ENVIRONMENTAL CENTS: How Much Power Do Data Centers Use?

The amount of power required to fuel a data center is difficult for most people to wrap their heads around. Bruce Saller provides a look at the numbers, and things we can all do to help lower them.

By Bruce Saller
WRITER

Photo by imgix on Unsplash

Data Centers are a hot topic in our area as several are being proposed in our region.  While they bring a lot of revenue to localities through increased real estate and personal property taxes, they have a significant environmental impact due to their large power and water consumption, and noise and air pollution.  This piece will discuss the power impacts. Future articles will focus on the remaining issues.

Loudoun County has the largest number of data centers in Virginia. Two of the newest ones are on a 32-acre site that will initially (2^nd Quarter of 2025) host a 48 Mega-Watt (MW) building, followed by a second 24 MW building. The two buildings will total around 620,000 sq ft. 

One site under consideration in Fredericksburg is the 83.5 acres straddling the Cowan Boulevard corridor near Interstate 95. With proposed buildings of around 1,100,000 sq ft, the site could use 100 MW based on the Leesburg data centers. The Fredericksburg Economic Development Authority has approved $200,000 to fund Dominion Energy’s feasibility study to determine how much power Dominion can provide to sites in Celebrate Virginia South.

The average Virginia household uses about 14 Mega-Watt Hours (MWH) of power per year. Data centers run continuously, so the potential Fredericksburg data centers could use 100 MW x 24 hrs/day x 365 days = 876,000 MWH, or the same energy as 62,500 residences. According to the 2020 Census, Fredericksburg had 12,175 residences. Assuming we have 14,000 residences now, a 100MW data center in Fredericksburg would use 4.5 times the energy used by all the residences in the city.

Virginia belongs to the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland (PJM) Interconnection that manages electricity generation and distribution through all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and DC. (Original members were PA, NJ and MD.)  PJM Interconnection acts as one large company. If additional electricity is needed, it is provided by the lowest cost supplier, regardless of location. 

Generation types from lowest to highest cost are Renewables, Nuclear, New Combined Cycles, Coal, Old Combined Cycles, Combustion (Natural Gas/Oil).  (Combined Cycle generators recover heat from natural gas generators to drive steam turbine generators, resulting in up to 50% more electricity being produced.) Looking at the PJM generation statistics, they are always using natural gas and coal, so any additional demand will increase fossil fuel use.  

As of June 30, 2024, PJM had an installed capacity of 177,000 MW comprised of 50.2% gas, 21.3% coal, 18.2% nuclear, 4.3% hydroelectric, 2.2% oil, 1% wind, 0.4% solid waste, and 2.4% solar. In the first six months of 2024, PJM installed 1,195 MW of new capacity of which 1,074 MW was solar, 101 MW was wind units and 20 MW was batteries. That is a good start, but they need to add about 200,000 MW of green energy by 2035 to replace gas, coal and oil generation and support demand growth due to increased data center and electric vehicle demand.

Here are some suggestions on what we can do to help:

1. Reduce your cloud storage. Delete/reduce old photos/videos that take up a lot of storage.  

2. Consider purchasing a USB storage device to backup your files.

3. Use traditional searches (Google/Bing) versus AI searches (Chat-GPT). An AI search uses almost 10 times the energy as a traditional search.

4. Ask your state representatives to make utility companies purchase excess residential solar power. Currently, excess yearly solar generation carries over as a credit to the next year and is only used if you generate insufficient solar in a future year. This would encourage residents to install solar arrays that generate more energy than they use.

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