Data Centers

Summary

• I fully support all local legislative efforts to completely ban new data center construction.
• I support the necessary federal legislation that will equitably manage the negative externalities of any new data center construction.

Source: İsmail Enes Ayhan

The issue of data centers poses tough challenges, especially relevant given that Loudoun County, in Virginia’s 10th district, is the data center capital of the country.

Two things can be true at the same time.

1. Data Centers result in some serious and ugly externalities:
   1. Rising electricity costs — areas with high concentrations of data centers have seen wholesale electricity prices climb roughly 267% over the past five years.¹ Nearly three-quarters of Virginia voters surveyed in January 2026 blamed data centers specifically for rising electricity bills.² Utilities can also pass the cost of grid upgrades needed to serve new data centers onto all ratepayers, including residents whose own electricity usage never changed.
   2. Heavy water consumption — A single hyperscale data center can consume up to roughly 5 million gallons of water a day, comparable to the water use of a small city.³ Globally, data centers are projected to consume between 4.2 and 6.6 billion cubic meters of water annually by 2027, and several U.S. localities hosting data centers have already reported water stress tied to this demand.
   3. Noise — industrial-scale cooling fans and backup generators run continuously. In Loudoun County itself, the Board of Supervisors has been fielding a flood of resident complaints about data center noise and generator fumes,⁴ and county officials have acknowledged the current noise ordinance doesn’t account for low-frequency, tonal hums residents find most distressing.⁵ Neighboring Prince William County has seen similar complaints, with one resident describing the constant noise from a nearby facility as an “internal organ vibration.”⁶
   4. Air pollution and public health costs — backup diesel generators and the power plants generating electricity for data centers emit particulate matter linked to lung disease, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. One peer-reviewed estimate, from a Carnegie Mellon University economist, put the nationwide health and environmental cost of this pollution at roughly $25 billion a year.⁷ A separate study by researchers at UC Riverside and Caltech projects that AI-related data center electricity generation could be linked to approximately 1,300 deaths and 600,000 asthma cases annually by 2030.⁸
2. Data Centers are a vital necessity — data centers are essential infrastructure for our information-based economy. Were there to be a complete national moratorium on any new data center being built anywhere in the country, we would likely lose the AI race to China. If you were to tell Americans exactly what it would cost them to have no new data centers built in this country, most would not want to pay that price. They want the benefits data centers bring, from cloud storage to AI tools people now use daily, but they don’t want to live next to one. It’s a real, understandable NIMBY dynamic, not a contradiction to be dismissed.

How Residents Are Fighting Back

Residents in localities across the country, including here in Virginia, are responding primarily in two ways: passing local moratoriums or zoning changes banning new data center construction where state law permits it, and pushing to remove existing tax incentives and exemptions, an effort that has succeeded at the state level in Ohio, Illinois, Arizona, and Maine. No locality has yet gone further to impose special, elevated taxes specifically designed to make new data center construction cost-prohibitive, though I believe this is a tool worth putting on the table.

The Equity Problem This Creates

Ultimately, if this fight is left entirely to individual localities, data center growth will end up concentrated in the communities with the least political power to resist it, typically lower-income communities with fewer resources to organize, hire land-use attorneys, and sustain a multi-year fight against a well-funded developer. This pattern has a long history in American land use: landfills, incinerators, and other locally unwanted infrastructure have consistently ended up disproportionately in under-resourced communities. In the U.S., this has often meant communities of color, though the underlying driver is political and economic capacity to resist, not race itself. Wealthier, better-organized communities will keep data centers out. Poorer ones, with fewer resources to fight back, will end up bearing the noise, the water stress, the air pollution, and the strain on the local grid.

What’s Already Moving in Congress

This isn’t a fringe issue in Washington. Both parties are actively working on it, though every current proposal solves only part of the problem.

The AI Data Center Moratorium Act (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Carson) would freeze all new AI data center construction until Congress separately enacts safeguards on rates, environmental harm, community approval, subsidies, and labor standards. Two of its conditions, barring subsidies and requiring community approval, are sound and worth keeping. But a blanket, indefinitely timed freeze with no defined criteria for when or how it ends doesn’t solve the underlying problem, it postpones it, while doing nothing to prevent the same siting and equity problems from recurring the moment the freeze lifts.

The AI Data Center Site Selection Transparency Act (McIver) requires developers to publicly disclose a proposed site, along with its environmental, utility, and cost impacts, at least 180 days before breaking ground, enforced by the FTC. This is a sound, narrow mechanism worth adopting directly.

The GRID Act (Hawley, Blumenthal) would require new data centers over 20 megawatts to source 100% of their power off the public grid, with a 10-year window for existing facilities to comply, backed by steep daily penalties. This bipartisan effort correctly identifies the ratepayer cost-shifting problem as one of the most politically salient harms, but as written it has real feasibility problems: industry estimates put full off-grid compliance at $500 million to $2 billion in added cost per facility, the 180-day compliance window for new facilities isn’t realistic given how long it takes to build independent generation, and exempting off-grid facilities entirely from federal reliability oversight creates a genuine safety gap. Last summer, 60 data centers near Loudoun County simultaneously dropped off the grid due to a standard safety mechanism, forcing grid operator PJM to scale back power plants to avoid a cascading outage. An off-grid mandate that removes a facility from reliability coordination altogether can create new grid instability risks, not just remove old ones.

My Proposal: The Distributed and Responsible Data Center Siting Act

This framework takes the strongest, most defensible piece of each existing effort, and of the research literature on state-level data center governance,⁹ and attempts to fix the gaps in each.

Title I: Voluntary Distributed Siting

No locality is required to host a data center, and no locality is barred from banning them outright under its own zoning authority. This title applies only to developers seeking a large new hyperscale facility who choose to use it: to qualify for federal permitting assistance, expedited interconnection review, or federal infrastructure support, a covered project must go through the national siting process below.

Each participating jurisdiction has an aggregate capacity cap, measured in total critical IT power load and total daily water consumption, not number of buildings or corporate entities, closing the loophole where a developer evades a facility-count cap by building one larger campus instead of several smaller ones.

A federal Data Center Siting Board publishes covered projects. Interested localities submit applications, not bids denominated in tax breaks or cash. Financial incentives of any kind are excluded from consideration and disqualify an applicant. Applications are scored on available grid interconnection capacity, water availability, existing industrial or brownfield land, and documented local consent: a governing body vote or ballot referendum specifically authorizing the project after public comment.

Before a project counts against a jurisdiction’s capacity cap, its projected power draw and water consumption must be independently verified by the Siting Board rather than accepted directly from the developer. Demand projections that drive multi-decade infrastructure decisions have too often come from the same company with a financial interest in an optimistic number, and self-reported figures shouldn’t be the basis for decisions communities have to live with for decades.

A developer must also post a bond or letter of credit scaled to its verified projected power draw before a project is approved and counted against the cap. If the facility is not built out substantially as represented within a specified timeframe, the bond is forfeited to the host jurisdiction. This ensures speculative developers can’t tie up a community’s limited capacity allocation with a project that never materializes, while leaving the jurisdiction with nothing to show for the years it held that slot open.

Title II: Grid Impact and Ratepayer Protection

Any covered facility with a demand of 20 megawatts or more must, by default, source its power independently of the public grid, on a phased timeline scaled to project size rather than a single fixed deadline, recognizing that independent generation takes years to permit and build, not months.

A locality may approve an exception allowing a covered facility to draw power from the public grid, but only through a dedicated local referendum held specifically on that question, following mandatory public disclosure of the facility’s projected effect on local electricity rates and grid reliability. Any community benefit or agreement tied to that referendum must be publicly disclosed, and none may include a tax incentive or cash payment, closing the same loophole barred in Title I.

As a third option, a facility may remain grid-connected without a local referendum if it procures new clean energy generation, not existing generation already serving other customers, matched to its own electricity usage on an hourly basis rather than through annual offsets. This gives developers already pursuing hourly-matched clean energy commitments a clear path to comply without requiring a community vote, while ensuring ratepayers aren’t left financing new fossil generation built to serve someone else’s data center.

Where a referendum approves grid-sharing, the facility must pay 100% of its own interconnection and grid-upgrade costs, none of which may be passed to other ratepayers, and must participate in demand response and load curtailment during grid stress events. Grid-tied facilities are also billed under real-time, locational rates that reflect the actual cost their usage imposes on the grid at that place and time, not a flat volumetric rate, so the price signal itself encourages new projects to locate where the grid actually has room for them.

Regardless of off-grid status, every covered facility must maintain a coordinated emergency interconnection with its regional grid operator for safety and reliability purposes and remains subject to federal reliability standards. No facility may disconnect from or reconnect to the grid without advance coordination with its grid operator. This closes the gap that caused a near-miss grid destabilization event in Virginia, where dozens of data centers disconnected simultaneously without warning.

These requirements are not limited to new facilities. Existing large data centers become subject to Title II at the next renewal of their interconnection agreement with their grid operator, so that facilities built before this Act don’t operate under permanently different rules than everything built after it.

Title III: Environmental and Noise Buffer

Every covered facility must maintain a vegetated, undeveloped buffer between its structures and the nearest residential parcel, sized on a sliding scale tied to the facility’s total power draw and footprint, rather than a single fixed acreage requirement that would be arbitrary for both very small and very large projects. This buffer must remain undeveloped green space, not additional pavement or parking, so it functions as genuine noise and pollution mitigation rather than as a cost formality. The added land and construction cost of this requirement is intentional: it shifts the cost of mitigating noise, air, and environmental impact onto the price of the cloud and AI services these facilities support, rather than onto the neighbors who live beside them for free.

Title IV: Advance Public Disclosure

Any covered facility must publicly disclose its proposed site, along with projected environmental, water, utility rate, and noise impacts, at least 180 days before construction begins. Violations are enforceable by the Federal Trade Commission as an unfair or deceptive practice.

Constitutional Grounding

Title I is built to survive judicial review by avoiding federal commandeering of state and local authority. It regulates only developers who voluntarily seek specific federal benefits, permitting assistance or interconnection support, which Congress may condition under its spending powers, similar in structure to how federal highway funding has long been conditioned on state policy choices. This is also why Title I, not a blanket nationwide mandate, is the right home for requirements like the verified-forecasting and bonding provisions above: land use and siting decisions have always been state and local authority, and the strongest voices working on data center policy at the state level, including researchers who work with legislators in dozens of states, argue this is deliberately where these decisions belong, not because a federal role is illegitimate, but because localities are best positioned to weigh the specific, place-based tradeoffs involved. Titles II through IV apply more broadly to any facility meeting the size threshold, grounded directly in Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, since these facilities participate in interstate electricity markets and interstate data transmission, the same basis underlying FERC’s existing jurisdiction over interstate transmission and the GRID Act’s own approach. No locality is compelled to participate in Title I, no developer is barred from building outside that system, and no state’s independent zoning authority is preempted anywhere in the bill.

Transparency and Review

All applications, scoring criteria, and siting decisions are published publicly. The program is subject to mandatory review by Congress after five years, including an assessment of whether the resource caps, buffer requirements, and consent requirements have produced more geographically distributed siting and reduced concentration of externalities in under-resourced communities.

The goal of this framework is not to slow down the data center buildout America needs to stay competitive in AI. It’s to make sure the communities hosting that buildout have genuinely chosen it, understand the tradeoffs, and aren’t simply the places with the least power to say no, while making sure the cost of that infrastructure is borne by the services it powers, not by the families who live next to it.