By Brian Trompeter
Data centers are a massive and increasing presence in Northern Virginia, and Fairfax County supervisors want to make sure the county can absorb and mitigate the facilities’ impacts.
“While we are open to data centers in Fairfax County, they only work if they’re in the proper location and have the proper environmental mitigations, as well as are properly located in an appropriate place relative to residential properties and other uses,” said Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay (D).
Supervisors on May 9 directed county staff to research advances being made to address environmental concerns involving data centers, investigate possible mitigations, develop guidelines for locating such facilities and review how data centers should be approved. Staff also should disclose where any new data-center guidelines should be placed in the county’s zoning ordinance and comprehensive plan.
Staff members will need to report their findings and recommendations to the Board of Supervisors by year’s end.
Supervisor Walter Alcorn (D-Hunter Mill), whose district is slated to accommodate four future data centers, recommended the county government act quickly on the issues raised.
“I’d encourage staff to move quickly on this and, frankly, if there are things that are ready to move before the end of the year, I would suggest that they do that,” Alcorn said. “This is a moving target . . . This technology is changing. The practices are changing, so there may be some things that we would need to do even sooner than the end of the year.”
Power requirements are a major concern with data centers, said Supervisor Patrick Herrity (R-Springfield). Such facilities make up 20 percent of the power base of Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative (NOVEC) and within 10 to 15 years will constitute 90 percent of that base, while being less than 5 percent of the utility’s customers, he said.
Supervisors at some point will need to consider whether there will be sufficient electrical power for such a scenario, where that electricity would come from and what the electrical grid would look like, Herrity said.
The Virginia Association of Counties is keeping an eye on those issues, said Supervisor Penelope Gross (D-Mason), adding that data-center security also should be a top priority.
Data centers’ technological evolution is still up in the air and may, with advances like “cloud” computing, require less space, said Supervisor Rodney Lusk (D-Franconia).
(Another possibility, if the history of computing is any guide, is the demand for data could expand exponentially and outstrip efficiencies brought about by technological innovations.)
“When you net it out, those data centers tend to be more efficient than racks of servers plugged into the wall in the basement of a building,” said Supervisor James Walkinshaw (D-Braddock). “If you just measure the emissions that that building creates – and we should hold them to high standards – you’re missing the alternative, which is most often much less efficient. Unless we all stop using our phones and our devices, then we won’t need them – but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) announced in January that Amazon Web Services would invest $35 billion to develop data centers in Virginia by 2040.
Data centers can be beneficial from a tax-base perspective or for repurposing buildings, said McKay. Northern Virginia receives many requests for the facilities because of the region’s location near the Internet’s fiber-optic infrastructure, he said.
Fairfax County has 11 data centers and five more are on the way, McKay said, adding that some of the facilities were installed by-right and others had to go through the zoning process.
The county’s 1978 zoning ordinance treated data centers as telecommunications facilities requiring special exceptions in residential districts, but allowable by-right in all commercial, industrial and planned districts, if included in the development or Planned Residential Community plans, McKay said.
Supervisors later in the May 9 meeting supplanted that former zoning code – for the second time, owing to a recent Virginia Supreme Court decision– with the Modernized Zoning Ordinance (aka zMOD).
The new zMOD does not allow data centers to be located in residential areas, most commercial districts and many planned districts, he said.
“zMOD became much more restrictive when it came to date centers than our outdated 1978 ordinance, [a] point missed by a lot of people as we’ve gone through the process,” McKay said.
The newly readopted zMOD also imposed use-specific standards with size limits for data centers in newly proposed buildings in certain commercial and industrial districts, McKay said. In addition, the standards required that such facilities’ ventilation, cooling and other equipment be enclosed in most zoning districts.
The Fairfax County Environmental Quality Advisory Council has requested that supervisors examine potential environmental issues related to data centers. The county’s Planning Commission, following well-attended discussions on the zMOD readoption, also has recommended that county staff further review data centers as part of the Zoning Ordinance Work Plan, McKay said.
