battle This brought Virginia to the brink of its first government shutdown in history.
The House budget originally included environmental requirements that the industry must meet in order to remain exempt from state sales and use taxes.
Rep. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, introduced House Bill 897 to address energy and water use, but also had in mind behind gas production at the meter. He said his bill is not aimed at banning the use of natural gas turbines, but rather drawing a line in the sand and setting stricter standards and environmental expectations for the industry.
“It seems to me that there is no one silver bullet. I keep coming back to the principles embodied in HB 897: making sure data centers use as little energy as possible, making sure they use it, moving away from diesel generation, and using other types of backup power,” Sullivan said in an interview last week.
These environmental requirements were not included in the final budget proposal, but will be analyzed by a task force created to consider further regulation of the state’s burgeoning data center industry. Lawmakers imposed a new tax on the industry that is expected to bring in $1.2 billion over two years.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger advocated for continuing the industry’s tax exemption to honor standing contracts with data centers and protect the state’s economic interests and reputation with businesses.
But in an interview with reporters Thursday, Spanberger called on data centers to first look to clean energy technologies before bringing more sources of pollution online.
Spanberger said it’s good that heavy-duty users want to take their power off the grid by installing their own power generation, but more research is needed on the factors that are holding the industry back from moving toward cleaner energy sources.
““As a commonwealth, I don’t want to see us move to a place where we think we’re on track to meet the goals of the VCEA, but that’s because this generation is all out of the equation. Now, how can Virginia become a place where (there is) best-in-class generational effort in new technologies?” Spanberger said.
Environmental concerns grow as data centers demand more power
Dominion must serve customers who want electricity, but there are no requirements on how quickly it must meet those requests. With unprecedented load increases, the company is implementing policies governing when and how power connections are made to prevent asset stranding and maintain grid reliability.
But data companies have expressed frustration with Dominion’s long connection queues. In the SCC lawsuit regarding the Large Load Interconnect Queue Policy, the Data Center Coalition alleged that Dominion’s “Large Load Interconnect Queue process standards lack transparency and treat high-quality, well-capitalized projects the same as speculative projects.”
this comes after Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Directive The regional power grid operator is seeking to “justify or reform the rules governing how data centers, manufacturing facilities, and other large energy users connect to the power grid.”
This means PJM, the regional transmission operator for much of the East Coast, will have to defend or revise its policies when connecting these heavily loaded customers to the grid.
in Letter to PJM Sent last month, SCC Chair Kelsey Baggott and Data Center Coalition President Josh Levy agreed to convene a working group to consider standardized retail rate provisions for mandatory or voluntary interruptible service.
The group will also consider backup generation regulations to manage grid reliability and ensure costs are not passed on to residential ratepayers.
The Piedmont Environmental Council said the letter was vague and lacked details about who would participate in these conversations. The group is particularly concerned about how discussions about the potential increased use of backup diesel generators as a way to manage grid strains will play out.
“It’s basically saying, ‘We’re willing to do that, we’re going to start digging into this.'” But the failure to identify other stakeholders is concerning. They don’t say, ‘We’re going to talk to the environmental community, or we’re going to talk to anyone other than our industry data,”’ said Julie Bolthouse, PEC’s director of land use.
The data center proposal is facing growing opposition from local residents across the state, with hundreds of residents attending and speaking at local Board of Supervisors meetings. Plans that include in-house power generation with natural gas turbines further increase concerns for people who must live near polluting facilities.
In recent years, residents and councilors have opposed the use of diesel auxiliary generators because of the high emissions from older low-rise generators.
New legislation passed to ensure clean power generators are installed at future data center sites. But during peak energy use, like the state saw in early July, Utilities allowed by PJM Ask data centers to activate backup power as needed for grid reliability.
In Shenandoah County, in the city of Strasburg, local residents are objecting to a proposed project that includes two data centers and a gas turbine power plant that is said to be located before the meter (meaning the power would be sold back to the grid).
Strasburg resident Kaylee Tanner monitors applications for projects near her home.
“That noise level is going to be tremendous. What kind of pollution is that putting into the air? We don’t know what it’s going to put into our air quality,” Tanner said.
Data center proposals are appearing one after another.
Another data center proposal with on-site gas generation is currently going through the approval process. Wise County, Cardinal News reported earlier this year.
Prince William County recently proposed a large data center complex that would include natural gas turbines. shot down by county supervisor. Another proposal involving in-house power generation was also withdrawn by the company. Regarding the tax debate.
In Fauquier County, developers changed their original proposal for Remington Technology Park to a new and different type of behind-the-meter energy generation. fuel cell power.
Because this technology uses an electrochemical process rather than burning natural gas, it produces less air and noise pollution compared to traditional turbines. Another similar power plant is Proposed near Fairfax CountyNorthern Virginia Magazine reported in May.
PEC said because this is a new technology that has not yet been deployed in Virginia, there are still many questions they would like answered before construction.
“Are there any safety implications to this? What are the risks? No one has ever done it before, so do we even know?” Bolthouse said.
The Department of Environmental Quality has approved only one air permit for the Vantage VA2 Data Center, a data center campus with on-site gas generation. On Friday, amid a historic air pollution incident from wildfire smoke that blanketed the commonwealth, DEQ reported that the facility suffered a “critical 480V circuit breaker failure” the night before, forcing the facility to run backup diesel generators for several hours.
Local residents are opposed to the plan. tell DC News Well, they were not told that gas turbines would be built along with the proposed data center until construction had already begun.
DEQ officials said the agency received another application for a data center project in Charles City that would operate its own gas turbines.
watch out for the gap
Dees said loopholes in the law that allow gas turbines to power behind-the-meter data centers and set back the state’s clean energy goals should be addressed “if we are to circumvent (Virginia’s) Clean Economy Act.”
“If that were the case, it would undermine the arguments that have been made to me,” Dees said of previous conversations with data center industry representatives.
Spanberger said because Virginia is the data center capital of the world, the state could hold the cards when regulating the industry with clean energy goals in mind.
“You have two choices. “We could walk away from the conversation, and then the data center would go to Maryland or it would go to Pennsylvania, but it’s still PJM that’s impacting the cost,” Spanberger said, adding that data centers in other states still impact the environment.
“Virginia is really unique in the level of traction and influence that we have in terms of being a leader in pushing the entire industry in a certain direction.”
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