Northern Virginia has had enough with data centers

Fri Jun 23 23:01:35 UTC 2023

> On Jun 23, 2023, at 15:17, Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Northern Virginia has about 275 data centers

There’s probably close to that number in the South Bay Area of California as well.

> The noise complaints are about HVAC fan noise (24-hour droning) from cooling towers or roof top farms of evaporative condensers.

I get it, but reality is that at most datacenter, this noise simply disappears once you get much outside of the parking lot. Especially if there’s a busy roadway anywhere nearby.

> The water complaints are about the one-use water cooling towers

That does seem rather silly… We don’t have those in California.

> The electric grid complaints are about the demand on the grid making the entire region less stable and proposed construction of new high-voltage tower corridors for data centers.

Yeah, I can kind of understand those, but as long as the grid is properly planned, it really shouldn’t have a destabilizing effect. In fact, many datacenter in California do CoGen and end up providing additional grid stability.

> And if you didn't know, some VC-funded companies can be a**-holes and not known for being good neighbors or anything besides making money.

Oh, yeah… We have those here too.

> And yes, I helped design & build several early data centers in NOVA :-)
> 
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/02/10/data-centers-northern-virginia-internet/

No doubt.

Owen