David M. Burnam, P.E. of Dominion Energy

Ashburn Virginia, in Loudoun County, is the internet capital of the planet.  Datacenters in “Datacenter Alley” in Ashburn host the servers and interconnect equipment that creates the web we call the internet.  These servers need power.  The rows and rows of racks of servers that are housed inside a datacenter building add up to a very large block load.  Add to that the electricity required to provide the cooling and axillary systems in the building, and the total utility power needs can be 40, 50, or even 60MVA per building.  Put multiple datacenter buildings on a campus, and now the campus power needs can be 250 to 300+ MVA.  Cluster a lot of datacenter campuses into a very tight geographic area, and one can appreciate the challenges of an electric utility to provide the necessary power to multiple datacenters.

This presentation will describe the power needs of a datacenter by exploring a typical Load Letter requesting power and how Dominion Energy creates a power plan to serve that request.  We’ll explore the options available to power datacenter customers.  Through a realistic datacenter project request, we’ll step through the process of building a power plan by taking a phased approach to delivering projects.

Biography:

David works on the Datacenter Planning Team in the Electric Distribution Grid Planning group at Dominion Energy.  This team coordinates with other internal work teams to connect new datacenter projects to the grid throughout Dominion Energy’s service territory.  He has been in the Distribution Planning organization for 22 years, the majority of which was planning for Loudoun County, VA coincident with the development of the datacenter industry in Ashburn, VA.  He has been with Dominion Energy for 30 years.

The Distribution Grid Planning group is responsible for monitoring existing system load, forecasting future load, comparing distribution system components capacity to their existing and projected loading, and identifying and launching system improvement projects to prevent overload of any system component.  The zone of responsibility is from the high side of substation transformers, through the distribution system, and to each customer meter.

Prior to Distribution Grid Planning, David worked in the company’s Energy Efficiency organization and in the Nuclear Department where he was an engineer and then an instructor in the Nuclear Training department training fellow engineers.

While not qualified as a rocket scientist per se, he did work in a rocket factory before coming to Dominion Energy.  In the late 1980 he worked for NASA in New Orleans in a plant that built the external fuel tanks for the space shuttles.  Prior to that, he worked for an engineering consulting firm in Richmond.

David is a licensed Professional Engineer in Virginia and has been an IEEE member since college.  He graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 1985.  He lives in Richmond for and enjoys DYI projects and mountain biking in downtown Richmond.