Hundreds of residents packed the Henry County Board of Supervisors meeting July 28 to voice opposition to the possibility of data centers in the county, prompting supervisors to delay action on proposed zoning regulations and seek additional public review before moving forward.
More than 30 residents addressed the board, raising concerns about water consumption, noise, environmental impacts, energy demands and the long-term effects data centers could have on the county.
Many in the audience held signs reading "Protect Our Soil! Not Tech-Giant Spoil," "No Data Centers on God’s Country," "Save Our Natural Resources Now," and "No Data Centers, No Flock Cameras, No Tyranny."
An engineer by trade, Dudley Dawson said the heat generated from the data centers has to be released somewhere.
“It goes into the water, it goes into the air, but it’s going to go somewhere. The surrounding farmland, if it goes into the air, which the new systems do, it can increase the air temperatures up to five degrees. So if it’s a 90 degree day in summer, it’s going to go to 95 degrees on the farm, and it’s going to affect the crops, the animals, and the irrigation,” he said.
Dawson also expressed concerns about continuous noise, light pollution and electronic waste generated by the facilities.
He said setting a decibel limit that the data centers have to remain under is one thing for a parking lot, but this would be 24 hours a day, seven days a week while people are trying to sleep or “have a church picnic outside.”
“The thing that often doesn’t get addressed is light pollution. These facilities have a tremendous amount of light, and it’s going to be a glow on the horizon. Your sunsets are going to be marred by this, the quality of light is going to be affected,” he said.
Dawson said the cleanup from data centers is another big concern, particularly during construction when a lot of debris would head to local landfills.
“Secondly, they’re predicting the electronics of these facilities are going to need to be replaced every three years. Every three years is going to be a warehouse, a huge warehouse, full of electronic trash going into your landfill,” he said.
Dawson said another concern is what happens after the project is done.
“In parallel with solar farms, the new ones now are required to have a bond in place to restore the land after they’re done with their use as a solar farm because the economics are such that the developers just walk away from it. So I would consider as you look at this to require a restoration bond before permits and an application for this,” he said.
Regarding energy use, Dawson said the current trend is for clean energy, or nuclear energy, or co-location, or putting the energy source right next to the data centers on the same property.
Terrilyn Twigg said she is concerned about the lithium-ion batteries commonly used at data centers and the fire risk.
“Now imagine 50 of them in a building and our teeny, tiny fire departments trying to handle that. The chance of them actually catching fire, I’ve read in some places…but it’s between 30 and 60 percent that they can go up at any given moment for any given reason,” she said.
Twigg said such fires can burn for hours and pose risks to air, soil and water quality.
"We shouldn’t be putting ourselves at risk like that," she said.
drove more than an hour — from Cave Spring — to attend the meeting.
Murphy, whose background is in software engineering, said that while it’s good to want to put guidelines in place, society as a whole needs to adopt a moratorium on data centers until stronger standards are in place.
“So that these data centers don’t come to places like Southwest Virginia and look to take advantage. They know a lot of our communities need help, they need the funding, and they come to places like this promising $10 million a year to be able to help our communities,” he said.
Murphy said the reality is that the best case scenario with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is that it works, and works so well that it takes all of the jobs away from residents.
“Or, it works poorly and it’s a bubble, and we have an empty building that takes up a huge amount of resources,” he said.
Murphy cited Wytheville as an example,, which recently announced a second data center that would be a gigawatt facility. “It has a thousand gigawatts it would take to run that facility. That is four percent of the power of the entire state of Virginia in one building,” he said.
When a data center comes to town, Murphy said electricity rates and costs will increase.
“It’s a guarantee. We have to have a set up here in the United States where the federal government protects its people by making sure that if these developments want to come to town they have to pay for 100 percent of their costs. They have to make sure there’s environmental standards such as sound, water, and power, that they have to use renewable backup generation, not just diesel generators,” Murphy said.
He noted that Virginia currently has 700 data centers, the most in the world.
“That’s more than China. If we really need a data center, which I do not believe data centers are a matter of national security, it does not need to be in Southwest Virginia,” he said to the applause of the crowd.
Naomi Hodge-Muse compared the role of supervisors to the county’s law enforcement to protect the residents.
“You are the law enforcement for our air, for our prosperity, you are the centuries,” she told the board. “You have been given your marching orders. Everybody in here has told you we don’t want it.”
Hodge-Muse recommended the board hire an attorney that specializes in zoning to craft a zoning ordinance that will make companies not want to bring data centers to Henry County.
“All of us have spoken. Both black and white, Republican and Democrat, we don’t want them. Let them go somewhere else. Now take your checkbook, find you the right lawyer and write it up, write it up, and let it be done,” Hodge-Muse said.
Review whether this sentence belongs in the article; remove if it is a stray production note
The full meeting can be viewed at YouTube.com/HenryCounty,Virginia.
