Will this be the year the Virginia General Assembly takes action to rein in unconstrained data center development? To date, our state leaders have failed to protect Virginians from the short- and long-term effects of reckless data center growth. Currently, there is no overarching state plan to manage the cumulative impacts on our energy costs, our air quality and our natural resources. Until meaningful reform legislation is passed, Virginia needs to pause all approvals of new

Over the past few years, millions of Americans have seen their electricity bills skyrocket. Since February 2020, electricity prices have increased by an average of 40 percent across the country. In some areas, the rate is even faster — in Washington, D.C., electricity costs increased 93 percent from July 2020 to July 2025. But the rise in costs hasn’t affected each type of user equally. According to recent data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), residential ele

“We are all asking: Where are the people we elected who promised to protect us from these big corporations trying to steamroll us? The people who are supposed to be standing up and protecting us are standing down and caving.” Anger over the perceived trampling of communities by Silicon Valley has entered the national political conversation and could affect voters of all political persuasions in this year’s midterm elections.
Many of the residents fighting the project in Sand

“Any increase in how often they’re running is going to cause corresponding localized air pollution.” This past summer, a fire at an electrical substation forced data centers in Loudoun County to rely on backup diesel generators as their power source. Grid failures like this happen often, but this time, shoppers in a nearby Walmart parking lot heard the noisy generators start up and reported smelling diesel fumes. “People were like, ‘What is going on?’” said Julie Bolthouse, t

All year, the residents of the Loudoun Valley Estates neighborhoods in Ashburn have been railing against a proposed high-voltage power line that could run through their community to energize dozens of data centers on the other side of town. On Monday, they spelled out their concerns to state regulators in Richmond. Dominion Energy said the project is a critical piece of energy infrastructure necessary to power the energy-hungry data centers. The case has been framed as a majo