Virginia Has the Biggest Data Center Market in the World. Can It Also Decarbonize Its Grid?

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By Sarah Vogelsong. Inside Climate News. 

Excerpt: This March, Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, D.C. in Northern Virginia that is home to the greatest concentration of data centers in the world, made an unexpected move: It rejected a proposal to let a company build a bigger data center than existing zoning automatically allowed.  “At some point we have to say stop,” said Loudoun Supervisor Michael Turner during the meeting, as reported by news site LoudounNow. “We do not have enough power to power the data centers we have.” County supervisors would later reverse the decision, approving a smaller version of the project. But the initial denial sent ripples throughout Virginia, where concern over the rapid growth of data centers and what that means for the state’s ambitious decarbonization goals is growing. ...said Tim Cywinski, a spokesperson for the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, ...“The data center industry is about 2 percent of global carbon emissions...." ...Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electric utility, has ...pledged it will decarbonize its Virginia grid by 2045, in line with the Virginia Clean Economy Act passed by the state legislature in 2020, .... “We are 100 percent committed to achieving the goals of the VCEA. We are not taking our foot off the accelerator with renewables,” said Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion. But, he added, “...The inescapable reality is we are experiencing unprecedented growth in electric demand.” ...Companies have also set their own goals: Google aims to operate its data centers on carbon-free energy by 2030, while Amazon is pushing for net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.... 

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