Will data centers harm Shenandoah National Park?

Environmentalists warn of dire consequences

As hulking, energy-guzzling data centers mushroom across the western reaches of Northern Virginia, environmentalists are warning of dire consequences for a local national jewel — Shenandoah National Park.

The industry’s explosive growth — first over the past decade in Loudoun County and more recently in Prince William County — has triggered anxiety among residents, environmentalists and officials. They now are sounding alarms on the deleterious effects these tech hubs can have on quality of life and natural resources.

Atop their list of worries is a potential push for additional transmission lines to cut through the park to power the centers — as already has been done to meet other electricity demands.

At present, a small line crosses the northern end of the park near Sperryville intersecting Skyline Drive, to deliver power to the region. At the southern end of the park, transmission lines deliver power from Mount Storm Power Station and Bath County Pumped Storage Station, providing electricity to the regional grid serving all Dominion Energy, Appalachian Power and electric co-op customers, according to officials with Dominion.

Already, Northern Virginia is home to the world’s greatest concentration of data centers – those enormous, block-house structures that proliferate, seemingly unabated, in the region. Chock-full of noisy computers storing digital information, they power cloud-computing and artificial intelligence systems for federal agencies and the nation’s big tech companies. They come with the promise of tax revenue that Northern Virginia jurisdictions hope will lower the region’s notoriously high property taxes.

For a time, data centers mostly were confined to the suburbs and exurbs of Washington, D.C. But slowly, the industry has moved farther west, popping up in areas like the towns of Warrenton and Culpeper and Orange County – and all the time, inching closer to one of the country’s most popular national parks.

In the absence of state and federal regulatory checks on their growth, environmental advocates say the data centers’ shrinking proximity to the park has far-reaching implications for the electric grid, air quality and natural resources in surrounding areas.

There’s nothing new in data centers impacting national parks in Northern Virginia. Prince William County last year approved a giant development – the PW Digital Gateway, which is expected to become the largest data center corridor in the world. Featuring 23 million square feet of floor space, it is to be sited on roughly 2,100 acres abutting Manassas Battlefield National Park.

The project, to be built over the next decade, drew the ire of environmentalists and the U.S. National Park Service, which fears data centers will harm the battlefield and its historic resources, potentially including the remains of Civil War soldiers. Former battlefield Superintendent Brandon Bies described the Digital Gateway as “the single greatest threat” to the park in three decades.

Currently, the closest data centers to Shenandoah are about 30 miles away, in Culpeper. So far, none is proposed for Rappahannock County, a major gateway to the park’s high-traffic Thornton Gap Entrance, near Sperryville. And it’s unlikely Rappahannock, a small, rural county largely opposed to development of any kind, let alone towering industrial structures, would consider allowing data centers any time soon.

Saying she was unaware of any data center developers eying the county, Debbie Donehey, chair of the Rappahannock County Board of Supervisors, said she would be “gobsmacked” if the county government ever seriously considered rezoning land for a tech hub.

“I think [the] word is out, we’re not a growth county,” she said. “If anybody on our board said anything pro about data centers, we would be out in the next election. [And] I’d have to agree … with the voters on that one – it’s definitely not who we are.”

The Rappahannock League for Environmental Protection recently hired a firm to help it to more effectively advocate for its priorities, as Rappahannock County moves to amend its zoning ordinances. Rick Kohler, the organization’s leader, said the league wanted to ensure the county’s laws made industrial development, like data centers, as difficult as possible.

Impact on power grid

But even without actual data centers within striking distance of the park, environmentalists remain broadly concerned about the implications for the electric grid posed by their intense demand for power.

Piedmont Environmental Council Director of Land Use Julie Bolthouse – the organization’s data center guru, said she expected new transmission lines would be built across the region as more hubs were approved.

Kyle Hart, Mid-Atlantic program manager with the National Parks Conservation Association, cautioned, “this is all high-level hypothetical at the moment,” in the absence of an actual proposal imminently threatening the park.

But he also cited new transmission lines to power data centers as the greatest threat.

Hart said he could envision a hypothetical scenario, wherein the most economically viable route for power being generated west of Shenandoah in West Virginia to be delivered to a data center east of the park, would be to cut through the park.

However the most likely scenario, according to Hart, is that existing transmission lines through the park, such as the corridor through Thornton Gap near Sperryville, would require significant upgrades, adding construction and increased viewshed impacts on the park. He said parks also would lose valuable wildlife habitat and land to new transmission lines.

“I think anybody that’s been around these big industrial transmission lines recognized that that’s what they are,” Hart said. “They’re industrial infrastructure. They buzz and crackle and pop and they’re, to be honest, quite ugly to look at. And when people go to a national park like Shenandoah, [they want] to escape that.

“Parks should be a place where people can kind of experience the natural world in its truest form, and as more transmission lines go up and are crossing the countryside, it becomes harder and harder for [people] to find that experience in the East.”

A few power lines already cut east to west through portions of Shenandoah. And the nearby Manassas Battlefield has its own transmission line that splices the park.

Looking ahead, Hart worries uncertainly: “A lot of the potential impact to Shenandoah is: What does the region, what does Shenandoah, what does the State of Virginia, look like in 10 or 15 or 20 years if nothing changes?

“Are there direct and immediate impacts to Shenandoah at this very moment? It’s kind of hard to put a pin in that … but not really. Is it foreseeable that in the near future, if nothing changes, sort of, across the data center regulatory landscape in the next 10 years, could it become this tremendous issue? Certainly.”

Shenandoah National Park Superintendent Pat Kenney did not return requests for comment for this report.

Hart’s organization is pushing state officials to require data center companies to submit a comprehensive analysis of their potential impact on the power grid, similar to how the Virginia Department of Transportation requires developers to submit traffic analyses for a project.

“That will prevent big projects … the Digital Gateway in Prince William County comes to mind, from having these far-reaching, downstream impacts that no one was really taking into account at the time of the rezoning,” he said.

Hart argued the burden should be on the data center companies, not power utilities, to prove that transmission lines fueling their planned structures would be as environmentally conscious as possible.

“It’s time that we start as a state and as a region, thinking about this industry as bigger than one plant, one project, one site,” he said. “It’s not just a local land-use issue. It’s much more than that. And it’s time that the state starts thinking about that, in a holistic manner, in planning for it long term. That is how you protect parks.”

Air quality concerns

The Piedmont Environmental Council’s Bolthouse said data center demand for energy creates not only pressure for the construction of new transmission lines, but also for additional natural gas facilities, which has broader implications for air quality and climate change.

Air quality impacts from data centers are tricky to quantify, she said. Advocates lack data sufficiently granular to measure air quality in small areas, such as Loudoun County’s data center alley, or where the Digital Gateway is being built.

But, says Bolthouse, a particular issue is the smog effect of thousands of diesel generators around Northern Virginia that are the size of train cars. They serve as emergency backup for data centers in the event of outages; but also, they come online routinely for maintenance purposes. If more data centers continue to stress the power grid, there’s a higher likelihood the generators will be put to use for more emergency outages. 

“The primary wind direction is kind of towards Baltimore from data center alley where all the generators are piled up,” she said. “But it also moves towards Shenandoah National Park sometimes as well, and that can create smog.

“Because no one was really paying attention, we’re a little bit of a frog in the boiling water. So, we don’t have a baseline to say, ‘Okay, what was it like before we started building all these [data centers].’ We’d have to go back to like 2018 and check the air quality, and compare it to today. But because we don’t have good air monitors all over the place, it’s really hard to pin that down to just Northern Virginia,” Bolthouse said.

Hart observed too, that as more data centers come online, big coal-fired power stations in Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania likely would operate for longer than they otherwise might have.

Environmentalists also worry data centers might resort to diesel backup generators to meet demand during peak times, an idea the industry is exploring.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been monitoring visibility in national parks since the 1980s, through its regional haze program. NPCA has leveraged that program to keep pollution out of the Shenandoah airscape but, Hart said, the program does not capture data on diesel generators, leading NPCA to start work on a policy that would include data center emergency generators in the haze plan.

“It’s almost this self-fulfilling prophecy: highly energy-intensive data centers come online; they strain an aging electrical grid; so they have to use those diesel generators, which burn diesel, which is very dirty; that produces smog; and depending on the facility and the prevailing wind direction, it certainly could end up in Shenandoah,” said Hart.

Foothills Forum is an independent, nonpartisan civic news organization whose mission includes providing in-depth explanatory reporting on issues of importance to the region’s citizens.