Community meeting highlights concerns about data center boom; News roundup
Engage Louisa is a nonpartisan newsletter that keeps folks informed about Louisa County government. We believe our community is stronger and our government serves us better when we increase transparency, accessibility, and engagement.
This week in county government: public meetings, July 28 through August 2
For the latest information on county meetings including public meetings of boards, commissions, authorities, work groups, and internal county committees, click here.
Tuesday, July 29
Revenue Work Group, Administration Conference Room, Louisa County Office Building, 1 Woolfolk Ave., Louisa, 2 pm.
Other meetings/events
Friday, August 1
Town of Louisa Mayor’s Forum, Louisa Arts Center, 212 Fredericksburg Ave., Louisa, 7 pm.
Residents have an opportunity to hear from the two candidates running for a year-long stint as the Town of Louisa’s mayor.
Saturday, August 2
Louisa County Fair, Candidates’ Hour, Walton Park, Mineral, 2:30 pm.
Hear directly from candidates running for local office at the Louisa County Fair’s Candidates’ Hour. Click here to learn more about all the fair has to offer.
Quote of the week
“I live here. I love where I came from. I grew up here. I have no skin in this game. I’m just looking to protect the water source in the community because I know the impacts [data centers] can potentially have.”
-Savannah Walker, a Louisa County native who works in the data center industry, at a community meeting last week focused on the impact of data center development.
Read more about the meeting in the article below.
Community meeting highlights concerns about data center boom
In August 2023, Louisa County announced that Amazon Web Services (AWS) planned to invest at least $11 billion to build two data center campuses in the county’s Technology Overlay District (TOD), a special zoning designation adopted by the board of supervisors just five months before to attract lucrative tech sector development.
Since then, supervisors have touted the deal as a boon for the county. They’ve contended AWS’s two campuses would generate much-needed revenue for the growing locality to pay for schools, fire stations and other services, the cost of which would otherwise fall on the backs of homeowners.
County officials have said the TOD would limit tech sector development to areas with the infrastructure to support it, and that the district’s strict development standards would protect neighbors from light pollution, noise and other ills.
But when AWS proposed its third data center campus in the TOD in early June—this one requiring a conditional use permit (CUP) and, thus, a public approval process—many residents pushed back, arguing that now isn’t the time to okay another campus when neither neighbors nor county leaders have seen the impact of what’s already in the works.
AWS’s proposal became public just a few weeks before the county announced it had sold the Shannon Hill Regional Business Park to EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure, which plans to develop a data center campus just north of Interstate 64.
Amid strong pushback from neighbors and public opposition from Mineral District Supervisor Duane Adams, who represents the area where AWS proposed its third campus and raised concerns about its proximity to the Northeast Creek Reservoir, AWS on Wednesday withdrew its application. In a letter to county staff, the company said it would “reevaluate” its plans.
In the wake of that news, some residents have vowed to continue to share their concerns about the community’s data center boom in an effort to raise awareness about the industry and prepare for future proposals.
Two groups who led the charge against AWS’s push for a third campus, Concerned Residents of Louisa County and Louisa County Technology Discussion, held a community meeting at Mineral Baptist Church last Thursday to provide information about data centers to others in the community
The meeting, which drew about 100 people, featured three speakers: Sarah Parmelee, an organizer with the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), an advocacy group that’s critical of unbridled data center development; Savannah Walker, a Louisa County native who’s worked in the data center industry for about 15 years; and David Pollard, a Culpeper resident who also works in the industry.
The speakers painted a starkly different picture of what the giant warehouse-like facilities that house the backbone of the internet could bring to the community than what’s been offered by county officials over the last two years. They raised concerns about the facilities’ impact on local infrastructure and the community’s rural character and questioned how much tax revenue the campuses would ultimately bring in.
The pursuit of revenue
Louisa County officials have hailed data centers as “smart economic development,” citing the significant tax revenue they’re expected to generate, mostly from real estate taxes on the land and buildings and business personal property taxes (BPP) on the pricey computer equipment inside.
Because data centers have fewer employees than other large-scale industrial development—like massive factories that employ thousands—they’ve also insisted the facilities would have limited impact on county services like schools and public safety.
It's unclear how many data center buildings—or “shells” as the county calls them—AWS intends to build on its campuses: one, dubbed the Lake Anna Technology Campus, is slated for about 150 acres adjacent to the North Anna Nuclear Power Station; the other, called the North Creek Technology Campus, is planned for about 830 acres of a 1,444-acre tract off Jefferson Highway (Route 33) south of the reservoir. To date, the company has submitted site plans for 17 shells, but county officials have indicated they could build as many as 36.
Economic Development Director Andy Wade has said that one shell could generate $37.7 million for county coffers over a 15-year timeframe. Neither Wade nor other members of county staff have provided details on how they arrived at that number. Wade has said the revenue estimate was generated internally with assistance from AWS.
At a meeting of the board’s revenue committee in early July, Finance Director Wanda Colvin shared cumulative revenue projections. In Fiscal Year 2030, Colvin estimated the county could pull in more than $36 million from AWS’s two campuses—about 20 percent of its current $174.8 million operating budget.
As the campuses are built out, Colvin estimated that revenue would climb, exceeding $195 million between FY31 and FY35, $202 million between FY36 and FY40 and $254 million between FY41 and FY45. Colvin has said the county’s projections are “conservative” and based on the assumption that AWS will build 25 shells. The projections don’t factor in potential revenue from EdgeCore’s campus.
Supervisors and county staff have already started thinking about how they’ll spend that money, pitching potential investments in rural preservation programs, transportation upgrades and parks and recreation facilities. They’ve also floated the possibility of sizable tax cuts.
Parmelee acknowledged that the promise of tax revenue is what drives localities to approve data centers, but she warned that the rosy revenue projections come with caveats.
“I really think more people need to be concerned about putting all their eggs in the data center revenue basket because it can be a really risky move,” she said.
As an example, Parmelee pointed to Loudoun County, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world, where taxes from the facilities make up about 38 percent of the county’s general fund revenue.
In tax year 2021, Loudoun faced a $60 million shortfall in its projected data center haul—about 10 percent less than anticipated—because companies didn’t replace their computer equipment as expected due pandemic-related supply chain issues, Parmelee said.
Localities generally offer an accelerated depreciation schedule for business personal property taxes on data center equipment. That means the frequency with which companies refresh their equipment plays a key role in how much tax revenue localities get.
“That was a really bad time for Loudoun,” Parmelee said.
In addition, Parmelee said that, under state law, banks are exempt from BPP taxes on the equipment holding their data, a lesson the City of Manassas learned the hard way. According to a statement on its website, the city will lose out on significant revenue it anticipated from a recently-built data center because its tenant is a bank.
“That really hurt. They can’t even ask who the bank is,” Parmelee said, alluding to confidentially agreements between data center operators and their tenants, which are commonplace in the industry.
Beyond those concerns, Parmelee suggested that much of what’s driving data center development now is the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI). She warned that the industry could be experiencing an AI bubble, meaning some of the data center campuses currently in the works might not get built.
“In a few years, if we realize we didn’t really need all of these facilities, some of these sites are not going to end up getting built out, and that revenue is not going to materialize,” Parmelee said, noting that Microsoft recently cancelled plans to build two gigawatts (GW) of data center capacity.
Walker questioned a performance agreement Louisa County signed with AWS, which was approved at several public meetings in late 2023 and includes tax breaks and other perks.
Per the agreement, which runs through 2050, the county lowered its BPP for data center equipment from $1.90 per $100 of assessed value to $1.25 and implemented an accelerated depreciation schedule that rapidly decreases its taxable value over five years. When the equipment’s new, the county taxes it at 50 percent of its value, but by year five and any year beyond that, it’s taxed at just five percent.
Wade has said that AWS typically refreshes its equipment every five or six years. But, if it waited longer, the county would get significantly less revenue, per the depreciation schedule.
The county is also offering AWS infrastructure and performance grants, based on a sliding scale that corresponds with the company’s capital investment in the county. The grants work in concert with a state grant fund, which explicitly benefits AWS. Established by the General Assembly in 2023, the fund is designed to incentivize the company to build data centers in rural areas that don’t currently have the infrastructure to support them.
Wade has said that any local grant money paid to the company will be drawn from net new tax revenue generated by the campuses. That means if the campuses didn’t generate any revenue for county coffers, AWS wouldn’t get any money back.
“You can get revenue from [data centers]. There’s potential there. I just don’t know how they worked out what they worked out,” Walker said.
EdgeCore isn’t expected to benefit from state or local grants but will benefit from the reduced BPP on data center equipment.
Water and power
Walker, Parmelee and Pollard touched on two major concerns about large-scale data center development: the significant amount of water many of the facilities use to cool their equipment and the vast amount of electricity necessary to keep the lights on.
To cool both of its campuses in Louisa, AWS will draw water from the publicly owned Northeast Creek Reservoir, which supplies drinking water to residents in central Louisa, including the towns of Louisa and Mineral.
Based on a pair of water service agreements inked with the company in late 2023, the county, via the Louisa County Water Authority (LCWA), agrees to provide up to seven million gallons of raw water per day to the campuses—about five million gpd to the North Creek campus and about 1.97 million gpd to the Lake Anna campus—at peak demand and full buildout.
County officials have said each shell is expected to use, on average, 23,000 gallons of water per day. If AWS builds 25 shells, which county officials have called a conservative estimate, the campuses could use an average of 575,000 gallons of raw water daily with the heaviest draw—or peak demand—coming on the hottest days of the year when more cooling water is required and little draw coming in colder months when the ambient air temperature cools the facilities.
Wade has insisted there’s ample water in the reservoir to support the campuses. As evidence, he’s cited a capacity study commissioned by the county two years ago, which determined the reservoir has a safe yield of 3.2 million gallons daily with current users drawing 300,000 gallons per day and 500,000 at peak demand.
Based on the county’s numbers, the average daily draw from the reservoir would sit at less than a million gallons daily if 25 shells are built and demand from current customers doesn’t significantly rise.
“We have a ton of capacity left in the reservoir,” Wade said in December 2023 when the board approved the water service agreements.
LCWA will supply that water via new water lines and pump stations paid for by AWS. The county has agreed to complete the infrastructure by July 2026 for the North Creek campus and January 2027 for Lake Anna campus. The latter campus will rely on ultra-deep commercial wells until public water arrives. The company will buy its raw water from the authority at the same rate residential customers pay for treated water.
Walker questioned whether the reservoir can sustain AWS’s water use, given its peak demand pull.
“They can only free cool a certain amount on a certain ambient temperature…In our region, generally, it’s like 55 to 65 when they can free cool off that fresh air. Anything above that, we are going to be in a bit of a pickle because they’ll be cooling off the water,” she said.
Walker also questioned county officials’ decision to allow AWS to pull from central Louisa’s only source of public drinking water.
“I live here. I love where I came from. I grew up here. I have no skin in this game. I’m just looking to protect the water source in the community because I know the impacts it can potentially have,” she said.
Walker contrasted AWS’s plan to use a water-based cooling system to EdgeCore’s plan for its campus at Shannon Hill, favoring the latter. The company, which has developed data center campuses in Phoenix and other areas where water is scarce, plans to use a closed-loop, air-cooled system that uses far less water than the industry average, according to its website. Any water utilized at the Shannon Hill campus will come from the James River via a pipeline that’s expected to be finished next year.
“A design like that, offset from the community and the only water source the town [of Louisa] has, it makes a difference,” Walker said.
When it comes to power, Parmelee said that data centers demand a massive amount of electricity to keep their computer equipment humming, which is straining the grid and only intensifying with the emergence of AI.
Parmelee said the burgeoning demand for power means electric providers must build new infrastructure—from generation facilities to transmission lines—and the costs of those facilities raise everyone’s electric bill. She also noted that, at least in the short-term, many of the new generation facilities will likely rely on natural gas, which could contribute to air pollution in communities where they’re built.
AWS last year announced plans to partner with Dominion Energy to potentially develop a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) at or near North Anna. Some data center developers are banking on SMRs to power the industry in the future. Parmelee said that, while SMRs may be cleaner than natural gas, they could still pose challenges.
“We still need to make sure that communities have a say in whether or not these things are placed in the midst of where they live and work,” she said.
County officials haven’t focused much on data centers’ power use, mostly saying it’s out of their hands and, if the facilities aren’t built in Louisa, they’ll be built somewhere.
Several supervisors have repeatedly touted Louisa County’s role as a major producer of energy because its home to North Anna, where two Westinghouse reactors generate about 1.9 GW of power, enough to keep the lights on in more than 550,000 homes.
But the three data center campuses slated for construction in Louisa alone could far exceed North Anna’s output. AWS’s Lake Anna campus is expected to use 420 megawatts (MW), according to an application submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers, while EdgeCore’s campus is expected to pull 1.1 GW, per a press release from the company. It’s unclear how much power the North Creek campus will use. But, according to a conceptual plan submitted to the county in late 2023, the campus could have as many as 10 substations with each capable of providing 300 MW for a total of three gigawatts.
“Our data centers use an outrageous amount of electricity. Twenty-five percent of the electricity used in Virginia is used by data centers. That is significantly more than anywhere else in the United States, including California, which has Silicon Valley,” Parmelee said, noting that Dominion Energy’s peak load is expected to more than double over the next 20 years due primarily to data centers.
Other community impacts
While most of the state’s data centers are clustered in Northern Virginia, the global epicenter of the industry, developers are moving south in pursuit of cheaper land and friendly local governments hungry for revenue.
Parmelee, Pollard and Walker agreed that data centers pose a unique threat to rural communities, bringing an onslaught of traffic during construction, noise, light pollution and other perils.
Pollard said he’s watched with dismay as data centers have spread into Culpeper, where he lives, with little regard for their impact on the community.
“{Data center developers] don’t care about what it does to your environment. We’re not worried about the impact it has on your roads, the impact it has on your livestock, the impact it has on your children,” he said.
For its part, Louisa County has maintained that its TOD includes some of the county’s strictest zoning regulations to protect neighbors. The district mandates a 200-foot opaque vegetative buffer adjacent to residentially zoned land and a 300-foot buffer adjacent to agriculturally zoned parcels. It caps noise at 65 decibels at the property line in the day and 60 decibels at night, roughly equivalent to the sound of a normal conversation, and imposes strict dark-sky standards.
But Parmelee warned that many rural areas aren’t prepared for the disturbances data centers bring even those with strong ordinances.
The facilities’ cooling systems and electrical infrastructure both bring a hum, Parmelee said, which local noise ordinances aren’t designed to address.
“The problem is most of our local laws or ordinances governing noise are not really written with persistent low frequency and high frequency noise in mind. They’re really designed for if your neighbor is having a rager at two in the morning, the cops can come and shut them down. They’re not really designed for a massive data center that creates a low frequency hum that makes your windows rattle,” she said.
Data centers are also equipped with bright lights for security. While that might not be an issue in suburban or urban areas, Parmelee said, it’s disruptive in rural communities—even those with dark-sky standards in their code. The facilities can be a burden, she said, “if you care about your dark skies, if you want to have your night feel like night.”
Parmelee and Walker also noted that data centers are equipped with massive banks of backup diesel generators, which can impact a neighborhood’s air quality. The generators provide electricity to the facilities if the power goes out, and require monthly testing.
‘Keep pushing’
Thursday night’s meeting came on the heels of AWS’s decision to withdraw its request for conditional use permit to build its third data center campus in the TOD. But organizers reminded residents to stay vigilant and pay attention to local government, noting that AWS could submit another application and other companies could pursue data center development in the county.
The TOD, where data centers and other tech sector uses are currently permitted with a CUP, includes four assemblages. AWS is already building campuses on two: the Lake Anna campus by North Anna and the North Creek campus off Route 33 south of the reservoir.
The other two assemblages are the roughly 1400-acre Fisher Chewning tract, where AWS proposed its third campus, and the 1200-acre Cooke Rail Park located north of Davis Highway (Route 22) between Chopping and Chalk Level Roads. Both Fisher Chewning, owned by Fisher Chewning, LC, and the Cooke property, mostly owned by the Louisa County Industrial Development Authority, hold CUPs for utility-scale solar development. It’s unclear if the owners of either property still intend to pursue that use.
Community Development Director Linda Buckler said in an email to Engage Louisa last week that, outside of the TOD and the Shannon Hill Regional Business Park, where EdgeCore plans to build its campus, county staff isn’t aware of any properties where data centers are permitted by-right or with a CUP. Data centers were proffered in as a by-right use when the business park was rezoned for industrial development six years ago while the county initially allowed tech sector development by-right in the TOD before tacking on the CUP requirement last year.
“For all future [data center] applications, the property must be located in a TOD with a Conditional Use Permit or request to be added to a TOD with a Conditional Use Permit,” Buckler said.
The county’s TOD ordinance includes a provision aimed at limiting data center sprawl. It caps tech sector development within the district at 3,266 acres, or one percent of the county’s land mass.
Parmelee encouraged residents to “keep pushing” and make sure that decision-makers in the community “fully understands what they’re being asked to do when they’re presented with a data center.”
“Keep doing what you all are already doing. Inform your communities. Inform your elected officials. Make this an issue that everybody has to have a stance on,” she said.
Parmelee said PEC understands that data centers are critical pieces of 21st century infrastructure, and they aren’t going away. But she said localities need to slow down on green-lighting the projects and state government needs to enact reforms to protect communities and the environment.
PEC and other organizations have joined forces to form the Data Center Reform Coalition, which is calling for changes in state law that put guardrails on the industry. Those include state-level review of data center proposals, tying tax incentives to sustainability initiatives, ensuring the industry pays for any upgrades to the power grid necessary to support its facilities and increasing transparency.
Of the 30 bills PEC advocated for last session, only two passed the Democratic-controlled General Assembly, Parmelee said. Both were vetoed by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin.
“Now is the time to be calling your [state] representatives and letting them know that you are concerned about these issues, and you want them to do something,” Parmelee said.
News roundup: Hopkins wins farming award
Engage Louisa focuses on Louisa County government. We recognize we can’t cover everything, and there’s plenty of other news in our neck of the woods. With that in mind, we occasionally include a roundup of links to the work of other journalists covering noteworthy events and issues that impact our community.
Louisa's Hopkins wins Farmer of the Year -The Central Virginian (metered paywall)
Louisa’s star running back sets commitment date -Saturday Down South
Louisa County Animal Shelter critically full -Louisa County (press release)
Check out last Wednesday’s special edition of Engage Louisa for our coverage of Amazon Web Services’ withdrawal of its request to build its third data center campus in Louisa County.
BREAKING: Amazon Web Services withdraws request to build data center campus north of reservoir
Engage Louisa is a nonpartisan newsletter that keeps folks informed about Louisa County government. We believe our community is stronger and our government serves us better when we increase transparency, accessibility, and engagement.
Click here for contact information for the Louisa County Board of Supervisors.
Find agendas and minutes from previous Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings as well as archived recordings here.
Click here for contact information for the Louisa County School Board.
Click here for minutes and agendas for School Board meetings. Click here for archived video.
Click here to access past editions of Engage Louisa.
I don’t have much knowledge on that subject, tbh. They will be temporary fwiw.
Lacking knowledge about "ultra-deep commercial wells", I am curious if they could potentially affect the water table of homeowners.