On Jun 23, 2023, at 15:17, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
Northern Virginia has about 275 data centers
There’s probably close to that number in the South Bay Area of California as well.
The noise complaints are about HVAC fan noise (24-hour droning) from cooling towers or roof top farms of evaporative condensers.
I get it, but reality is that at most datacenter, this noise simply disappears once you get much outside of the parking lot. Especially if there’s a busy roadway anywhere nearby.
The water complaints are about the one-use water cooling towers
That does seem rather silly… We don’t have those in California.
The electric grid complaints are about the demand on the grid making the entire region less stable and proposed construction of new high-voltage tower corridors for data centers.
Yeah, I can kind of understand those, but as long as the grid is properly planned, it really shouldn’t have a destabilizing effect. In fact, many datacenter in California do CoGen and end up providing additional grid stability.
And if you didn't know, some VC-funded companies can be a**-holes and not known for being good neighbors or anything besides making money.
Oh, yeah… We have those here too.
And yes, I helped design & build several early data centers in NOVA :-)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/02/10/data-centers-northern-vir...
No doubt. Owen