Eastern Loudoun County, VA, has 181 data centers in just 30 square miles within Northern Virginia, an area with three times more data centers than the second-highest concentration in America. Known as Data Center Alley, it hosts 65-70% of the world’s Internet traffic.
That’s why Mike Turner’s perspective on data centers and energy is so fascinating. Turner is an elected member of the county’s board of supervisors, a group responsible for budgeting and resource planning. He represents Ashburn, VA, the center of the center of the data center capital. So he’s on the front lines dealing with how the county’s massive data center growth is affecting electric power.
Turner recently published a white paper, “Loudoun County Virginia: Data Center Capital of the World, A Strategy for a Changing Paradigm,” that comes across as a kind of dispatch from the future — a road map for other communities that have yet to experience rapid data center development but will soon.
The paper has three clear messages. The energy demand from data centers can quickly overwhelm a utility system. More transmission alone won’t solve the problem. Data centers need to build onsite energy.
And a fourth message, which is that we’re not ready for this.
“The post-COVID world since 2022 has seen a seismic increase in demand for data representing not an evolution, but a revolution of technological change now very likely to overwhelm our existing power infrastructure,” writes Turner, a retired Air Force veteran who worked on strategy and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff before being elected to the Loudoun Board of Supervisors in November 2019.
“Essentially, we’ve invented the airplane but just realized we haven’t yet invented runways. This level of systemic change demands new paradigms at almost every level if we are to avoid an involuntary and likely painful landing,” he writes.
Do away with old thinking about the grid
One solution, he says, is to ditch 20th-century grid models and move to more onsite energy.
He writes that Data Center Alley faces a stark choice: Accept the traditional paradigm of power generated at massive, remote power plants, transmitted over hundreds of miles of overhead transmission lines; or “reject that 135-year-old power infrastructure paradigm and begin creating a radically new power delivery model and market environment whereby large power consumers generate the amount of carbon-net-zero power they need onsite and deliver surplus power onto the regional power grid.”
The first choice — building transmission lines — has already proved to be a problem. In 2022, PJM warned the region’s utility, Dominion Energy, that it had underestimated data center energy needs. Realizing it lacked enough transmission to meet the demand, Dominion put a temporary moratorium on new data centers in the county. (The moratorium has since been lifted, but the utility has continued to limit electric capacity for new data centers.)
Community outcry against transmission
The utility quickly went to work planning new electric infrastructure. And equally quickly, the community protested when the plans called for transmission lines across farms, wetlands, tree conservation areas, and a historic village, according to Turner. Acrimony over the transmission lines, in turn, has spurred resistance to further data center development.
“Between 2022-2024, community resistance to more data centers, more overhead transmission lines, more substations and more consumption of fossil fuel energy reached unprecedented levels,” he writes. He sees more resistance ahead.
“Essentially, we’ve invented the airplane but just realized we haven’t yet invented runways. This level of systemic change demands new paradigms at almost every level if we are to avoid an involuntary and likely painful landing.”
Even if all are built, the planned transmission lines will not keep pace with the rapid increase in future electric supply, Turner writes. The county’s electric demand rose from 1 GW in 2018 to 3.4 GW in 2023 and he forecasts it could conservatively reach 11.58 GW based on a linear extrapolation.
But the transmission lines are only one reason that Turner calls for more onsite energy. The other is environmental. Many data centers are pursuing ambitious climate goals. But their growing energy demand is causing utilities to reconsider the retirement of fossil fuel power plants, meaning that if the data centers rely heavily on utility power, they will undermine their own climate goals.
Indeed, some of the major tech companies are already struggling. Despite its goal to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where it operates by 2030, Google reported last week that its greenhouse gas emissions have grown 48% since 2019. Microsoft also has pledged to reduce emissions but instead saw them jump 30% from 2020 to 2023.
While Turner says there is no magic bullet, he recommends “creating a radically new power delivery model and market environment whereby large power consumers generate the amount of carbon-net-zero power they need onsite and deliver surplus power onto the regional power grid.”
Incentivize data centers to build onsite power
“Incentivizing data centers to develop autonomous, onsite power will increase grid resiliency and reduce the threat to residential and other commercial users posed by rapidly increasing demands on our power grid. It would also help keep rates low for non-data center customers. During off-peak hours, each autonomous data center power source would be able to provide carbon-net-zero energy to the North America power grid, thereby helping the nation achieve its climate change goals,” he writes in the paper.
This is the approach the military has taken, he says, mandating that select military bases and critical installations achieve energy independence.
He also calls for consideration of several other technologies, including transmission line reconductoring, small nuclear reactors, various building and data center efficiency measures, and water heat reuse systems.
Turner acknowledges that data centers and utilities may not agree with his ideas. But he hopes the paper will “start a conversation based not on our ungrounded hopes but on our fact-based needs.”
“We are the nexus for the world data center community. We have both a profound responsibility and an historic opportunity to redefine and permanently reshape the digital world and the power infrastructure it relies on,” Turner writes. “And we must act now.”
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