October 23, 2018
By:
Walter G. Wright
Category:
Arkansas Environmental, Energy, and Water Law
Arkansas Environmental, Energy, and Water Law
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A group of data center providers, colocation service providers, and customers of data center facilities (collectively “Data Centers”) with operations in Virginia submitted September 17th comments to the Virginia State Corporation Commission (“Commission”) asking it to consider renewable and clean energy technologies when evaluating Dominion Energy’s (“Dominion”) proposed 2018 Integrated Resource Plan (“IRP”).
The companies submitting the letter included:
- Adobe
- Akamai
- ebay
- EQUINIX
- Salesforce
The Data Centers state that they are responsible for more than $10.2 billion in annual economic output in the State, along with supporting more than 40,000 jobs. They further state that their facilities constitute the largest share of Dominion’s load growth – which has increased by approximately 500 megawatts over the past six years.
The Data Centers encourage:
. . . the Commission and Dominion to take data center companies’ and customers’ renewable energy preferences and energy efficiency investments into account when deciding on future energy infrastructure projects to meet our energy load growth.
Their interests are stated to fall into two “buckets”:
- The Data Centers are increasingly looking to power their facilities with renewable energy
- The Data Center industry is at the forefront of innovative energy technologies to improve efficiency and manage their impact on the grid (arguing that such advancements will result in lower future load requirements for data centers
A copy of the September 11th letter can be found here.
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