Tag Archives: Amazon Web Services

A 5-point plan for Virginia’s data centers

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Data center between housing community and a bike path
Data centers increasingly dot the landscape of Northern Virginia, like this one sandwiched between a housing community and the W&OD bike path in Ashburn. Photo by Hugh Kenny, Piedmont Environmental Council.

None of the sessions at last month’s Virginia Clean Energy Summit(VACES) in Richmond were devoted to data centers, but data centers were what everyone was talking about. Explosive growth in that energy-hungry industry has everyone — utilities, the grid operator, and the industry itself — scrambling to figure out how Virginia will provide enough new power generation and transmission. And, worryingly, no one seems to have an answer. 

Or rather, lots of people have answers, but none of them achieve the trifecta of providing data centers the energy they need while continuing the explosive growth trajectory that state leaders seem to want, and at the same time keeping Virginia’s transition to zero-carbon energy on track. Something has to give. Which will it be?

With no action, the “give” comes from the people of Virginia. Residents will see growth they don’t want, pay for infrastructure that doesn’t serve them, suffer from pollution that is not of their making, and see their tax dollars subsidize an industry that employs almost no one.

The no-action option isn’t a solution

But first, a quick recap. Northern Virginia already has the largest concentration of data centers in the world. As of late 2022, data center electricity demand had grown to 21% of Dominion Energy Virginia’s entire load, and likely an even larger percentage of the load of Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative (NOVEC), which serves much of Data Center Alley.

Worse, the industry is just getting started. Grid operator PJM’s grid forecast projects Dominion’s data center load will quadruple over the next 15 years, while NOVEC’s will rise to ten times what it is today. Other rural electric cooperatives in Virginia told PJM they also expect a huge demand from data centers, a prediction confirmed by news that Amazon Web Services expects to spend $11 billion on data centers in Louisa County, in the territory of Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. 

In its Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) filing in May of this year, Dominion told the State Corporation Commission (SCC) that due to data center demand, it plans to ignore Virginia’s commitment to achieving a zero-carbon economy. Instead of increasing the pace of renewable energy and storage construction, it wants to keep coal plants running past their mandatory retirement dates and even build new gas combustion turbines as well as billions of dollars’ worth of new transmission infrastructure. The result will be higher costs for consumers and massive increases in carbon emissions, violating the carbon-cutting mandate of the Virginia Clean Economy Act. 

Bill Murray, Dominion senior vice president for corporate affairs and communications, seems to have tried for a more conciliatory tone in talking to Senate Finance Committee members last week about the challenge of meeting data center load. Murray is quoted in the Richmond Times-Dispatch telling members, “We have worked through these challenges before.” Isn’t that reassuring? If only it were true. 

If Dominion’s response has been less than adequate, others have not done better. PJM, already woefully behind on approving new renewable energy generation interconnection requests, blames states for wanting clean energy rather than doing its own job to help the market provide it. A PJM representative told the VACES audience utilities should just keep their fossil fuel plants running until it can work its way through the backlog, hopefully by 2026.

Virginia’s Data Center Coalition doesn’t see energy as its problem to solve, and its members seem strangely content to run on fossil fuels. Others in the industry are trying to do better, though. Whole conferences are devoted to the subject of lowering the carbon footprint of data centers. In addition to a pledge to use renewable energy 24/7, Google has achieved remarkable levels of energy efficiency (for you nerds, they claim an average PUE of 1.1). Google, however, has only a small footprint in Virginia. 

Amazon Web Services, the biggest data center company in Virginia, buys renewable energy but is not striving for the 24/7 standard. AWS’ senior manager for energy and environment public policy, Craig Sundstrom, told a panel at VACES that by 2025, AWS will have offset its use of grid power with purchases of renewable energy on the PJM grid, and he pointed to 16 solar projects the company has in operation or under development in Virginia. That’s a great start, but it’s only a start. With no battery storage in the mix, AWS will still be using grid power from fossil fuels most of the time.

Wishful thinking will not solve this 

So what should data centers do? Or, since most of the industry doesn’t want to do anything, what should Virginia utilities and policymakers do? 

VACES conference attendees had a few suggestions. The nuclear energy true believers were there, touting small modular reactors (SMRs). Gov. Youngkin and many Virginia legislators are fans of nuclear, but the timing was unfortunate. A few weeks after VACES, the first SMR in development — the one that’s supposed to prove how great the technology is — lost its customers due to increasing cost projections. The chances of SMRs ever outcompeting solar paired with storage seems more remote than ever.

Green hydrogen, a vital part of our energy future, has cost and availability problems right now, too. Microgrids powered by hydrogen fuel cells would be a fantastic solution. I’ll set my alarm for 2030 to check on how that’s going. 

Meanwhile, representatives of Washington Gas and Roanoke Gas earnestly tried to sell the VACES audience on the virtues of methane captured from wastewater treatment plants and hog waste cesspools like those at Smithfield Farms’ concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). 

Some of this so-called renewable natural gas (RNG) may be available now, but it is exceedingly hard to imagine there would ever be enough to supply even the back-up generators at Virginia data centers, to say nothing of meeting 21% (and growing!) of Dominion’s total load. North Carolina has incentivized pig waste biogas for many years, but it still makes up only a fraction of a percentage point of that state’s energy supply.

To hear the gas folks tell it, though, RNG is not just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative, achieving this Holy Grail status by capturing and burning methane that would otherwise escape into the air. They assert that mixing a mere 5% of this biogas into ordinary fossil methane will effectively decarbonize the entire pipeline. In other words, we should be glad CAFOs are such an environmental disaster. 

That dog won’t hunt. If gas companies get to claim the virtues of pig waste biogas, they also have to account for its vices, including the greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution associated with methane capture and leakage throughout collection and delivery.

Also, if factory farming is the answer to the needs of data centers, God help us. Maybe the tech industry should move to Iowa. 

A better approach

One of the better ideas coming out of VACES was a simple one: if clean energy can’t come to the load, the load should go to clean energy. Iowa, in fact, is just one of several states that get more than half their electricity from wind and solar. And indeed, some large tech companies are looking at separating their operations between those that are time-critical and need to be next to load centers and those that don’t, with the latter able to take advantage of better climates and greener energy.  

Tech companies don’t necessarily have to look beyond Virginia to take their operations to clean energy. Nothing prevents them from locating in rural counties where they can surround their data centers with fields of solar panels and banks of batteries. For that matter, a large operator like AWS could buy offshore wind, starting with the Kitty Hawk project that is still seeking a customer. 

Many Virginia data center operators, though, will still need to access the PJM market. They should be expected to follow Google and buy renewable energy and storage to meet at least most of their electricity needs on a 24/7, hourly matching basis. Given the PJM bottleneck, they will need a grace period of two or three years. After that: no renewable energy, no tax subsidy.

That’s point one of our data center strategy. Point two: data centers that have to source their own renewable energy will be motivated to use less energy, but Virginia can also set an energy efficiency minimum they should meet to qualify for Virginia’s tax subsidies. They need not match Google’s success, but they should come close.  

Point three: Dominion claimed in its IRP that it could not build enough solar itself to meet the soaring data center demand; this was its excuse for keeping expensive coal plants running beyond their planned retirement dates. If Dominion can’t build it, let others do it. The General Assembly should remove the 35% limit on the amount of solar and storage capacity that third-party developers can provide. A little free-market competition never hurt anyone.  

Point four: If the growth of data centers requires utilities to invest more for energy generation and power lines, the data centers should be the ones paying the extra cost, not residential customers. 

Point five: Leaders should not separate the joy they feel in attracting data centers from the pain their constituents feel in living with data centers and transmission lines, breathing pollution from diesel back-up generators and having the quality and quantity of their freshwater resources threatened. Data center developers and revenue-hungry local governments are not the appropriate decision makers for development at this scale. The administration should convene a task force with the job and power to do comprehensive planning for data center siting, development and resource use. 

Adopting these five points will not stop data centers from locating in Virginia, and that isn’t the goal. What it will ensure is that the development is well planned out, fair and equitable to everyone.

This article appeared in the Virginia Mercury on November 21, 2023.

Virginia could soon have more than 2,500 MW of solar. We just need customers.

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Photo by Activ Solar via Wikimedia Commons.

A review of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality website reveals developers have at least started the permitting process for 64 solar farms across 40 jurisdictions, representing over 2,400 megawatts (MW) of solar capacity.

This includes projects that are already in operation, like the thousand-acre, 80 MW Amazon Web Services farm in Accomack that kicked off the solar gold rush here in 2015. Amazon also has another 5 projects in development. By the end of 2017, Amazon will have 260 MW of solar in Virginia, accounting for more than half the solar in the state.

The DEQ total only includes projects above 5 MW. It also omits another 94 MW of Dominion Energy projects permitted by the State Corporation Commission, all of which will be in operation by late fall. (Under legislation passed this year, Dominion’s projects will now also follow the DEQ Permit By Rule process, which applies to projects between 5 and 150 MW.)

In all, Virginia would have over 2,550 MW of utility-scale solar if all the projects were to be completed, at the maximum size for which they are seeking permits. But a closer look at the DEQ “notices of intent” suggests that so far the projects seem to have attracted only a limited number of customers: Amazon, our utilities, and the Commonwealth of Virginia itself.

Governor McAuliffe pledged that the Commonwealth would buy 110 MW of solar, enough to meet 8% of its electrical demand, split between onsite and offsite arrays. Announced deals include 18 MW at Naval Station Oceana and two projects totaling 32 MW that will serve the University of Virginia. The Commonwealth is also the off-taker of a project that provides Microsoft with RECs, to date the only announced deal involving a corporation other than Amazon.

Dominion Energy Virginia committed to 400 MW in 2015, and the utility’s 2017 integrated resource plan proposes a continuous build-out of 240 MW per year for the next 25 years. Old Dominion Electric Cooperative has also contracted for 30 MW of solar at two locations, with Dominion Energy owning the projects. Most recently, Central Virginia Electric Cooperative contracted for the output of two 5-MW solar farms. (These do not appear on the DEQ site.)

Where can we find more customers?

This leaves most proposed solar farms in Virginia without identified customers. Certainly, Dominion will prove to be the buyer for many, and there is no good reason it should stop at 240 MW per year. Appalachian Power is also considering sites in Virginia and West Virginia, but its appetite appears limited to 25 MW. The Commonwealth probably has a couple more deals in the works to complete McAuliffe’s pledge, and the next governor could up the ante—especially now we know that purchases by public colleges and universities count.

But for renewable energy to make a serious contribution to our energy supply, new customers have to commit. Fortunately they don’t need to sign onto Dominion’s half-baked green tariff proposal; they can contract directly with developers, as Amazon did initially. When Dominion Energy bought the first Amazon project from its from developer, the parties negotiated a special rate. Industry members say that deal is too complicated to serve as a model for others, but Dominion has indicated an interest in finding a solution.

Dominion’s participation was not necessary for Amazon to move forward, and it would not be required for other large customers to follow suit. In particular, a financial model known as a “virtual PPA” may offer an attractive option. In this arrangement, a large user contracts for the output of a solar or wind farm, but does not actually take delivery of the electricity. Instead, the power is sold into the wholesale market while the customer buys electricity from its utility as usual. The sale of electricity in the wholesale market offsets the cost of power purchased from the utility, acting as a hedge against rising energy prices. The customer gets the renewable energy certificates (RECs) to legally “green” its electricity supply.

A virtual PPA avoids treading on the monopoly power of a utility because it does not require a customer to take delivery of energy from the solar farm. According to Niels Crone of Customer First Renewables, a company that helps large businesses and institutions maximize the value of renewables, virtual PPAs could be a good option for customers located in Virginia.

Crone says that although virtual PPAs (as well as physical PPAs) deliver the greatest bottom-line benefit with larger projects, smaller customers can aggregate their demand to take advantage of economies of scale. That means the benefits don’t have to be limited to the Amazons of the world. Smaller corporations, universities, hospitals and even local government can band together to lower their energy costs—and make a positive impact on Virginia’s environment and economy.