Virginia needs a data center moratorium now | Guest column
If ever there was a time for Virginia to enact a statewide moratorium, the moment is now. When it comes to the real-life impacts of the data center boom, Virginia is in deeper than most people, including our state leaders, realize. We are experiencing unprecedented threats to the affordability of energy, reliability of our electrical grid, air quality and public health, resilience of our potable water supply, and our private property rights.
Virginia is the largest data center market in the world, with nearly 95 gigawatts (GW) of contracted electric power requests in the pipeline: 70 from Dominion and another 25 from Appalachian Power. If 95 GW of data center capacity were built out, our current power grid would quadruple in size, requiring thousands of miles of new transmission lines, hundreds of new substations, and dozens of new power plants. This is akin to building 20-30 new “transmission interstate highways.” Each of those corridors has a minimum 200-foot-wide right-of-way, which will affect both rural and suburban communities across the state. Unlike public highways, these rights-of-way will be taken primarily to serve private industry's demand, slashing through farms and forests and looming over neighborhoods and schools.
This is a self-made crisis. State leaders have allowed our investor-owned utilities to agree to provide extraordinary levels of power without sufficient oversight or consideration of what the aggregate demand would mean for Virginians. Virginians deserve to know the extent of the impacts and how they will be prevented and mitigated. Until those answers are provided, we must stop making this “crisis by contract” worse.
Virginia needs to immediately pause all data center contracts for interconnections to the power grid until it has a plan to address these six critical issues:
Cost of energy: Over the past two years, a growing list of proposed electric generation plants, transmission line projects, substations, and fuel cost charges has come incrementally before the State Corporation Commission, representing billions of dollars in new ratepayer expense. But for data center demand, most of these projects would not be necessary. The state needs to develop a plan to address this problem in aggregate and to lay out regulations and solutions that ensure the data center industry pays for all increased costs.
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