Climate Age

Imagine officials on a suburban county board outside of Washington D.C. approving a series of industrial projects that will require as much electricity as New York City. Add in that these facilities will need to run on toxic diesel fuel for extended periods that will pump out billions of pounds of carbon dioxide and deposit acid rain on a struggling Chesapeake Bay ecosystem.  This could never happen in 2023, right?  Think again.

A small group of county supervisors in Prince William County Virginia has, over the past four years, voted to approve the siting and development of millions of square feet of new industrial-scale data centers. These centers, attached to such names as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and contracts by the Department of Defense promise to generate local tax revenue and provide jobs. These officials crow about their ability to bring such economic development to their area. They are not climate deniers. Philosophically, at least, they care about climate change and even set up a new sustainability commission to work on programs for improved county-wide recycling, energy conservation, tree planting and more.

But if we look a little deeper, none of them has had any education on or orientation to the causes and consequences of climate change. They simply can’t see what they don’t know. They evidence a nearly complete lack of understanding of the larger effects of local land use approvals on climate. This courts true disaster when it comes to industrial-scale data centers. Their decisions are leading to a cascade of global warming and carbon pollution impacts that, due, in part, to their ignorance, will reverse many years of state and regional progress on climate mitigation. Let me explain.

For starters, a thin majority of the County Board has approved or is considering about 100 million square feet of data centers in the County. While this might be an abstract number, it is enough floor space to cover Reagan National Airport, runways and all, three times over.  When they are operational these facilities will house tens of millions of computers and will need as much electricity (no exaggeration) as New York City on a peak summer day. A modest estimate is the 250 to 300 city block-sized buildings they have approved, or are considering, will pull 15,000 to 24,000 megawatts of power from the PJM managed power grid of the 13-state Mid-Atlantic region. According to PJM it will overwhelm the electrical grid by 2030 and cause other dominos to fall with stunning implications:

• It will mean that soon-to-be-retired and exceedingly dirty coal-burning power plants will stay in operation for years longer because alternative energy plans did not consider such a rapid growth of data centers.

• 15,000 megawatts are equivalent to the generation output of a dozen average coal-burning plants or five to six nuclear plants.

• These data centers will, at times, need to fall back on roughly one half of 8,000 installed industrial-scale (2 to 3 megawatts each) backup diesel generators, for extended periods, such as during cold spells and summer heat waves. These generators will, conservatively, burn 400,000 gallons of diesel fuel every hour – the same usage as half a million idling diesel trucks.

• 100 hours of this backup generation would pump about one billion pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere and discharge ground level pollution throughout the DC region.

• The State of Virgnia will likely grant an air quality waiver to this massive diesel generation and allow increased levels of pollution. EPA attributes diesel pollution to childhood asthma, carcinogens, and thousands of premature deaths in the U.S.  Millions of residents will periodically experience dangerous and unbreathable air pollution impacting lower-income people, children, the elderly and people with chronic heart and lung conditions.

• Virginia will also likely withdraw from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

• Dominion Power indicates that the region will get a new spiderweb of high-voltage transmission lines from as far away as Ohio and centering on northern Virginia. Private property will be taken and degraded and millions of trees will be cleared.

• The Chesapeake Bay ecosystem will suffer from increased acid rain and degradation.

• The data centers will install flood retention structures based on old weather models that fail to consider today’s more intense, climate-driven storms. This will cause increased flooding and polluted runoff into Chesapeake tributaries and regional drinking supplies.

• The data center sites will have millions of gallons of stored fuel, chemicals, large quantities of pavement clearing salts, and a vast accumulation of toxic metals such as cadmium, arsenic and mercury with no major plans for emergency response or waste management.

• And more changes are coming. As the world moves more toward a reliance on artificial intelligence, energy demands for data centers will triple and Virgnia’s pending climate disaster will worsen. 

These County officials, who would say they care about the environment, did not understand any of this as they approved data center projects one by one. If they had, they might have made different and more measured decisions. But climate change was not really on their radar.  The County’s professional planning staff missed the broader implications too. Understanding climate change means understanding numerous causes and effects.

The bottom line is that climate education is about more than kids learning the climate cycle or training technicians to install solar panels and windmills. Our leaders, across the public and private sectors, also need to be versed in the climate implications of their decisions. Whether they are in the business world, the public sector, educators, or local politicians looking for added local tax revenue. The desperate lack of meaningful climate education in the U.S. may not always have such dire implications as the Prince William County land use decisions, but the point is clear enough.  We need the largest threat to the planet and human survival to be much more thoroughly integrated in U.S. education at all levels including public administration including land use planning.