Who Pays When Northern Virginia Data Centers Need More Power?

Northern Virginia’s data center boom is forcing Dominion Energy and regional grid operators to plan tens of gigawatts of new electricity supply and hundreds of miles of ultra-high-voltage transmission corridors. The burden does not stop at the data center campuses: new lines will cut across rural counties, farms, historic landscapes, and residential backyards, leaving many communities to absorb the disruption without sharing in the tax benefits.

The resulting infrastructure expansion has triggered widespread pushback over cost allocation, private property takings, and degraded viewsheds. Public unease with data centers and AI is growing because the promised local tax windfalls are concentrated in a few counties, while the transmission corridors, condemnation fights, and ratepayer risks are spread across a much larger region. The costs are becoming increasingly apparent to all while the benefits seem to be concentrated among the few.

The core conflict is not whether Northern Virginia needs more electricity. It is whether the communities enabling that growth—through land, viewsheds, eminent-domain risk, and higher utility bills—should bear costs created primarily by data center expansion elsewhere.

The Power Demand Driving the Grid Buildout

Dominion Energy's contracted queue for large data center loads stands at over 45 to 50 Gigawatts (GW) across Virginia. By comparison, Dominion’s entire legacy peak summer customer demand historically sat near 25 GW.

Loudoun County’s data centers currently consume roughly 6 GW and are projected to reach 10 to 12 GW at full buildout. Neighboring Prince William County is planning for an additional 5 to 7.2 GW across projects. There are proposals for other data center campuses in the county on hundreds of acres that are still scheduled to come before the county board of supervisors.

While Prince William's total approved capacity (~7.2 GW) does not technically exceed Loudoun’s ultimate ceiling (~12.3 GW) following the deaths of Digital Gateway and Dulles Cloud South, the velocity and localized concentration of Prince William's approved pipeline create an infrastructure bottleneck that is in many ways more severe than Loudoun’s.  

Loudoun County's data centers grew incrementally over 25 years alongside pre-existing high-voltage paths near Dulles Airport. Prince William’s 5-7.2 GW pipeline is trying to scale up over a compressed timeframe in areas completely lacking the heavy transmission infrastructure required to feed it.

Like Loudoun, Prince William is moving to eliminate "by-right" data center zoning overlays, but they cannot retroactively cancel projects that already hold site-plan approvals. Massive industrial parks in Innovation Park, Bristow, and along Route 234 are already locked into the grid queue. Because both counties are trying to double their power requirements simultaneously, the regional grid operator, PJM, is facing an absolute power crunch.

The localized demand requires importing power from hundreds of miles away, turning rural pass-through counties into utility transmission highways. These pass-through counties get the ugly and a portion of the bill without receiving any of the taxes. Powering this queue requires capacity roughly equivalent to dozens of new nuclear reactors or large natural-gas generation complexes, forcing the grid to import bulk power from western coal and nuclear generation across the Appalachian and Piedmont regions.

 Miles of Lines and Tower

To import bulk electricity from external generators into the Northern Virginia bottleneck, regional grid operator PJM and Dominion Energy have proposed construction on hundreds of miles of new and rebuilt transmission lines. 

Over 500 miles of high-voltage transmission projects are planned, including:

• Valley Link (Joshua Falls to Yeat): A roughly 115-mile, $1 billion mega-project originating near Lynchburg (Campbell County) and running north to Culpeper County.
• Valley North & Regional Ties: Upwards of 250 to 400 miles of regional ties planned across northwest Virginia and West Virginia.
• Morrisville to Wishing Star: A 36.5-mile line linking southern Fauquier County, through Prince William, directly into Loudoun’s Ashburn/Arcola cluster.
• Intra-County Connectors: Shorter 5-to-15-mile high-voltage segments, such as the contentious Golden-to-Mars line in eastern Loudoun. 

·        Line Types and Voltage:

• 765 kV Lines: Operating at the highest commercial transmission voltage in North America, these massive bulk lines act as an "interstate electric superhighway".
• 500 kV & 230 kV Lines: Heavy-duty feeder corridors designed to distribute power from regional hubs straight into individual data center clusters.

·        The physical profile of these high voltage lines have alienated all the passthrough counties and even the neighbors of the data centers who are benefiting from the tad windfall.

Physical Profile:

• Structures stand between 110 and 185 feet tall (the Statue of Liberty stands at about 150 feet- and this is hundreds of miles of these).
• Galvanized steel lattice towers or massive engineered monopoles.
• Cleared swaths cut between 100 to 200 feet wide, requiring clear-cutting of timber and complete removal of permanent structures like community amenities and woodlands.

Counties Traversed and Whose Land Is Impacted

The transmission corridors cut across several rural and suburban counties that house little or no data center infrastructure. Nobody signed up for what this impact will be:

• Campbell, Amherst, Nelson, Albemarle, Fluvanna, Buckingham, Lousia, Orange, Culpeper, Spotsylvania, Fauquier, Rappahannock, Clark and Frederick will all have these power high voltage power lines traversing through them.
• In eastern Loudoun and western Prince William, Dominion is relying on eminent domain and condemnation to expand corridors, resulting in 185-foot towers installed within tens of feet of residential homes and taking up to one-third of individual suburban yards (e.g., in Loudoun Valley Estates where homeowners are concerned about their property values and quality of life).
• In Central Virginia and the Piedmont, routes cross generational family farms, vineyards, conservation easements, and historic Civil War battlefields, converting all this rural acreage into utility corridors. 

Who Pays: Cost Allocation vs. Local Ratepayer Burden

Historically, transmission and grid expansion costs were bundled into Dominion's general rate base, meaning all residential and small-business customers across Virginia paid for them via monthly transmission riders:

Regulators warned that without reforms, typical residential utility bills could increase by double digits over the decade to service hundreds of billions in capital grid upgrades. Counties outside Loudoun and Prince William do not receive the computer-equipment tax windfalls that fund Loudoun’s municipal budget and lower its local real estate taxes. Instead, these pass-through counties face only a loosing equation: 

• Permanent visual degradation across their scenic viewsheds.
• Loss of taxable agricultural or residential land value within transmission paths.
• Electricity transmission riders added to their monthly electric bills to maintain the grid.

Following fierce advocacy from rural coalitions (like the Piedmont Environmental Council and the Coalition to Protect Prince William County) there has been a regulatory shift and a directive from state leadership. The Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) issued an order mandating that Dominion directly assign the full capital cost of transmission lines and substations built exclusively to serve large data centers directly to those data center operators, rather than spreading those specific costs onto ordinary residential ratepayers.

This mandate does leave a loophole. The SCC’s direct-assignment mandate strictly applies to lines exclusively built for specific facilities. High-level, multi-billion-dollar regional bulk lines (like the 765 kV Valley Link project) are often classified as "regional grid reliability" projects by PJM, leaving a substantial portion of the broader interstate transmission cost still subject to regional ratepayer cost-sharing.

Dominion explicitly projects $7.59 billion in dedicated electric transmission lines slated to come online through 2031. According to filings with the SCC  68% of that $7.59 billion—roughly $5.16 billion—is driven exclusively or concurrently by data center growth. If the full queue of 70,000 Megawatts of data center demand comes online, Dominion estimates it will need to build an additional 230 localized substations costing between $6 billion and $12 billion. Electricity is about to get a lot more expensive in Virginia.