Bruce Saller takes a look at potential carbon emissions from data centers.
By Bruce Saller
GUEST COLUMNIST
Data Centers are a hot topic in our area, with several being proposed in our region. The previous Environmental Cents article examined Data Center power usage. This article will discuss emissions from data centers.
Based on Loudoun County’s latest plans for its two newest data centers, the site under consideration in Fredericksburg could use 100 Mega-Watts (MW) of power. The Fredericksburg Economic Development Authority has approved $200,000 to fund Dominion Energy’s feasibility study to determine how much power Dominion can provide to sites in Celebrate Virginia South. This article assumes a 100 MW site, and estimates emissions based on Loudoun County data.
Data centers have backup diesel generators onsite which normally run monthly for testing, and whenever the utility power is lost. The state estimates there are 4,151 generators at data centers in Loudoun. Loudoun data centers use about 3 GW of power, so their average generator size is about 700 KW. Based on that size, a 100 MW center in Fredericksburg would have 143 generators.
A typical Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) permit allows a data center to run its generators for maintenance and testing (typically 2 hours/month) and during power failures, up to 500 hours per year. DEQ has estimated the pollution from a single Loudoun County generator. I added the nominal and worst-case yearly emissions from 143 generators.
The local pollution from the generators is the same as the yearly output of numerous tractor trailers:
Since all new electrical loads are being powered by gas (or oil), the emissions from the utility power generation can be determined using the US EPA AP-42 gas turbine emission calculator. A natural gas turbine outputting 100 MW generates produces:
So, a 100 MW data center generates a large amount of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, both locally and at the utility.
Here are some suggestions on what we can do to help reduce the need for more data centers (from previous article):
- Reduce your cloud storage. Delete/reduce old photos/videos that take up a lot of storage.
- Consider purchasing a USB storage device to back-up your files.
- Use traditional searches (Google/Bing) versus AI searches (Chat-GPT). An AI search uses almost 10 times the energy as a traditional search.
- Ask your state representatives to make utility companies purchase excess residential solar power. Currently, excess yearly solar generation carries over as a credit to the next year and is only used if you generate insufficient solar in a future year. This would encourage residents to install solar arrays that generate more energy than they use.
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