SALISBURY — Rowan County commissioners and residents received a crash course in data centers at Monday’s meeting.
County officials invited Christopher Lloyd, a Virginia-based consultant, to speak about data centers. Monday’s presentation is one of a number of stipulations from a data center moratorium the Board of Commissioners passed in May.
“As the board would like to recall, we require several of those actions,” said Planning and Development Director Ed Muire about the moratorium requiring county commissioners to listen to a data center expert as well as feedback from the public.
Lloyd said he’s not representing the interests of any entity interested in constructing data centers in the area. He added that his presentation was meant to be informative and impartial.
“To be clear, I’m here not representing any data centers,” Lloyd said. “The views that I’m sharing are my own.”
Economics
Lloyd hit on several topics related to data centers but began his presentation focusing on economics.
Lloyd described the economics of building new data centers as too big to ignore.
“The amount of money involved…is absolutely staggering,” Lloyd said, later adding that several trillions of dollars will be spent in the industry over the next few years.
“You cannot ignore something of that kind of magnitude,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd highlighted a recent Wall Street Journal report that compared the data center emergence to major investments of the past.
Property values are among the motivators behind communities opting to allow new construction.
“Data centers generate a lot of property tax revenue,” Lloyd said, adding that, in Virginia, communities use additional property value revenue for specific purposes. This included building new schools, affordable housing trust funds and lowering residential property taxes.
Demand
Demand, according to Lloyd, is one of the major drivers of new data center construction. He explained that the public’s need for data will only grow as more communities across the country come online and our lives become more connected.
“That is what’s driving its growth,” Lloyd said, adding that the things people take for granted are often reliant on the infrastructure provided by data centers.
“Think about your car. Your car is a mobile data center. If you want to download Spotify…it operates off the back of data centers.”
Lloyd put it in perspective, saying that each day millions of hours of content are downloaded.
“Everything has been moved to this digital economy,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd said that the growth in data center construction is not just to satisfy current demand. He said experts anticipate future needs driven by investment in burgeoning technologies.
“It is only going to accelerate,” Lloyd said, adding that emerging technologies like autonomous vehicles and factories will require a basework of infrastructure.
Nationwide, over 5,000 data centers are either active or under consideration, according to Lloyd.
“They are everywhere,” Lloyd said, adding that Virginia leads the nation with more than 700 facilities.
North Carolina has just over 100 data centers. Lloyd said many existing and proposed data centers are concentrated in larger metropolitan areas, like Charlotte and Raleigh.
Considerations
Lloyd said that there are ways to deploy data centers that wouldn’t be as impactful on the environment and residential comfort. Lloyd said things like power generation and water consumption should be considered. Lloyd said data centers backed up by generators with a lower carbon footprint than diesel generators can have a positive impact, along with data centers that reuse water.
These are referred to as data centers with a closed-loop system.
“It’s no secret that data centers use water,” Lloyd said. “They use water for cooling.”
According to Lloyd, data centers used 17 million gallons.
“It is a lot of water but compared to other uses it’s not as significant,” Lloyd said. “Data centers have a lot of incentive to reduce their water consumption.”
Close-loop data centers reuse a tank of a couple hundred thousand gallons for a period of three years.
“The amount of water that is (lost) from evaporation is about the same as a small restaurant,” Lloyd said.
County chairperson Greg Edds said the county is growing and data centers are one aspect of that.
“We want to keep our county friendly and quaint,” Edds said. “How do we round out so that we end up with a healthier economy?”
Lloyd said communities like Rowan are at the forefront of establishing best practices.
“This is the time to build standards,” Lloyd said.
