Ultimately, the project would mean a $1.5 billion investment in buildings and other improvements as well as about $1.5 billion in equipment, said Roxanne Salerno, Powhatan’s economic development manager.
The data centers are expected to employ 200 to 250 people, she said.
The developer, Province Group of Newport Beach, California, plans to erect three buildings on the site, each 75 feet high.
It would set aside approximately 24 acres, or 20% of the site, as open space. That set-aside would include buffers on both of the streams flowing through the land, as well as a 50-foot buffer, preserving existing trees, along its boundaries.
The buildings would be set back 100 feet from the property line.
“In an age where data is the lifeblood of every industry, the demand for efficient and scalable data centers has never been greater,” the developer said in its application to rezone the property, currently designated as agricultural land.
“In Powhatan County a data center development will be an employment-generating use that supports local economic development goals by providing a new, significant, and positive commercial tax revenue,” the developer said.
“Two-story data centers with structure heights of 75 feet are crucial for optimizing operational efficiency and accommodating the sophisticated building systems required by these modern buildings,” it added.
The proposal must still be reviewed by Powhatan’s planning department.
That review will be what the county Planning Commission considers when it makes a recommendation to the Board of Supervisors, which has the final say on whether the land will be rezoned and whether it will allow the buildings to be higher than is currently allowed.
There is no set timetable for these reviews and votes.
Data centers typically require lots of electricity, 24 hours a day. Dominion Energy expects to expand the existing substation serving the area and eventually to erect a new substation and high-voltage transmission line to serve the site.
“We embrace the positive impact this site will have on job creation and investment within Powhatan County and central Virginia,” said Dominic Minor, Dominion’s manager for customer service and strategic partnerships.
The site’s owners, Harold and Christina Ellis, had hoped to turn the property into a mixed-use development with up to 249 detached houses and town homes, with commercial buildings on U.S. Route 60.
The Board of Supervisors rejected this in 2019.
A scaled-down proposal for 180 houses, a 300,000-square-foot industrial building and a restaurant never got going.
Data center projects are already in the works in Hanover and Henrico counties.
Pushback to data centers
Data centers are major consumers of electricity, and their big power needs have become an issue, especially as the usual way of generating electricity — in coal-, natural gas- or oil-fired plants — emits the carbon-based gases that cause climate change.
Neighbors of proposed data center projects in the metro Richmond area and in Northern Virginia, which has the world’s largest concentration, complain that data centers use too much water and make too much noise while generating too much traffic and air pollution, especially when proposed for property near historic or natural sites.
Province Group says it has worked on more than 75 projects with a value of more than $850 million since its founding in 1991.