BLACK & VEATCH
A facility design that works perfectly in Northern Virginia might face months of regulatory challenges in a market where data centres represent unfamiliar technology.
The move toward on-site generation fundamentally changes the regulatory landscape by introducing power plant regulations to data centre projects.“ A lot of these data centres are now looking at producing the power by themselves,” Mike says.“ So there’ s a whole different realm of regulations that may be applicable for the actual power plant side of things.” Air quality, water discharge, noise control and safety standards that may be entirely unfamiliar to data centre developers suddenly become project-critical requirements.
Acoustic regulations also present particularly thorny challenges due to lack of standardisation and limited regulatory expertise. Andrew Truitt, Subject Matter Leader for acoustics and noise control at Black & Veatch, highlights the complexity:“ The problem, especially in the US, with acoustical noise regulations, is that there’ s almost no reciprocity across any states with noise regulations. It varies state by state and, even within a state, it’ s going to vary county by county and city by city.”
Even established data centre markets struggle with this issue – Andrew notes that data centre capitals like Prince William County and Loudoun County“ have changed their noise regulations almost yearly for the past five to six years.”
64 August 2025