Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., said Tuesday that the federal government needs to take a more strategic approach to data center development. He said communities are increasingly bearing the costs of rapid growth without enough say in where facilities and supporting infrastructure are built.
Speaking at a Brookings Institution event on Sept. 15, Subramanyam made the case for a national strategy that sits between two competing approaches: stopping data center construction altogether or allowing development to proceed largely unchecked.
One side of “the discussion so far on data centers has been total ban, which I think probably has a lot of support at this point because people are so fed up, and I don’t blame them,” Subramanyam said.
On the other side is the “golden goose,” he said, where the prevailing attitude is that “there doesn’t need to be any regulations. Everything is going great.”
Subramanyam represents Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, part of Northern Virginia’s massive data center market. His perspective on the issue comes from experiencing the industry’s growth firsthand – including rising electricity costs, new transmission infrastructure, and data center development near residential communities.
“We have two big data centers going up, along with four other ones that are going on the other side of my community,” he said. “It’s my life.”
On Sept. 8, Subramanyam introduced what he’s calling a National Data Center Plan, according to a press release. The plan addresses data center siting, energy costs, resource measurement, and security through a slate of four bills: the Responsible Data Center Siting Act, the Data Center Fair Share Act, the Data Infrastructure Energy Measurement and Standards Act, and the Data Infrastructure Risk Reduction Act.
At Brookings, Subramanyam said the current locality-by-locality approach to siting data centers and the infrastructure to support them is falling short.
“This ad hoc approach, going community to community, county to county, state to state, is not really working right now,” he said. “It’s all short-term profit-driven. Sometimes it’s a little predatory, and it’s not working. So I want more national strategy that puts communities first.”
Focusing on data center costs and impacts
Under Subramanyam’s legislative package, the Responsible Data Center Siting Act would direct the Energy Department to develop best practices for siting facilities based on factors including energy availability, electricity and water use, utility bills, environmental impacts, national security, workforce effects, noise, and tax revenue.
A second bill, the Data Center Fair Share Act, would require states to establish tariffs intended to ensure that data centers and other large energy users cover the costs of grid and generation upgrades required to serve them. States that fail to establish those tariffs could lose access to federal highway funding.
Subramanyam said Tuesday that ratepayers should not have to shoulder infrastructure costs generated by data center expansion.
“There’s something just wrong or unfair about having to have a power line go through your community that you have to pay for to power data centers,” he said.
He also called for better information about facilities’ actual resource consumption. The Data Infrastructure Energy Measurement and Standards Act would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop technical standards for measuring data center energy and water use.
“The way we measure the power impact and water impact right now is not logical to me,” Subramanyam said. “We’re measuring their potential or their efficiency, but not necessarily what their actual power impact is.”
He said greater transparency should extend beyond resource measurements to the agreements governing individual projects, pointing to nondisclosure agreements between developers and localities as another concern.
“The impact is secretive, and the deals are secretive, and that needs to change,” he said.
The fourth bill in Subramanyam’s package, the Data Infrastructure Risk Reduction Act, would require the federal government to develop a strategy for protecting communities near data centers and related infrastructure from adversarial threats.
Subramanyam said attacks on infrastructure overseas underscore the need to consider physical security as data center capacity expands.
“If you look at what’s going on in the Middle East or in Ukraine, Russia, data centers are now a target,” he said. “I want the Department of Homeland Security to actually do more of an assessment on how we protect data center infrastructure and the communities around them, especially.”
Finding a middle ground on data center growth
Subramanyam stressed that his legislative package does not impose a moratorium on data centers. Instead, he said it offers an alternative to either an outright ban or no-holds-barred development.
“Are we just going to sit back and argue between all or nothing, or are we going to see if this is possible to build out in a way that makes more sense, in a way that puts communities first?” he asked.
Subramanyam said longer-term approaches could include locating facilities near dedicated energy resources, such as energy parks, and farther from homes, schools, and other sensitive areas.
He warned that failure to address community concerns could ultimately fuel more state-level efforts to halt development.
“If we do nothing, I think that moratorium will win,” Subramanyam said. “I think [a] national moratorium will win, and I think it won’t be a national moratorium passed by Congress. It will be every state … or pretty much every state.”
Lawmakers in 16 states are considering banning data center development, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. More than 100 localities have approved moratoriums, according to the law firm DLA Piper.