While short-lived, the denial came as a surprise.
This March, Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, D.C. in northern Virginia that is home to the greatest concentration of data centers in the world, made an unexpected move: It rejected a proposal to let a company build a bigger data center than existing zoning automatically allowed.
“At some point we have to say stop,” said Loudoun Supervisor Michael Turner during the meeting, as reported by news site LoudounNow. “We do not have enough power to power the data centers we have.”
County supervisors would later reverse the decision, approving a smaller version of the project. But the initial denial sent ripples throughout Virginia, where concern over the rapid growth of data centers and what that means for the state’s ambitious decarbonization goals is growing.
“It is really a salient issue for climate right now,” said Tim Cywinski, a spokesperson for the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, which has been voca... Read more
