"The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality stepped into a fight over powering AI facilities with natural gas turbines. It could shape the industry’s future."
"When Virginia’s top environmental regulator received an analysis warning of data center pollution, it took him less than five minutes to forward it to seven people on his staff.
The Piedmont Environmental Council had sent the report to Michael Rolband as a courtesy two days before publicizing it in March. It ignited a scramble within the agency to poke holes in the analysis, which raised concerns about the health effects of an AI facility that stands at the vanguard of the state’s fastest-growing industry.
“Will you review and tell me what you think?” Rolband, the director of the state Department of Environmental Quality, asked members of his air permitting staff.
Internal emails obtained by POLITICO through a public records request paint a portrait of an agency that moved quickly to defend the only data center in Virginia that is powering itself — in what former officials and environmental health advocates described as an unusual effort to shape the debate around an industry whose global epicenter is in the state."
