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Will Payne and Will Clear are all too aware of the skeptics.
But those doubters only fuel the duo’s vision for Southwest Virginia. The former Virginia state energy office bureaucrats turned private-sector consultants have an ambitious plan to repurpose land and backfill local taxes in communities left behind by the coal industry’s decline, and also pioneer new models for powering data centers with local clean energy.
Data Center Ridge is one piece of a nonprofit venture — Energy DELTA Lab — designed to transform 65,000 mostly contiguous acres of minelands where coal was king for decades into test sites that advance energy innovation. The project has the backing of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who announced an agreement last November establishing a framework for developing the land.
“If I had a dollar for every time somebody asked why we’re wasting our time on this, I wouldn’t have to work,” Clear, a former chief deputy director with the state Department of Energy. “This isn’t a pipedream. What people need to understand is how long a project like this takes.”
The first phase involves persuading tech companies to build solar-powered data centers on up to 2,000 acres of the now-defunct Bullitt Mine in Wise County. The facilities would be able to tap into underground mine water to help cool their servers. Eventually, they say, other energy sources such as wind turbines, pumped hydro storage, or small nuclear reactors could be added across the larger property.
“This is a big idea and we need someone who can share that vision,” said Payne, managing partner of Coalfield Strategies LLC. “We need developers who believe in ramped-up clean energy.”
Glenn Davis, director of the Virginia Department of Energy, said a couple of key factors are driving the state’s interest in the lab. Many data center companies are exclusively seeking sites where they can access 100% clean energy, and new clean power generation could cushion the grid impact from the state’s booming data center sector.
“Southwest Virginia was the energy capital of the East Coast and I believe it will be again,” Davis said in an interview. “There’s a power void that needs to be filled and solar is part of that.”
DELTA, shorthand for Discovery, Education, Learning & Technology Accelerator Lab, is just one enterprise Davis is tracking as he coordinates Youngkin’s all-of-the-above Energy Plan.
Last fall, Youngkin said the intent is to attract private and public dollars to flesh out a portfolio that also draws wind, hydrogen, large-scale batteries, pumped-storage hydropower and eventually, perhaps, small modular nuclear reactors when and if that nascent technology matures. Any carbon-cutting realized by lab energy projects wouldn’t count toward Virginia’s landmark Clean Economy Act because the faraway area is served by a Lexington-based power company, Kentucky Utilities. The VCEA requires only the state’s largest investor-owned generators — Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power — to achieve a carbon-free grid by 2045 and 2050, respectively.
That doesn’t bother Youngkin, Davis said.
“What’s driving the governor’s interest is jobs, businesses and an improved quality of life,” said Davis, appointed as an agency head in April 2023. “We’re excited because the opportunity for growth there is larger than any other in the state.”
Dallas-based Energy Transfer owns the acreage, roughly 101 square miles. The lab is coordinating site development with Wise County officials and the landowner. Some of the acreage is still being mined for metallurgical coal, the type used for steelmaking and other industries. However, much of the property, including inactive Bullitt Mine, is being reclaimed.
On paper, the dozen or so projects on the drawing board, including Data Center Ridge, could generate 1,600-plus jobs, add 1 GW of new power and induce $8.25 billion in private investments, Payne said. First, however, they have to move beyond the conversation stage.
Payne and Clear, DELTA’s chief advisers, are counting on their matchmaking skills to revive a region often depicted as down on its heels.
Clear grew up in Smyth County, east of Wise County. Payne recently moved to Washington County on the Virginia-Tennessee border. The Richmond native left a position as chief deputy at the state energy department in 2019 to direct InvestSWVA, an incubator invented to diversify the region’s economy and curb carbon emissions. Appalachian Grains was one of their previous energy-related joint ventures.
Tax revenues from data centers are the boost local governments need to fill the coal gap, they say.
“Plain and simple, public safety, education, health care, municipal services and other core government sources are at risk of falling off a cliff if we do nothing,” said Clear. “We’re trying to solve this crisis.”
Josh Levi, president of the Loudoun County-based Data Center Coalition, said Southwest Virginia shouldn’t be dismissed as too inaccessible or mountainous for data center development.
Recently, the burgeoning industry began expanding into off-the-beaten path “tertiary markets,” he said. For instance, he pointed to a deal Amazon Web Service announced this year to spend $10 billion on two data center complexes in Mississippi.
It was only a few years ago that the industry reached into secondary markets such as Columbus, Ohio, and San Antonio, Texas, after initially concentrating its investments primarily in Silicon Valley, New York-New Jersey, Dallas, Chicago, Northern Virginia, Atlanta and Phoenix.
In Virginia alone, there’s a southward shift as more data centers pop up around Fredericksburg and Richmond.
“What they’re doing is credible,” Levi said about Payne and Clear. “My understanding is that they have seen levels of interest from data center developers. Whether the opportunities they’re leveraging lines up with the business needs of data centers remains an open question.”
For instance, he said, Southwest Virginia might be the right fit for backing up federal data but less so for applications such as live-streaming video or trading stocks.
Loudoun County and surrounding Northern Virginia are home to almost 300 data centers, the biggest concentration of such campuses in the world. It’s the crossroads for roughly 70% of global internet traffic.
Prolific construction of the mega-buildings that make cloud computing possible — combined with the accompanying need for transmission lines for electricity and water for cooling — have caused an uproar among community activists alarmed about their impact on local infrastructure and the environment.
Such large-scale growth prompted a tongue-in-cheek comment from Democratic state Sen. Danica Roem about exporting data centers from Prince William, the county she represents, to Tazewell County, just east of the proposed Data Center Ridge.
In an interview with the Energy News Network, Roem said she would only support siting data centers in Southwest Virginia if the projects have widespread community buy-in, are powered with renewable energy and are built on reclaimed coal mines that don’t require clearcutting of forests, which serve as carbon dioxide sinks. Utility customers shouldn’t be saddled with paying for the expensive buildout of transmission infrastructure, she added.
“I don’t want to simply shift the problems we’re having here to Southwest Virginia and create problems for the residents there,” Roem said. “If they’re building data centers there, are they going to stop digging in my district?”
Roem has joined other legislators introducing bills aimed at reining in data center growth and controlling the resources the buildings require. For instance, compared to a typical office building, the U.S. Energy Department estimates one data center needs 50 times more electricity.
David Porter is the vice president of electrification and sustainable energy strategy for EPRI, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Electric Power Research Institute.
While Porter lauded the Virginia entrepreneurs for seeking to boost a dormant economy by repurposing idle land, he’s skeptical about it advancing beyond the idea stage.
“I guess anything is possible,” he said. “These data centers could be a really neat idea if they can work around a lot of potential hurdles.”
High on his checklist of limiting factors in Southwest Virginia are access to a reliable electric grid connection, battery storage to fill gaps and “major league” fiber optic cable for communications.
He emphasized that even a modest number of data centers can’t rely on renewable energy 24/7. Backup power, typically provided by diesel-powered generators, is needed to keep the centers operating when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
As well, he said, even larger data centers in the gigawatt range generate far fewer jobs than a manufacturing center.
Payne and Clear responded that they are far from naïve about the difficulty of solving grid and broadband issues, which they know will take years, not months, to remedy.
However, both took umbrage with Porter’s remarks about the relative impact of data centers in a region where the average annual income is $42,000.
“We’ve heard similar pushback from people in Northern Virginia and Charlottesville who don’t know what’s at stake,” Payne said. “That’s a myopic way to view this situation.
“In Southwest Virginia, we’ve seen plenty of manufacturers pick up and leave, and that wouldn’t be the case with wind turbines and data centers.”
Their models show that one 36 MW data center, considered to be a mid-size project, would generate about 50 jobs paying $134,300 a year. In an ideal scenario, the size of Data Center Ridge would eventually expand more than 25-fold to 1,000 MW.
DELTA Lab recently collaborated with a local industrial facilities authority to offer a financial incentive for data center developers, Clear noted. It translates to Wise, Lee, Scott and Dickenson counties and the city of Norton offering a tax rate on data center equipment of 24 cents per $100 of assessed value. By far, it’s the lowest such rate in the state.
“The more persuasive argument for data centers here is about sustainability for local governments and their citizens,” Clear said. “This creates a new trajectory for tax collections for the next 50 years.”
The sites they’re eyeing for data centers are atop an estimated 6 billion to 10 billion gallons of underground 55-degree mine water, which offers a less-costly method for cooling the hot air generated by hundreds of servers.
It’s not an aquifer. Over the years, rainwater has been filtered by the limestone and sandstone as it trickled through fissures and cracks and landed in cavities created as coal deposits were removed. The pools of water are as deep as 1,000 feet below the surface.
Four years before ushering in DELTA Lab, Payne and Clear had procured a state grant to study the water supply. Since then, they have been collaborating with engineers to devise a closed-loop water system that could chill the centers and eventually pump the water back underground to be reused after the Earth removes the heat it absorbed.
Drilling of test wells by a geotechnical company is scheduled to begin this fall. That exploration is funded by the federal government and managed by the U.S. Department of Energy.
In the meantime, a looming challenge is securing the flow of electricity to and from Data Center Ridge. Even if on-site solar arrays with backup battery storage are the initial power source, the project needs to have sufficient substations, transmission lines and other infrastructure to tie into the grid. That way, excess electricity can be shipped out and “imported” electrons can fill any deficits.
Payne and Clear are talking with Kentucky Utilities — which does business in Wise and four other Virginia counties as Old Dominion Power — about upgrading and adding infrastructure. That analysis is part of a larger effort spearheaded by county officials to meet long-term energy demand in Southwest Virginia.
One plus, Clear said, is that siting the buildout of substations and transmission lines will be less difficult on property with one landowner. However, he also knows investor-owned utilities often aren’t keen on asking ratepayers to fund infrastructure built to serve one distant customer.
Davis said his agency would likely pursue federal Energy Department money to construct transmission infrastructure.
Data Center Ridge has the potential to boost the utility’s renewable energy portfolio, which is 1% of a generation energy mix that is heavy on coal, 84%, and natural gas, 15%.
Although every component of their blueprint presents a separate set of obstacles, the entrepreneurs say outsiders’ perception of Appalachia is the chief hindrance.
“Even after making our case since 2019, dispelling myths about the region is our first challenge in getting developers down here,” Payne said. “They think everybody is on meth and lives in shanties.”
They persist to prove their doubters wrong.
“Everything is teed up here to be executed,” Clear said. “It’s getting that first domino to drop that’s really important.”
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