A data center opened next door. Then came the high-pitched whine
politico.com
politico.com
> “However, we take any reports of issues at the site seriously,” Stephenson wrote
Absolutely no abnormalities because this is by design, but nobody wanted to pay attention when approving the building and zoning. Amazing what some money to politicians will get you.
I can't even imaging living within ear shot of these things. Horrific quality of life. I can't sleep when my water pump is active.
> Turner said county officials didn’t understand in 2022 and 2023 exactly what it meant to have gas turbines at a data center, nor did they have zoning rules to address it.
Well then why were they allowed to vote on it ? It's incompetance ? Or just straight up corruption.
That's the benign case. If it turns out he wasn't actually incompetent but was signing things in exchange for money or favors he should go to literal death row. Proven corruption should result in the death penalty for all involved.
As a common citizen, very few things in this world are more demoralizing than witnessing corrupt politicians get filthy rich while trading favors, embezzling money, creating loopholes for corporations to exploit while pretending to regulate them or whatever else it is that they do, there are so many scams it's impossible to enumerate them all. It breaks one's spirit to realize that it's the honest and the just who get punished on a daily basis while the corrupt get constantly rewarded. That is an incalculable crime against society and should absolutely be severely punished.
If they don't like it, they can just not be a politician. Nobody asked them to seek power, they fought to be there. Normal citizens get to go to jail, not them.
> But he that knew not and committed things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes.
> For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required
> and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.
If a solution isn't working, it's probably because it's not extreme enough. Always go further. If they try to weasel out, preempt them. We aren't dealing with innocent lambs here. These are rich elites who graduated from top universities, high functioning sociopaths who absolutely have enough education and mental acuity to know right from wrong. They take an almost sadistic pleasure in not only subverting morality but in getting away with it. They don't just do things, they rub it in our faces that they did it and got away with it, and think us fools for not stopping them.
Corruption is power without responsibility. The more power you have, the more scrutiny you should be subjected to and the more consequences you should suffer.
https://nordictimes.com/world/china-executes-senior-official...
but the US venerates $$$ more than anything
I actually think there's something in there.
It also seems worth noting that these gas turbine generators are meant to be the solution to another big complaint people have about datacenters, that they might drive up local power prices if they plug into the grid. Like you and the people in the article, I'm personally very sensitive to noise pollution. so to me this sounds like another argument that datacenters should connect to the grid after all. But I'm sure some people disagree and think it's worth it to save on electricity, and others disagree and think there shouldn't be datacenters near them at all.
The local government has to resolve the disagreement somehow and no solution is going to make everyone happy.
But I guess this isn't how the world works.
The big consumer also buys in bulk and negotiates better rates etc.
It's also nearly impossible to build large-scale things like long distance transmission lines - so even stuff like solar fields and wind farms are difficult to make pencil out these days. You are talking a decade or more to get anything big done, if you are lucky.
We ran out of parlour tricks like trying to game efficiency and curtail residential usage. We also ran out of industry to offshore. This was coming for us either way, just AI datacenter buildouts were unexpected and pulled demand forward some odd number of years.
I was always planning on building an off-grid power setup for exactly this reason - the writing was on the wall decades ago. It just came a bit sooner than I expected!
A large industrial scale power user that operates at roughly the same base power load 24x7 is an absolute dream customer for a grid operator. The fact we can't make the perfect customer profile pencil out without raising rates should be a giant huge red flashing warning sign with bells going off to everyone. Heck, these facilities can even typically participate in demand shedding programs on top of being ideal.
We've been living off the cheap power our grandparents invested in building for us. Time has come to pay the piper.
Well I'm not sure how it works there but there are requests here made before building can start. Planning permission is usually first voted on by committee and then brought to the public in the area and public forums are where people get to ask questions such as "what's the expected noise pollution". Basic stuff I thought.
You mention properly incentivizing the grid operator, but this is also not so simple. As Dominion describes in their FAQ (https://www.dominionenergy.com/virginia/large-business-servi...), providing power to a large datacenter is itself a substantial construction project, requiring its own permits and specialized components. It's not just a matter of paying enough to get some guys working overtime.
Talking about motivations would seem to be a smokescreen, a politician still trying to grease the wheels to allow the project to continue despite the harm to local residents. The point is that any engineer overseeing the deployment of turbines would have said "these things are loud" - it's an externality eminently foreseeable by the owner.
And yes, my point is that the theories of liability that would make the county liable for any of these costs need to be drastically curtailed. The responsibility for a datacenter owner trying to force their externalities onto existing land uses and failing should rest on the datacenter owner, not on the people whom they attempted to harm.
No thanks. Instead lets fix our inability to build a thing in this country by reducing NIMBY regulation so things like power generation can be built where it makes sense, and we are allowed to do things like build long distance transmission lines again. Also start funding these societal-level projects like our grandparents and great grandparents did to invest in our futures.
No datacenter operator wants to deploy their own power plants. It's due to the inability for anyone to get anything done that is not directly under their control. You would be waiting decades for projects to happen otherwise, like many have. Utilities have abdicated their responsibility to build for the future, and regulators have let them. Just like anything infrastructure related in the country. You are now seeing the direct impacts of this, and they will continue to increase regardless of if the cause is AI datacenters or whatever other popular thing we want to argue about next.
You'll get zero argument from me about the need to build more power plants and transmission lines. But this of course must be done with proper compensation to those affected, not just a regulatory giveaway after finding some disenfranchised area. In fact one might say that such regulatory giveaways have artificially lowered the expected cost of building a new plant below the actual cost, thus discouraging investment at the true cost.
You can also look at the onerousness of permitting processes (etc) as a result of a regime whereby once something is built, if it causes problems then nobody can do anything about it.
This is an interesting point I have not considered as much as I should have.
I think it's somewhat circular. As regulations become more and more restrictive on a "global" scale, "local" workarounds are going to become more common and more obnoxious to the local population. If a few jet engines in a parking lot impact 10 people in an extremely negative manner, but a 400 mile transmission line impacts 900 property owners through 90 political districts in a very minor way; the latter is going to be getting far more political scrutiny and be far harder to pull off even though it's better overall.
This will then tilt development into screwing the tiny minority since it's far cheaper and faster (practical) to get done. I don't think this is a good outcome for society over the long term as it erodes the social contract, but it's very interesting to think about how to solve.
Get rid of that regulatory subsidy in your example, and now working with 900 [1] property owners [2] for the predictable well-worn path becomes a more attractive alternative.
[0] Part of the problem is intrinsic to large sunk costs of capital investment, yes. But some is not - the data center still exists and can eventually be used for the purpose it was built for without the turbine generators, but the investors' desired schedule to full operation slips. I'd say this is effectively the same as any other project setback, and comes from something that was deliberately maintained as an unknown.
[1] was this number meant to capture only the people whose real estate is being bought for the right of way, or was it meant to include abutters as well?
[2] I'd say the main problems here stem from the high cost of real estate, especially developed real estate. Of course people get touchy when their single life-asset that they're scraping by to slowly own stands to be drastically devalued. And the higher cost pushes developers to try and avoid compensating everyone who is affected.
Doubt they had to bend over backwards. This is one of dozens (hundreds now?) datacenters in the area.
The difference these days is that they now come with power plants in the parking lot. Otherwise they tend to be pretty quiet all things considered other than when backup generators are fired up during testing or power outages.
Cooling can be moderately loud, but the noise rapidly drops off with distance.
The flip side is that residents of a place where people want to do more business and make big investments will have a lot more economic opportunity, which is important to quality of life. So unless you're in an area where people feel they already have all the opportunity they need, figuring out how to get businesses investing in your community in some way is important. And datacenters are often more pleasant to have nearby than warehouses or manufacturing.
Then a family will arrive that seems like they're at a Disney theme park and you just hear screaming kids non-stop. It's like a tornado is hitting for days. We always joke if you ask a tornado if it's quiet it will answer of course- I don't hear anything. Because there is NOTHING louder than the tornado and that's all it knows.
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/?category=SEMANTIC&sea...
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19941105/1939991/oh...
> "It was only after the data center was operating, following a tour he took of the facility, that Turner said county officials realized the data center was “running in island mode.”
> “It was very impressive, but it was obvious that this is not what we thought was allowed,” Turner said."
Youve stated its corruption by officials. Its rather clear, however, that when the company were told that a grid connection would take 3 years that they found a way around it that didnt require further approvals.
Conspiracy theories are fun, but this isnt one.
Here's a free idea for someone to run with: just as Zillow has a neighborhood "walkability" score prospective buyers might look at, there could be various pollution scores, including sound and light, sourced from some kind of Flock-like (ew) network of capture devices. Some folks are into mounting things like personal weather stations on their property, so maybe a new generation of devices capturing this type of data (with local signature-based identification of sources, and triangulation when the same thing is heard in multiple places, etc.) wouldn't be too far-fetched.
A modern US city has the combined problems of cheap construction of residential buildings, with insufficient unit-to-unit and exterior noise isolation (builders "don't care"), and near-zero enforcement of vehicle noise laws (police and muffler shops "don't care", drivers "want to" be loud).
Contrast this with, say, Germany or Switzerland, where concrete construction is the norm, noise laws are often strictly enforced, and a modified car would get pulled over quickly.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sully+Rd,+Centreville,+VA/...
I live near a datacenter myself in San Francisco. No problems here.
You might not feel it right away, but the closer you are to these things, the more your health is going to suffer over time.
It's when we decide building any power infrastructure anywhere is evil we get absurdities like standing up jet engines in datacenter parking lots as insane workarounds.
It's basically impossible to build anything at scale when it comes to power. Solar, wind, transmission lines, nuclear, you name it. There will be a group of folks vehemently against it that ties most projects up so they don't even get proposed to begin with.
Blocking low-frequency noise requires very heavy, well-designed construction, and retrofitting a typical dwelling to achieve large reductions is difficult and expensive.
This means all the blame goes onto the perpetrators – the developers, the politicians – because for all intents and purposes, residents can't do anything to stop it.
Because all these talks of data-center disrupting everyday's life from all the videos I have watched somehow now involve the AI/GPU aspect which have definitely made things more energy intensive and more water intensive
But more specifically compute focused datacenters actually feel somewhat good/neutral to the region and you still need remote hands etc. so net employment.
Although one of the ideas I have with that is it would be better if the owner of the said datacenter either belonged to the community/cared about it and wasn't a massive corporation for example too.
It's the AI bubble which is the issue which has caused a Datacenter frenzy as nameless corporations take massive debts to build them and scramble to do so and cause issues in the process.
They expect transaction fees will overtake minting earnings.
And even more than that, the largest things for these things is how to supply enough water properly and water-cooling systems which aren't required in traditional systems.
They also are very conditional and spike the grid up and down with their use cases slowing the grid.
If the bubble bursts, which it will, It's hard to justify the billions of dollars spent on AI specific datacenters for essentially the bricks and mortars. I don't think that its very sound decision that they were worth building, it might make some compensation but not enough, in my opinion.
This is why we have zoning laws.
Is this storage? If so, storing what?
Is this for AI/processing? If so, doing what?
It’s common enough that generator manufacturers make different levels of enclosures to comply with noise regulations.
It’s likely impossible to use gas turbines to generate power in my state unless they’re very far away from anyone, rules linked below. The only type of land with no noise restrictions is undeveloped land, so you can operate forestry equipment but not gas turbines.
States that allow gas turbines anywhere near their residents homes does not give a shit about them, probably it’s a perfect circle venn diagram with states that reject expanded Medicare funding.
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/p-gen6-01.pd...
That’s a weird thing to say given the story is about Virginia.