(Reading time: 7 minutes)
Sometimes it’s hard to grasp just how quickly the world is changing, and how slow we can be in adjusting. Perhaps that’s not a big deal on a personal level. Tell people you don’t use a cell phone or go on social media and they’ll just think you’re quirky, or old. But being out of step becomes a really huge deal when it involves spending millions of dollars and making decisions that will have a ripple effect for decades.
Case in point: that ambitious effort to attract investment dollars, currently marked by a towering column just 350 feet off I-81, known as Staunton Crossing. By this time next summer the concrete pillar will be crowned by a ginormous billboard advertising the city, painted onto a 1-million-gallon water storage tank that will be 70 feet in diameter and, at its top, 240 feet above the ridge on which it sits. A critical structural failure would make one helluva splash on the highway below.
The aesthetics of such boosterism come down to a matter of taste and judgment, but there should be less subjectivity regarding the water tank itself, which together with its ancillary plumbing carries a hefty $10 million price tag. Who knew a cistern in the sky could be so expensive? For context, $10 million is enough to replace approximately one-fourth of the 13 miles of pipeline that supply Staunton with its drinking water—including, ironically, the water that will fill the new tank. Replacing the pipeline is becoming a critical issue because it’s more than a century old, but where the city will obtain $41.5 million to do the job, or an additional $8 million to drill backup wells, is anybody’s guess.
Meanwhile, although there are plausible reasons to build a new water storage tank on the east end of the city, the primary impetus for this massive venture is Staunton Crossing itself. And, more specifically, a desire by city officials to include a so-called “data center” on its freshly primed real estate. Why the scare quotes around “data centers”? Because the label, while conveying a cutting-edge sense of cleanliness and efficiency, obscures the fact that these contemporary data factories are voracious consumers of power and water, more accurately described as resource vampires.
Offices and manufacturing plants—the development’s other proposed tenants—also need water and electricity, of course, but data centers really need them. The master plan for Staunton Crossing calls for 375,000 square feet of data center space, projected to require 187,500 gallons of water a day. That compares to more than twice as much proposed square footage for manufacturing, which would require only 12% more water—or a proposed 605,000 square feet of office space, using a mere 60,000 gallons a day. (Moreover, most of the data center water evaporates, which means less is available for recycling—good for the sewer system, but not so good for water conservation.)
The planners who conceived this project knew all that, of course, which is why their top infrastructure priority was water. “Prospects need to know that pressure and capacity are adequate for their needs,” they wrote. “Nothing else matters more than water, particularly in the area of manufacturing and data center pursuits.” Ergo, the water tower, enabling the city to assure business prospects that it can deliver 2 million gallons a day, as well as 4.2 megawatts of power.
But that was six years ago, and as noted at the top of this column, the world is moving ever more quickly. What seemed like a reasonable concept in 2019 has become increasingly outdated, as computer users from the smallest to the largest increasingly turn to “the cloud”—an ethereal marketing term for data centers—for their data storage needs. More recently, the post-Covid ascendance of energy-hungry artificial intelligence (AI) has blown up all previous forecasts of national power consumption.
Based on their projections for Staunton Crossing, the planners were envisioning a 10-megawatt data center, which at that time was an average size for the centers that were sprouting up in northern Virginia. But the reason why Ashburn, for example, today has 133 data centers is because these smaller centers need to cluster around a high-speed network infrastructure to reduce latency, a critical aspect of a seemingly seamless “cloud.” On this side of the Blue Ridge, on the other hand, we still have areas without decent internet service, never mind the kind of fiber connections that would enable cloud computing.
AI’s massive energy needs, meanwhile, require hyperscale centers measured in the hundreds of megawatts. One such center currently in development in Culpeper, for example, will have 1.4 million square feet providing initial support for 216 megawatts of critical load, eventually expandable to 432 megawatts. That’s clearly a whole new ball game, in which Staunton Crossing can’t compete.
These limitations suggest that the Crossing’s quixotic pursuit of a data center won’t get out of the starting gate, too small for a hyperscale center but too isolated to plug into the cloud network. Indeed, it’s worth noting that while much of the marketing strategy behind Staunton Crossing has been to emphasize its proximity to two interstate highways, a railroad and Virginia’s inland port in Winchester, absolutely none of it addresses virtual connectivity. So: nothing to worry about, right? Unless, of course, it’s to fret about the time and money wasted on ill-fated marketing efforts, or on building a possibly over-engineered water tank.
Still, there’s always the danger that these sorts of projects take on a life of their own, lurching onward long after someone should have cut off their heads. And putting a data center in Staunton, while of debatable value in 2019, makes even less sense today. Although we’ve had a relatively wet spring and early summer, Staunton had repeated drought warnings and advisories the previous several years, underscoring the city’s vulnerability to water shortages in an age of ever more extreme climate change. Meanwhile, the 4.2-megawatts of electricity that Staunton Crossing currently promises won’t begin to address the energy needs of a data center (or a serious manufacturing plant, for that matter), which means Dominion Power will be expected to build a new transmission line—with construction costs distributed among current users.
What would Staunton get in return? Once a data center is up and running, relatively little. Local employment, as measured by vehicle trips per day, would be a scant 375, as laid out in the master plan—compared to more than 5,000 a day for a manufacturing plant, and 6,400 to 11,000 a day for office workers. More vehicle trips, more local employment. The other potentially significant upside could be the tax revenue generated by such a capital-intensive project, were it not for the fact that taxing data centers has become a race to the bottom. Or as Staunton Crossing’s planners advised the city, slashing taxes for data centers would signal the industry “that it is specifically desired in Staunton.” Maybe that’s a signal we shouldn’t want to send.
At the very least, it would be prudent for the city to revisit the Staunton Crossing master plan and determine if changing circumstances have rendered some of it obsolete. Ditch the idea of having a data center. Perhaps revisit the idea of incorporating housing into the plan, a concept that was part of the original planning but then inexplicably dropped, and one that subsequently has become more urgent. Safeguard a precarious water supply.
We’d still be left with one of the state’s biggest billboards, so it won’t have been a total loss. (Sorry, Lady Bird.)
Looking askance 