Comment by SpicyLemonZest
4 days ago
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.
> doesn't believe they were trying to find tricks or deceive anyone
Talking about motivations would seem to be a smokescreen, a politician still trying to grease the wheels to allow the project to continue despite the harm to local residents. The point is that any engineer overseeing the deployment of turbines would have said "these things are loud" - it's an externality eminently foreseeable by the owner.
And yes, my point is that the theories of liability that would make the county liable for any of these costs need to be drastically curtailed. The responsibility for a datacenter owner trying to force their externalities onto existing land uses and failing should rest on the datacenter owner, not on the people whom they attempted to harm.
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