Yesterday 500 people attended a public meeting in a Virginia school - most of them objecting to the environmental impact of an Amazon data center.

This wasn’t a general Greenpeace-style protest about energy use and renewable power. It’s a very local issue. Amazon wants to build a big data center in Prince William County, Northern Virginia, and protesters are objecting to the powerlines it will need. The proposals, drawn up with local utility, Dominion Power, call for 30m (100 foot) poles to carry 230kV lines across country to reach a site in the town of Haymarket.

Amazon - and others - already have plenty of capacity in Virginia, only about 25 miles (40km) away from this site. Ashburn is an Internet hub, and a lot of Internet giants have capacity on AWS’s US-East infrastructure there.

Ashburn is bursting at the seams and there’s a spree of building there. Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT) is already building another facility for Amazon in Ashburn - and suffered a fire on the contruction site last week.

Northern Virginia has occasionally suffered power problems. This new proposal puts a data center in a new part of the State, and opens up a new part of the country.

Pressure group
But the residents aren’t happy. They’ve set up a pressure group, local politicians have written to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and are demanding that the proposal is changed, so the power cables are buried underground. All this was argued in the Town Hall meeting (see below) - at the aptly-named Battlefield High School in Haymarket.

Now, laying an underground cable costs maybe ten times as much per mile as running an overhead line, and it’s been suggested that the cost of burying the cables would be enough to bury the whole project.  Which seems to be what the protesters actually want.

Prince William County, say contributors to the Protect Prince William County site, is a rural area which doesn’t have the infrastructure to cope with industry. “The Rural Crescent does not require infrastructure investment the same as more intensive use areas do,” says one.  “We don’t have public water or public sewer, we are self sufficient in those ways.”

It’s not just the power (or the sewers), protesters say the area doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a big data center, and putting it in would wreck its rural status.

The story is a little like the protest that last year blocked The Data Centers’ bid to build a $1 billion facility in Delaware holding a power station as well as a data center. Those protesting didn’t mind the data center - it was the co-located 279MW power plant that they objected to. Similarly, the Prince William County protesters, apparently, are objecting to the power infrastructure, not the data center.

Remember Quincy?
It also reminds me of protests against Microsoft’s data center in Quincy, Washington State. Like the Prince William County protesters, Quincy citizens objected to the environmental impact of something incidental to the data center. In this case it was the backup diesel generators, which they claimed were causing a health risk.

In Quincy the protesters got the math wrong: backup diesels get used rarely and produce less pollution than the roads through the city. In Delaware, it looks like the proposed project was poorly conceived. In Prince William County, the issue is more subjective.

But all these cases add up to a message. Planning your data center involves a lot of global issues. Delivering it is a local matter - and you’d better be prepared to be nice to your neighbors.

A version of this post appeared on GreenDataCenterNews.org.