I am writing to express my concern over these changes and how they will affect Virginians located near data centers.

How does this affect your mission of ensuring quality air and water for our residents?

How many 'planned outages' are allowed per month?  Per year? 

How long will data centers be allowed to run their 'planned outage'?

Will nearby residents and businesses be informed in advance?

Are there NO other alternatives to this?  My understanding is that these generators are for emergency use when all other backups fail.  What backups are in place or required currently?

Will air quality and noise be monitored during these test outages?  Will that information be available to the public?  And will there be standards towards controlling the air quality/noise?

Is there a limit as to how many sections of a data center campus can test at one time, or can the entire center turn on all generators at the same time?

How is this an improvement over the current practice of testing that the generators are in good repair and operational?

I happen to have a generator for power outages, as do my neighbors.  We test them by making sure they are properly fueled, and starting them before a storm.  Once we verify they work, we shut them down - takes less than 10 minutes.  We do not turn off our circuit breakers to stimulate an actual power outage - we understand that our generators will power things if the storm takes out power.  I completely fail to see how a data center would be any different - are our regulations so lax that these corporations can build something where they actually need to verify that their generators will provide power if there is an outage?

If so, why are they not being required to prove that their generators can handle a power outage BEFORE they are built and operational?

In my opinion, this is wrong on many different levels.  Your commission's mission is to protect our land and air so both current and future generations of Virginians can reside and visit the state.

I strongly urge you to not relax the regulations for data centers.  They should be able to abide by the current regulations in place.

Thank you for your time,

Deidre Reitwiesner

Fredericksburg, VA