John Steinbach was shocked to receive a $281 electricity bill in January 2026—a huge spike from the roughly $100 he’d paid the previous month. “It’s just so far beyond any bill that I’ve ever had,” he says. Steinbach, who has lived in his Manassas, Va., home for nearly 40 years, worries his rates will keep climbing as the outsized electricity demand from AI data centers grows. “They’re building them like it’s ‘Field of Dreams’—build it and the electricity will come—but we don

A coalition that includes Dominion Energy and the parent company of Appalachian Power is planning an “extra-high-voltage” transmission line spanning 115 miles from the Lynchburg area to Culpeper. The final route has yet to be determined, but a map of possibilities shows that the 765-kilovolt overhead line could cross nine counties: Appomattox, Buckingham, Campbell, Culpeper, Fluvanna, Goochland, Louisa, Orange and Spotsylvania. Community meetings are planned to get resident

STERLING, Virginia — Lindsay Shaw was happy when she found out a data center was going up 100 meters from her front door. Unlike most of her neighbors, she preferred a supercomputing hub to a shopping mall, which might bring a crush of car traffic. She was even more pleased when she learned the data center would generate its own power — rather than connecting to the grid and driving up her electric bills. But then the data center turned on, along with the eight natural gas tu

FLUVANNA COUNTY, Va. (WVIR) - A proposed roughly $1 billion, 115-mile electric transmission line project was front and center in Fluvanna County on Tuesday, March 10, as hundreds of community members gathered for an open house to ask questions and, for many, to voice concerns. Valley Link, a joint venture between Dominion Energy, FirstEnergy Transmission, LLC, and Transource Energy, LLC, is planning the Joshua Falls-Yeat Transmission Line Project, at 765 kilovolts, the highe

Two energy giants, Dominion and AEP, are planning to build a high voltage transmission line between substations near Lynchburg and Culpeper. At the Piedmont Environmental Council, analyst Mike Barber says it will have a huge impact on natural resources stretching 115 miles. "It’s going to covert somewhere north of 2,700 acres of land to utility right-of-way, and all of that is land that’s currently forested or farmed— natural open space or someone’s backyard," he explains. "T