ANNAPOLIS, Md. – With nearly 300 data centers on the ground and dozens more on the way, Northern Virginia is home to the world’s largest concentration of those sprawling facilities. On the opposite side of the Potomac River in Maryland’s Frederick County, local officials, real estate developers and environmentalists don’t talk about whether data centers will leapfrog over the river but where.
“Strategically, the county happens to sit in a place where it can take advantage of a big opportunity,” said Tom Natelli, a local real estate magnate and board member of a company pursuing a 2,100-acre data center park in the county. “But in order to do that, it’s going to have to identify the places where additional development is appropriate.”
That tension has been on full display in Frederick County over the fate of 20,000 acres of picturesque farmland, rolling hills and a beloved mountain park. The ensuing debate, which pitted grassroots community organizations against powerful economic interests, offered a preview for how the data center dilemma might unfold across suburban Maryland in the coming years.
A land use proposal would have prohibited most types of large commercial and industrial developments, including data centers, in an area it dubbed the Sugarloaf Treasured Landscape. Beginning in 2020, county officials convened dozens of public gatherings with local landowners, business leaders and others to craft a management plan for the mostly rural southeastern region of the county.
After several contentious meetings, the County Council delivered the apparent final death knell to the concept in December, with a majority rejecting the development limits. Conservationists say they are now more worried about the region’s future than ever. “‘Crestfallen’ is a good way to describe it,” said Steve Black, president of the Sugarloaf Alliance, a local conservation group.
The area is home to Sugarloaf Mountain, a popular destination for hiking that is open to the public but owned by a private foundation. Supporters said they hoped that passing the proposed zoning overlay would stanch the flow of development toward the mountain and its surrounding landscape from the nearby Interstate 270 corridor.
“It’s a spectacular view up there,” Frederick County Councilman Steve McKay said during the deciding hearing about the overlay in December. “That’s what makes it cherished and treasured. The last thing you want to do is to look down and see warehouse-like buildings right there at the base of the mountain.”
Demand for data centers has surged worldwide, fed by the pandemic-induced spread of remote work and the proliferation of content-streaming on mobile devices. To make this modern internet possible, a growing phalanx of windowless, warehouse-like buildings has popped up along the fringes of many cities, each stacked with routers and servers.
Public officials often see the projects as an economic boon because of the millions of dollars in tax revenue they generate without requiring many costly public services in return.
To rev up the sector, the Maryland General Assembly in 2020 passed a tax exemption on data center equipment and appliances that significantly reduced the cost to construct the facilities in the state. And Democratic Gov. Wes Moore is championing a measure in the current session to shield proposed centers from review by the state’s top electricity use regulator.
Frederick is doing the right thing by taking a measured approach to data centers, said Kelly Schulz, head of the Maryland Tech Council, a pro-data center trade group. Schulz, a Frederick County resident, was part of an 11-member workgroup appointed last year by County Executive Jessica Fitzwater to recommend how and where the facilities should be developed. As part of its deliberations, the group toured Loudoun County, the epicenter of Virginia’s data center boom.
“Everyone agrees we don’t want Frederick to look like Loudoun,” Schulz said. “Even the folks in Loudoun County would say that if they had it all over again, they would have done more placement planning and sustainability planning. Now, Maryland has a chance to learn from what Loudoun County has experienced over the last 20 years.”
Environmentalists cite several drawbacks with data centers. They are drains on the electricity grid, requiring up to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical office building. High volumes of water are piped in to keep their servers cool, with some facilities needing the equivalent of what a city of 50,000 residents uses in a day. And, if that power goes out, they turn on large banks of emergency generators that burn diesel or natural gas, releasing pollutants into the air.
Steve Findlay, president of the Sugarloaf Citizens Association, a conservation group founded in 1973, said his organization’s opposition to data centers is rooted in maintaining the area’s bucolic charm. “This is a rural agricultural area, and that’s the way people want to live here,” he said.
The county currently is home to two small data centers: one owned by Fannie Mae and one by the Social Security Administration, both in Urbana. But a project under development in Adamstown on the site of a former aluminum smelting plant could put Frederick firmly on the data center map.
Partnering with Natelli, the Texas-based startup Quantum Loophole has been pitching the property to potential tenants as a park of data centers. But the project hit a roadblock last October when its first tenant, Aligned Data Centers, lost its case before the state Public Service Commission for a waiver from state and federal environmental rules to equip the operation with 168 backup diesel generators.
Conservationists were alarmed in 2022 when word spilled out that Amazon Web Services had been in talks with the county about developing at least one data center just west of Interstate 270 within the Sugarloaf Treasured Landscape boundaries. The proposal fell through, but the episode, they said, underscored the urgency behind enacting the zoning overlay.
The Frederick County Council approved a comprehensive land use plan for the Sugarloaf area in 2022. But without the next layer of protection — a zoning overlay — development opponents must remain “consistently on the hair trigger to fight these [data center] proposals,” Black said.
Natelli owns a large swath of land along the west side of I-270 that is within the Sugarloaf plan limits. He said he hopes the county will consider making it possible to construct data centers along the highway because of its proximity to needed infrastructure available on the opposite side of the road.
The rest of the Sugarloaf area should be allowed to retain preservation-oriented development regulations, he added.
Nearly the entire area around Sugarloaf Mountain is zoned for agricultural or resource conservation uses. But conservationists contend that developers could get around that by having parcels within the Sugarloaf area redrawn into a more-lenient planning area or pursuing “piecemeal zoning,” which sanctions new developments in the event of a purported flaw in the original zoning or a change in the community’s character.
In its final report, published March 1, Fitzwater’s workgroup urged the county to mandate a ceiling on data center development based on metrics such as the total square footage of all facilities or energy usage by the sector. But the group didn’t prescribe any specific limits, leaving that to be decided later.
The workgroup also identified three potential growth areas for the facilities in the county’s southern tier: Adamstown, Brunswick and Urbana. While the report didn’t recommend data centers in the sensitive Sugarloaf region, it left the door slightly ajar, noting that its proposed locations were “neither exhaustive nor exclusionary.”
Do you folks here in Southern Calvert know there’s a plan to allow Amazon to build the world’s largest data center on the property of Constellation Energy? I live nearby and am concerned for the growth in a pristine area. I find the decision odd for a county claiming to be opposed to large development. I understand these data centers come with impactful community noise because they require a high number of large capacity cooling systems which emit an audible humming noise subject to annoyance. I’m frustrated the county hasn’t announced the plan and engaged community members about the project. If it comes to fruition, and there’s noise like I’ve heard, not only will we be disturbed by that, but would have trouble selling our homes if we ever decide to do so. I for one decided to live in the area for the rural peace and serenity.
please have a better response than you’re on the internet, look it up, whats the definition of a data center/ what is a data center?
What are you talking about? I not sure you know. My source is not the Internet. It’s people inside the plant and those who’ve done solid research on the impacts of data centers and the many law suits across the country. Perhaps you should conduct some research. I’d bet you don’t even live in the affected area and simply feel the need to troll others.