Any data center company worth its salt talks a big game when it comes to community engagement. Sustainability reports from all the major players will mention the community pledges, the initiatives, and various projects they do at the local level.

But not everyone is happy. Data centers might swell the local coffers with tax dollars, but many residents are unhappy with the continued build-out. Some oppose the idea of big grey boxes being built on farms or forestland, others worry about the impact on water and air. Some seriously question how Virginia can support gigawatts of new capacity while hoping to meet its stated sustainability goals and potentially avert a climate disaster.

With a growing number of large-scale campuses being proposed beyond the traditional data center heartland of Northern Virginia and into many rural counties further south, the issue of community engagement is more important than ever. To not could risk greater pushback than the industry is already seeing on an increasingly regular basis.

To better understand how and why people might oppose data center development, DCD sat down with Julie Bolthouse, director of land use with the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), an organization that has been heavily involved in several initiatives against data center projects in the Commonwealth.

Opposition groups grow in Virginia in tandem with data centers

Founded in 1972, the PEC describes itself as a community-supported, locally-focused 501(c) (3) non-profit organization, dedicated to promoting and protecting the natural resources, rural economy, history, and beauty of the Virginia Piedmont.

In Bolthouses’ own words, the PEC “conserves land.”

“We help preserve the landscape, the natural resources, and build high-quality communities that people want to live, work, and play in and that are sustained by the environment,” she says.

In her role, according to her bio, Bolthouse coordinates the organization's advocacy on state and local policies to promote “smart growth and climate action while conserving and preserving the natural resources, local food system, history, and beauty of the Virginia Piedmont.”

Previously holding roles at Virginia Tech and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, with stints at the City of Alexandria Planning and Zoning Department and the Rappahannock-Rapidan Regional Commission, Bolthouse has been with the PEC since 2010. The Virginia native grew up in Fairfax, Loudoun, and Clarke counties.

“Before I ever really knew anything about data centers, I was doing things like sustainable landscaping workshops and talking to homeowners about how they can better treat their backyard so that it can be a place for them and for wildlife, and working on helping counties to adopt stronger comprehensive plans that had things like night sky protections, wildlife corridors, and trails. ”

The Piedmont region of Virginia stretches from the falls of the Potomac, Rappahannock, and James Rivers to the Blue Ridge Mountains. As much a cultural as geological and biological region, its boundaries a hazy. But the traditional data center heartlands of Loudoun, Fairfax, and Prince William Counties would fall under the grouping.

PEC’s coverage area includes the counties of Albemarle, Clarke, Culpeper, Fauquier, Greene, Loudoun, Madison, Orange, and Rappahannock, as well as the city of Charlottesville. Some of those counties are already data center hotspots, with more set to become part of the data center jigsaw in the coming years.

Today the PEC is heavily focused on curbing data center development. The group hosts maps of data centers and transmission lines in the areas it operates in, and many of its pages repeatedly highlight the impact data centers are having in what are often historically rural counties.

According to Bolthouse, one of the first data center developments to come onto the PEC’s radar was Compass’ True North Data project in Leesburg. Filed back in 2018, the 760,000 square foot (70,600 sqm) was set to offer around 75MW across up to nine buildings.

The PEC, however, was concerned about the project’s impact on the Mafic Barrens plant community; a patchwork of rare mosses, lichens, flowers, vegetation, and tree seedlings unique to Virginia. The True North project was set to build on an area of the Mafic Barrens, and the PEC tried to get the project amended to avoid damaging the flora and fauna.

Construction on the first building at the campus began in 2019 – though the company has since reduced the number of planned buildings to seven.

“We were trying to get them to downscale the project,” says Bolthouse. “And that's when we really saw the power of this industry.”

The PEC isn’t officially against data centers in principle, but advocates for ‘smarter growth’ with consideration for the state’s climate goals; air, water, and nature conservation, and landscape & national park protection. According to its 2023-2028 Strategic Plan, the PEC is “committed” to researching the matter of data centers further, working with partners, opposing “bad planning and siting decisions”, and highlighting the choices and trade-offs affecting Piedmont communities.

When asked about the group’s stance on data centers Bolthouse says the PEC is “not anti-data center.”

“We're quite aware of the role that data centers play in modern society,” she says. “The PEC has all its information in the cloud.”

“What we would really like to see is the industry recognize the stuff that we're concerned about, we see as the foundation for life on Earth. And that we would like them to pay more attention to land conservation, to water conservation, to our air quality, to our climate, and the impacts that climate change is causing on communities.”

The PEC’s actions, however, often butt heads with developers. The group keeps close tabs on data center and transmission line proposals and regulations across the Piedmont area – and encourages its members to attend and speak at public meetings with data center proposals. It organizes rallies – including one in March 2024 against data center rezonings in Loudoun County – and you can order yard signs saying “Save Culpeper: Stop Data Center Sprawl” if you want to spread a message but would rather avoid saying how you intend to vote at elections.

It has also filed lawsuits in the past and is a fiscal sponsor of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, an organization that focuses on land use and policy in the greater Washington DC area.

PEC also co-leads the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition, a group comprising more than 30 organizations, homeowners’ groups, and residents including Friends of the Blue Ridge Mountains, American Battlefield Trust, Citizens for Fauquier County, the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, Goose Creek Association, Manassas Battlefield Trust, National Parks Conservation Association, and the Sierra Club.

“We can't continue to just go out to public hearings. We had hundreds and hundreds of people speak at the Digital Gateway hearing, that went to the early mornings of the next day, and that still wasn't enough,” says Bolthouse. “We realized that we have to make changes at the state level, and we formed the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition.”

“The Coalition is very broad, but it is people who are all on the same page about two fundamental things. There needs to be more transparency around this industry; we need to know how much energy, how much water, and their emissions. And then the second part is there needs to be more oversight of this industry at the state level; our localities are ill-equipped to handle the regional implications that are coming from these massive projects.”

Data center operators can expect to come up against the PEC regularly in the near future. In the group’s summer newsletter, PEC president, Christopher Miller said that the group was responding to the accelerated push for new transmission lines across the Piedmont and the Mid-Atlantic region.

“We are preparing to challenge proposals locally in Albemarle, Culpeper, Orange, Fauquier, and Loudoun counties, and we are gearing up to raise concerns with the State Corporation Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy, and ultimately, with the General Assembly and Congress,” he said.

A big part of the group’s effort is on education and outreach, especially with local officials.

“The vast majority don't know anything about these issues,” Bolthouse says. “Most of our legislators only understand this from the perspective of what they're thinking from national security or from economic development. Our elected officials need some education as well, and so we're trying to talk to them about what do the actual impacts of all of this look like?”

“We have full time staff working with elected officials, planning commissioners, going to public hearings, rallying the public, and trying to advocate and get better information in the hands of these elected officials so that they better understand this issue.”

She notes one group the PEC has been helping educate is the American Planning Association to ensure the nation’s planner professionals are better informed.

“[Planners] look at it from their typical lens of lighting, aesthetics, noise; and they don't look at things like energy, water, the scale of the facility and what that actually means.”

“They've never dealt with anything that big, and they don't understand what a gigawatt campus is.”

Bolthouse said the PEC is also working to research the potential air quality impacts of having so many data centers in one area, and model what the effect of so many generators in one area could be.

“We have some big questions, like what happens if we have a major outage and a bunch of generators come online? Those sorts of questions are the ones that we need more research on. ”

Pushback to continued growth

Virginia’s association with data centers goes back to the days of the National Science Foundation’s Computer Science Network (CSNET) during the 1980s, with the modern boom beginning with the rise of the MAE-East Internet Exchange Point in Tyson’s Corner, Fairfax County.

Today Northern Virginia (NoVA) is the data center capital of the world, with tens of millions of square feet and gigawatts of capacity across Loudoun, Fairfax, and Prince William Counties. Over the past 15 years, Loudoun has built more than 30 million sq ft (27.9m sqm) of data centers, with another five million sq ft (2.7m sqm) currently in development, according to the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC). Neighboring Fairfax County reportedly has around 29 facilities in operation with a pipeline of 4.4 million sq ft of (440,000 sqm) space under construction, more than doubling the existing inventory. Nearby Prince William County, already home to nearly seven million sq ft (650,000 sqm) of capacity, has an additional 30 million sq ft (2.78m sqm) under development.

Amid increasing land shortages, grid capacity issues, greater regulatory scrutiny, and more pushback from residents, data center development is spreading further south. Spotsylvania, Pittsylvania, Fauquier, Culpeper, King George, Surrey, Stafford, Caroline, Louisa, and Mecklenburg Counties have all seen new large-scale data center developments announced or applied for since 2022 as developers look to cash in.

Counties that have traditionally had little to no data center development are now suddenly staring down the barrel of millions of square feet and multiple gigawatts of capacity being built out over the next decade.

When asked about the trend of data center developers moving south out of Loudoun, she immediately pushes back on any notion that Loudoun is full, pointing to half a dozen projects in the county in various stages of the proposal phase.

“I think it absolutely is full, but I don't think the industry seems to recognize that and I don't know how they're going to get power,” she says.

On the push further south, Bolthouse is concerned by the rate and scale of expansion.

“A year and a half ago, I would have said that it's better for us to see these projects happening in a more dispersed fashion,” she says. “But at this point, the grid is so overcapacity.”

“We've already got 180 million square feet of data center space approved in Virginia. A lot of it's unbuilt, so why don't we just focus on that? The big projects in the rural counties are throwing the grid for a complete loop, and I think the industry should be very concerned about how this is all going to work.”

Unsurprisingly, Bolthouse says she and the PEC would like to see a “pause” where all the interested parties come together and take stock transparently.

“I know that no one wants to hear that because there is money to be made. But there needs to be transparency and some real planning about where we should be building data centers and where the grid can provide that power, and make sure that we're not doing things in multiple places that are pulling against each other and causing massive problems.”

When pushed on where data centers should go if they absolutely have to, she is clear it should be in industrial zones next to other industrial buildings.

“I don’t want to say putting them out in rural areas is a good idea. And we don't want to be putting them next to schools. We don't want to be putting them in the middle of communities that we want to be walkable and liveable.”

One further build-out across Virginia, she says there are definitely certain areas that are better prepared than others. In Culpeper, for example, where most of the county’s data center proposals have been kept within a specifically zoned industrial area, Bolthouse says the county has done a good job of keeping them contained partly because of “robust efforts” made by the PEC.

“They have been doing a good job of siting them within that core area. But they're now up to 10 gigawatts. Pretty sure you're full, now you've got to turn off the faucet. That's the problem with this industry; you get one or two data centers and all of a sudden it's like they come in like vultures.”

“We feel like we're headed towards a crisis, at least in certain regions,” she says. “Something's going to break; you can't just keep putting transmission lines through buffers and trails and road right of ways.”

Power needs, power uncertainty

With ongoing grid capacity issues both in Virginia and further afield, data center operators are having to be increasingly creative in where they source power.

Some are opting for nuclear – Amazon has signed an agreement with Dominion to explore the development of an SMR project near Dominion’s existing North Anna nuclear power station. The companies said the deal will bring at least 300MW of power to the Virginia region.

Bolthouse says the PEC doesn’t have an official stance on nuclear power, but she has concerns about whether the practicalities of deploying SMRs at scale outside the confines of traditional power plants have been fully looked at yet – including waste management and security issues.

“There hasn't been any real, robust research into how this would work, how this would fit into the suburban area,” she says. “Instead, what we're doing is continuing to approve data center projects with the speculative belief that eventually, we're going to have small modular nuclear to provide them with power. That’s foolish because if those reactors or the finances never work out, we’re going to need more transmission lines. ”

Other operators are looking at tapping into natural gas pipelines as a shorter-term bridge. Virginia has a number of gas pipelines and there have been several project proposals this year that have mentioned potentially relying on natural gas for at least part of a campus’ energy needs.

Bolthouse has concerns about natural gas because of the potential air quality issues that can arise when we’re talking about hundreds of megawatts being powered by it – compounding existing air quality worries around backup gen-sets. Likewise, while there are plenty of pipelines for export, adding more localized distribution lines from existing routes to data centers could see properties and land being taken under eminent domain.

“The biggest challenge really is scale. We can't handle all these hyperscale facilities. When you're dealing with gigawatts of power, any of these solutions start to become problematic because of the sheer scale of them,” she says. “Gigawatts of solar means thousands of acres of land. Gigawatts of wind, thousands of acres off the shore – and we'd like to have a couple of beaches without windfarms on them.”

“We're not opposed to researching solutions. We're opposed to moving forward with speculative solutions that really haven't been thought out.”

In terms of energy and efficiency, Bolthouse wants to see more effort made to move off diesel (and only have higher-tier generators with fewer particulates), and a quicker switch towards liquid cooling. Beyond that, she’d like to see greater efforts made around data management and more focus efficiency, including more movement towards cold storage.

Water is also a major worry for the PEC and other groups. Despite multiple pledges to be water-positive – and more than a few closed loop or waterless cooling options available, many data center operators are heavy water users.

Water sources for these facilities vary. While some sites will use grey or wastewater, facilities often draw from potable (drinkable) sources, including groundwater. Exactly how much drinkable water the data center industry uses is unclear, but it's estimated to be in the billions of gallons annually.

Amazon, which aims to be water-positive by 2030, has said that 16 facilities in Virginia use reclaimed wastewater (i.e. sewage) that undergoes a three-step treatment process that removes 99 percent of impurities. This is, however, the exception, rather than the norm, when it comes to water use.

“People see us as having plenty of water. They worry about drought in Nevada or Texas. They don't worry about that here in Virginia, but they should.”

At the time of writing in October 2024, approximately 13 percent (5,350 square miles) of Virginia is under drought conditions, and 72 percent (30,590 square miles) is abnormally dry, according to data from NOAA. That is despite a wetter-than-average September.

“Our groundwater is declining over time, and there is a real risk to our water resources,” says Bolthouse.

A tragedy of the commons

Developers across the board will repeatedly talk about the importance of community outreach, conscientious development, and addressing the concerns of local residents. Some practice what they preach, while others are notorious for their radio silence and working quietly behind the scenes through lawyers, shell companies, and NDAs.

Bolthouse is clear they many operators in Virginia are simply giving sustainability “lip service.”

“I've read the ESG reports from companies, obviously, some are better than others,” she says. “Google seems to be a better player than say, AWS, for example.”

“But they're still just giving it lip service. It doesn't really seem like they understand the impacts that are happening in these areas, or they would stop and figure it out before they kept moving forward.”

Bolthouse is one the main faces of the PEC, and when allowed, has spoken at several data center conferences to advocate for limiting data center growth and promote greater transparency in the industry.

However, DCD is aware of multiple instances of at least one data center company with operations in Virginia refusing to share a panel with Bolthouse. On one occasion this opposition to speaking to the opposition ultimately lead to her being disinvited from an entire event. The company in question that DCD is aware of is one with a published ESG report with multiple pages dedicated to community impact and partnerships.

“It’s healthy to be encouraging other entities to come to these conferences, because otherwise you're just in an echo chamber,” she says. “You're talking to each other about community impacts and how to deal with NIMBYism? Why are you guys talking to each other about that? What exactly do you expect to get out of that?”

Data center operators may counter that they engage with interested parties at the local level instead of via protest groups, however, the silence these groups seem to receive on occasion does little to dispel the notion of only giving engagement lip service.

A protest outside a QTS data center in Manassas in early 2022 was resoundingly ignored by the company. The Coalition to Protect Prince William County had mobilized against the company’s proposed Digital Gateway project in the county.

“What I'd like to see happen is us be able to talk to the bigger companies,” says Bolthouse, who notes that Amazon, the largest operator in the commonwealth, “basically slammed in my face the couple of times I have tried to talk to them.”

“I like to see us come to an understanding that there is more of a need for transparency,” she adds. “and that they start to recognize that we're headed towards a tragedy of the commons.”

Though the term dates back to the 1960s, the concept of the tragedy of the commons dates back to the days of Aristotle; it warns that giving many unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource – such as a pasture – will see them tend to overuse it and may end up destroying that resource's value altogether.

“The grid, reliability issues, cost increases, this is going to hit all of us,” Bolthouse warns. “It's not just going to be the residential ratepayers. It's going to be the industry as well.”

When asked how the PEC plans to move forward with its ongoing opposition, Bolthouse says the group is taking an “all of the above” approach comprising community organization, education, working with local and state officials, and even potentially taking legal action.

“We try to be very strategic in our lawsuits because they're costly,” she adds, noting an example would be when Orange County refused to supply documents as part of a freedom of information request.

“But most of our focus is going to continue to be on outreach and just raising the profile of this issue.”

Despite her exasperation with the industry, Bolthouse is optimistic things are going to get better in the long run.

In the same way the industrial boom and pollution impacts of the 1950s led to a number of clean air and water acts in the 1960s, she thinks so too the near future could have greater legislative oversight on data centers.

“It's a new industrial revolution,” she says. “I think there's going to be a backlash, and things are going to get better in the long run.”