Comment by bilekas
4 days ago
> What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them?
Well I'm not sure how it works there but there are requests here made before building can start. Planning permission is usually first voted on by committee and then brought to the public in the area and public forums are where people get to ask questions such as "what's the expected noise pollution". Basic stuff I thought.
The article details why it wasn't so basic here. Loudoun County allows datacenters to be built by right without a hearing, because they were understood to be (and IME still usually are) very low-impact on the neighbors. The gas turbines were approved as a temporary power source, but then the local power company Dominion said "temporary" would have to last for years longer than planned. Now they're changing the rules for datacenter approvals to ensure that projects that might end up producing this kind of impact will get the scrutiny they need.
The fundamental problem is that adjusting the regulations for new operations still delivers no equitable relief for people around the site that was let through. An industrial operation shouldn't get an indefinite pass of grandfathered use for finding tricks in the current regulations. Rather the turbines should be shut down in short order (~weeks), and then owners can figure out how to proceed with the foreseeable contingency - wait for the grid operator (or properly incentivize them), deploy their own solar and batteries or some other type of power generation that doesn't produce noise and air pollution externalities, and so on.
The article says that Michael Turner, the vice chair of the county's government, doesn't believe they were trying to find tricks or deceive anyone. That makes it a lot harder to justify shutting them down. And potentially quite expensive, if they or their users can argue the county is liable for the costs.
You mention properly incentivizing the grid operator, but this is also not so simple. As Dominion describes in their FAQ (https://www.dominionenergy.com/virginia/large-business-servi...), providing power to a large datacenter is itself a substantial construction project, requiring its own permits and specialized components. It's not just a matter of paying enough to get some guys working overtime.
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Bending over backwards and giving zero tax rates will sure make our area prosper! It has never worked before, but this time, maybe it will!!
Pretty sure Northern VA (datacenter alley) is doing pretty great?
Doubt they had to bend over backwards. This is one of dozens (hundreds now?) datacenters in the area.
The difference these days is that they now come with power plants in the parking lot. Otherwise they tend to be pretty quiet all things considered other than when backup generators are fired up during testing or power outages.
Cooling can be moderately loud, but the noise rapidly drops off with distance.