AWS Datacenter Drawing Protests
A new datacenter planned for the Washington, DC, suburbs is drawing the ire of local residents, largely because of the amount of electricity it would draw from proposed high-voltage power lines.
Residents of Prince William County, Va., turned out in droves at a recent public hearing to protest the construction of high-voltage transmission lines needed to deliver electricity to a proposed datacenter near Haymarket, Va. While the owner of the datacenter has not been revealed, local politicians have said they believe it is Amazon Web Services, a supplier of cloud and other services to federal agencies, including the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Local residents are concerned that high-voltage lines would be routed through residential areas. Dominion Virginia Power has said the facility would require lines at least 100 feet high. The utility recently proposed several possible routes as it begins the process of gaining regulatory permits required before construction can commence.
In response, local politicians have proposed legislation requiring that power lines constructed in residential areas be buried at the expense of the datacenter owner. A utility spokesman told the Washington Post (which is owned by Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos) that it would likely propose both above-ground and buried power lines for the datacenter.
Dominion Virginia Power estimated that an above-ground option for power lines would cost an estimated $62.5 million while a hybrid approach that might fly with county residents would more than double the project's cost to an estimated $140 million.
Virginia state senators wrote Bezos to oppose the datacenter power line project. The Jan. 5 letter requests that the location of the datacenter be changed to an area zoned for industrial use near a research park operated by George Mason University. "Data centers exist at this location, and there is adequate acreage and capital infrastructure for the Amazon data center," the legislators noted.
The other option proposed to Bezos was burying the power lines. At least part of the additional cost of burying transmission lines would be borne by Dominion Power's ratepayers, according to state law.
Amazon Web Services isn’t commenting on the datacenter controversy.
The Northern Virginia area is dotted with datacenters that provide cloud services to Beltway contractors and, increasingly, government agencies. Most are located in industrial parks situated along major highways. As more residents move into the region, the datacenters are beginning to bump up against neighborhoods that are resisting upgrades to the local electric utility infrastructure.
The Virginia utility said it is currently reviewing several alternative routes for the 230-kilovolt double circuit transmission line and substation project. Before proceeding with the project, it must gain approval from the state utility regulator, the Virginia State Corporation Commission. "We have not set a date to submit our application," Dominion Power said in a statement. "However it will likely be after the first quarter of 2015."
