Making Connections in Northern Virginia

This work was done as part of the Spring 2024 Urban and Environmental Planning and Design Studio.

We began by looking at mobility and transportation in and around the Washington and Old Dominion (W&OD) bike trail, converted from the old W&OD railroad. This report gives an overview of the major lines of transportation along the bike trail.

The full report can be found here.

We then used a timeline to juxtapose the development of energy and transportation infrastructure and the buildup of federal defense and intelligence agencies in Northern Virginia. At the present day, the environment created by this development and buildup (in addition to state policy and tax incentives) has proven extremely amenable to the information technology sector, resulting in the largest concentration of data centers in the world.

The full size poster can be found here.

The W&OD trail runs directly through the heart of this concentration of data centers, known as “Data Center Alley”, located in Loudoun County. We took a closer look at the development and current footprint of Data Center Alley.

The full size poster can be found here.

Within the industry, these data centers are estimated to have a lifespan of somewhere between 10 and 15 years. This estimate is driven purely by data center profitability and has an element of planned obsolescence: the industry estimates that the cost of updating, maintaining, or repairing the constituent parts of a data center outweighs the profits it generates within that timeframe. So, what’s next? Data centers come with massive footprints and massive environmental costs. Data center electrical consumption equal to that of a large city, something existing electrical infrastructure is struggling to keep up with. In fact, Dominion Energy, the utility company in charge of the electrical grid in Virginia, has decided to open up a new fossil fuel (natural gas) plant due to the energy demands of Data Center Alley. This, too, has a lifespan, though it is dictated instead by the amount of natural gas available and the estimated consumption rate. The estimated lifespan of the new natural gas plant supplying the basis for increasing data center electrical demand is 40 years. We try to imagine what should come next, in the wake of the expired data centers.

The full size poster can be found here.

< Previous Project Next Project >