As part of our “Dark Side of Data Centers” Initiative, we’re working on totaling up the emissions that the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality(DEQ) has permitted from Loudoun’s data centers so that we can make this data more easily readable by the public.

It’s important to note that permitted emissions are not the same as actual emissions… they really should be treated more as a maximum allowable level of emissions. Another note is that this is all publicly available data in the first place. We’re not exposing any new data.

What we are doing is parsing over permits in PDF format which are available from DEQ here: https://www.deq.virginia.gov/permits/air/issued-air-permits-for-data-centers

Each permit has a PDF that, with some exceptions, clearly states the maximum annual emissions permitted facility-wide. We’re taking those values and putting them in a spreadsheet. We also have some initial findings!

DEQ permitted the following emissions from Loudoun data centers in 2024:

• Nitrogen Oxides: 2,419.22 tons per year
• Carbon Monoxide: 1,216.81 tons per year
• VOCs: 327.79 tons per year
• PM10: 122.85 tons per year
• PM2.5: 120.18 tons per year
• PM(total): 239.89 tons per year

You can see our math on this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uvE-qqXVDts3oT_wdWld1e3W7q-MCJSE1aItGZufC_A/edit?usp=sharing

We’re working to add up the rest of the permits and should have more information soon.

One might wonder what effects these air pollution types have on human health. Thankfully, The World Health Organization (WHO) has an informative list of air pollution types and their health effects that can be found here: https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/air-quality-and-health/health-impacts/types-of-pollutants

We could use help parsing over PDFs and aggregating data for this project. If you’re interested in helping, email info@loudounclimate.org.