Bad neighbours? Amazon data centres irk American residents
Northern Virginia cloud hub spawns complaints about noise, health risks
In a universe of cloud computing, Northern Virginia might be in a perpetual fog.
More of the data centres that feed the cloud are clustered in the region outside the American capital than anywhere else in the world.
As cloud computing — which enables data storage and other services to be delivered over the internet — continues its exponential increase, the appetite for new data centres continues to grow. And increasingly, communities that abut the centres are complaining about their new neighbours, mostly about the noise from constantly whirring fans needed to cool the computers and servers warehoused within.
“It's just a constant whirr at a frequency that's obnoxious,” said Dale Browne, president of the Great Oak Homeowners Association. Residents there led a protest recently outside a nearby data centre in Prince William County, newly built to support Amazon Web Services.
Browne said he's worried that the noise will only get worse in winter, when a line of trees that provides something of a buffer sheds its leaves.
Speakers at the protest said they fear Prince William County is on the verge of joining its neighbour, Loudoun County, known as the data centre capital of the world.
Northern Virginia has been a tech hub since the formation of the internet, and now hosts more data centres than the next five largest U.S. markets combined, according to the Northern Virginia Technology Council.
Collectively, the Northern Virginia data centres demand about 1,900 megawatts of power, said Josh Levi, president of the Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group. That's roughly equivalent to the entire output of Dominion Energy's nuclear reactors at its North Anna power plant.
Browne and his neighbours say noise from the data centre regularly exceeds the local limit of 60 decibels for noise — a study by Amazon disputes this — but it's largely a moot point because the county noise ordinance exempts air conditioning units. Activists say the ordinance was written more than 30 years ago and never anticipated the massive cooling systems used in data centres.
Amazon Web Services, for its part, said it's installing acoustical shrouds at the site as part of its noise-reduction efforts.
“Addressing our neighbours' noise concerns in Prince William County is a priority for us,” a company spokesman said in a statement.
Noise is not the only issue. Spencer Snakard, president of Protect Fauquier, worries that more data centres will require more high-voltage transmission lines to deliver the massive amounts of electricity they require, destroying views and posing their own potential health risks.
“I see these noisy monstrosities much like computers of the 1960s and '70s: massive, bulky, ugly, and in their infant stage,” she said.
Not all residents are opposed to the data centres. In the Gainesville area, some property owners proposed having their land rezoned from agricultural use to allow them.
Mary Ann Ghadban of Gainesville, 68, is one of the property owners who would sell if the area is rezoned. A lifelong county resident, she built what she called her “dream barn” on her 55-acre horse farm. “All my neighbours, we were all long-timers. We were going to live here until we died,” she said.
But after the electric company built high-voltage transmission lines through her property in 2008, she said her horses suffered ill health effects, and property values dropped. Housing developers took over nearby tracts, and her rural enclave became something else.
“It breaks our heart, but it's a fact: It's not rural anymore,” she said.
Counties that snub data centres would be turning down a lucrative source of tax revenue.
Data centres now provide for more than 30 per cent of the general fund budget of Loudoun County, a suburb of the nation's capital with more than 400,000 residents.
While the windfall has been a boon to Loudoun, Phyllis Randall, chairwoman of the county's Board of Supervisors, has raised concerns about overreliance on the industry.
“I'm not an economist, but even I know that not diversifying your economy to that degree gets a little dangerous,” she said at a February meeting where a board committee considered plans to manage the data centres' growth.
Levi, with the Data Center Coalition, said the industry is typically tight-lipped because of its security requirements, and needs to do more to promote its beneficial impacts, along with its advances in designing centres to have less environmental impact, he said.