Frederick County

An Essential First Step

The Northern Virginia Data Centers, also known as “data center alley,” have expanded so quickly that many of the factors that fueled their growth are no longer able to meet demand. Land and power restrictions, two of a data center’s most crucial requirements, have recently compelled developers to look for and expand. The simplest route for growth is south and west to Prince William and Fauquier Counties, with support from the state government and competition to keep all development in Virginia. Developers were forced to look north into Maryland as power demand reached a tipping point, forcing new projects to wait years for electrical approvals.

Many data center developers are looking at expanding the data center corridor into Frederick County, MD, due to its proximity to Loudoun County, which has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. We will look at a number of the elements that show Frederick County to be a great place to grow and bring an entirely new industry to the region and the state.

Network Access Point

Due to the significance of “critical application” uses for federal agency clients, site proximity to the Equinix IEX in Ashburn is essential. The distance between two facilities and the fiber’s carrying capacity determine the connection speed. Typically, federal agency clients will establish a list of requirements for their cloud storage and then contract with a facility end user, such as AWS, Microsoft, or others, to manage and maintain their data within the parameters they have provided for accessibility, redundancy, uptime, physical and digital security, among other factors.

Frederick County, specifically Doubs/Adamstown, represents the outer limit of a 30-kilometer radius that would qualify for these critical application uses and would provide the connectivity backbone required for future expansions within Maryland.

Maryland may not currently represent a significant portion of the national data center market, but northern Virginia’s preeminence is also a recent phenomenon. In terms of national capacity, Loudoun County only surpassed New York City as the largest data center market in 2016, and in 2011, the Virginia data center market was a mere footnote. If Maryland seizes this opportunity, there is no doubt that we will become the second-largest data center market, if not the largest. If we fail to seize this opportunity, Virginia will likely take an unassailable lead in as little as a year as they continue to add capacity despite power shortages and work to construct alternative transmission lines in order to maintain their market share in the data center industry.

Power Access

Potomac Edison, which is owned by FirstEnergy, serves Frederick County, which has an efficient 230 KV transmission system. Under certain rate structures, users with a high load factor and a consistent load curve may be rewarded. Frederick County has some of the most competitive average commercial electricity rates in the capital region, with prices that are approximately 55% lower than the average rate in Maryland and 53% lower than the national average rate.

The Doubs Substation, one of the Mid-Atlantic region’s largest 500KV transmission interconnections, is one of the region’s most important power assets. The system provides dual 230-kilovolt services.

First Energy has already announced plans to build a transmission line from Maryland to Virginia in order to protect Virginia’s monopoly in the data center market. We believe it would be irresponsible to allow valuable power to flow from Maryland to Virginia when the revenue generated could be used to improve the lives of many of our fellow state residents.

Building a data center in the United States mission-critical for any organization. From articulating the business motivations behind the creation of such an asset to defining the key elements of an appropriate location, it is necessary to create a detailed picture of the critical and complex requirements in advance in order to successfully implement your vision for a data center. None of these decisions is more crucial than the location of the data center you intend to construct.

When determining the viability of a development, topography is a crucial factor. The terrain of Frederick County is divided into three distinct sections. On the west, there is a very mountainous terrain; in the center, the terrain is very flat, followed to the east by a more rough train. This corridor in the center of Frederick County contains relatively flat, bedrock-supported land that is optimal for construction or large-scale building. The relatively flat terrain of our site has a positive effect on all aspects of the project.

This incoming wave of infrastructure will have big implications for Frederick County governments and planners, particularly those interested in leveraging the new economic drivers they enable. The proximity of data centers to communities is key to attracting connected industries for applications like smart manufacturing as well as delivering high-quality advanced services like telehealth, remote learning, augmented and virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, drone delivery, and all the various smart city applications.

Despite this, relatively few local zoning codes define and regulate data centers, which have largely been located in industrial and office parks and complexes. The lack of an explicit code is what creates uncertainty and leads to various types of interpretation by the many. In light of this, Frederick County has the chance to show how forwardthinking it is and set an example for Maryland in terms of the most important factors for planners to take into account and methods to help your community succeed.