Data centers & energy

The Action 16 team is investigating energy consumption by data centers in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania, but the segment focuses on Virginia, particularly Loudoun County, known as Data Center Alley. Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council, an environmental watchdog group in Virginia, detailed the projected power demands of data centers in the state. Miller stated that Virginia has between 600 to 1000 data center proposals in the pipeline. Dominion Energy, the utility provider, has reported requests for power up to 70 gigawatts solely for data centers. This demand significantly dwarfs their current peak load, which is around 20 gigawatts, indicating a potential tripling or quadrupling of their system capacity over a 20-25 year period. Dominion Energy expects to spend $58 billion on generation and transmission within the next five years to meet this demand. Miller also raised concerns about the long-term sustainability of such rapid growth, emphasizing that while compute power advances, the electricity consumption for generative AI and complex calculations is effectively unlimited, and similar issues apply to water usage, suggesting the system could be 'broken' if not addressed proactively.