Sal Orlando, News Editor
The L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs released a new Commonwealth Poll on July 15 with results showing Virginians are concerned about data centers.
Nearly 8 in 10 registered voters in Virginia believe data centers should pay additional fees to compensate for increased electricity demands from facility operation, according to the poll. Over 70% of registered voters oppose data centers receiving sales tax exemptions that incentivize facilities in the state.
Virginia leads the country in the most planned data centers, according to Pew Research Center. There are future facilities planned for Chesterfield, Henrico, Petersburg and Goochland.
Mary Finley-Brook, Professor of Geography and Global Studies at the University of Richmond and member of Data Center Defiance, said that Google, Meta, QTS, Chirisa and Tracts are all well-known entities in the data center landscape building in the Richmond area.
DCD is a coalition in Central Virginia with a mission to protect people and the environment from the harms of data centers in the region.
“They’re trying to squeeze as much as they can out of every locality, and it is always a sense of ‘If you don’t go along with what’s being demanded, we will go elsewhere,’” Finley-Brook said. “So, local governments feel a little bit over the barrel… I think they are misinformed about the risks.”
Google held two community open houses last month to discuss three proposed data center campuses in Chesterfield: Project Peanut, Project Skye and Project Loch.
“They [Google] just stood there and ran their mouths saying anything positive that they could without listening to what the people said and people came out hoarse from arguing back because they were so mad,” Finley-Brook said.
Finley-Brook said participants at the open house were told claims that didn’t align with their lived experiences.
“Google definitely doesn’t seem to listen,” Finley-Brook said. “They just come back with greenwash and it’s really lacking evidence. I study them all over the world, they come out with all of these claims, they’re not living up to it.”
Courtney Bernhardt, a Chesterfield resident and DCD member, said her main concerns with data center construction in her community are the environmental impact and the noise that comes from them. She asked for the sites to commit to clean energy, scale back the size of their projects to have fewer water body impacts and install noise monitoring to hold themselves accountable.
“Basically, I want them to be a good neighbor, not like any other industrial site on paper,” Bernhardt said.
Bernhardt works for the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit that advocates for environmental law enforcement.
“They [the county and the data center planners] don’t know how big the data center is going to be, they haven’t decided which cooling system to use,” Bernhardt said. “It’s almost like, you know, counties have to make decisions without a whole lot of information in front of them.”
Over 2,500 people signed a petition to Chesterfield County demanding public disclosure of all negotiations, agreements and financial commitments with data center developers. The petition requests community input and seeks to end county engagement in non-disclosure agreements.
Bernhardt wants people who are concerned about data centers’ impacts to pressure their government and not blindly trust they will do the right thing.
Sen. Glen Sturtevant, R-Colonial Heights, sent a letter to Gov. Abigail Spanberger urging her to establish an immediate pause on the approval and development of data centers in Virginia, according to ABC News.
“Now that communities there have seen the consequences of that level of development, the industry is moving elsewhere in Virginia, including south along I-95 toward the Richmond region,” Sturtevant stated in an email. “I don’t want my part of Virginia to become the next Data Center Alley.”
Sturtevant believes the best thing residents can do to fight back is to get involved before a project is approved. He said residents can push back by paying attention to zoning applications, attending public hearings and asking officials about required resources and funding.
“People also need to make clear that endless data center growth is not inevitable,” Sturtevant stated. “The industry has gotten very accustomed to hearing ‘yes.’ Residents have every right to ask whether another project actually benefits their community and whether Virginia needs it at all.”
Sturtevant introduced Senate Bill 552 last session, which the bill would have required site assessments and environmental reviews before data center projects could be approved, but failed
“It makes no sense to continue approving more projects while that work is underway,” Sturtevant stated. “At the very least, the moratorium should remain in place until that work is completed. More fundamentally, Virginia needs to answer whether additional data centers are justified at all.”
Sen. Mike Jones, D-Richmond, announced a plan to file two data center bills in the 2027 session. The bills would ban local officials from signing nondisclosure agreements for data center projects and require public hearings and disclosure requirements for data centers.
“The goal is to try to give residents and communities the opportunity to hear about what’s going on in their communities,” Jones said.
Jones said data center developers are lobbying state representatives, creating an obstacle for regulatory legislation.
“Democrats need to step the f*** up and lead in this,” Jones said. “We’re allowing Republican legislators to lead the argument on this, and that shouldn’t be the case. That’s why you have democratic leaders in Virginia stepping up.”
Nearly 20% more Democrats support requiring data centers to pay additional fees to offset electricity demands, according to the July Commonwealth Poll.
“For the average Virginian, especially for the majority of the people I represent, they are impacted,” Jones said. “An eight-dollar increase on a bill is going to make a difference.”
Jones said that cities want to brand themselves as business-friendly when making deals with data centers. He believes there should be an expectation that they will be good neighbors by not depleting natural resources or raising the cost of living.
“We have to ensure that families that are struggling to survive are not swallowed up in this,” Jones said.
Spanberger intervened in a proposed $67 billion dollar merger between Dominion Energy — the utility responsible for the data center market in Northern Virginia — and Florida-based NextEra Energy, according to a press release. She cited the intervention to skepticism of if the merger would be at the expense of affordability, existing jobs and clean energy in Virginia.