MANASSAS, Virginia — In mid-October, a small crowd gathered to hear Democratic candidates and activists take shots at the low-slung, energy-hungry data centers of northern Virginia.
At Jirani Coffeehouse in Old Town, Manassas, a gold and navy banner established the theme of the night’s rally: “The Energy Bills Are Too Damn High.”
“We cannot meet this load demand for the wealthiest industry in the world, or we will destroy ourselves,” said Elena Schlossberg, executive director of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, referring to the electricity consumption of data centers.
During Tuesday’s general election in Virginia, candidates for governor or seats in the General Assembly face voter discontent over data centers and rising electricity prices, and broader affordability issues.
For the first time in a statewide election cycle, the state’s friendly environment for the digital economy’s megaprojects is on the ballot — at least in part.
This year’s Virginia governor’s race is a bellwether contest for Democrats, who hope to see signs of life among Democratic voters as the party tries to recapture Congress next year. Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat, is holding onto a 9 point lead over Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, according to a Suffolk University poll.
Virginia is the largest hub of data centers in the world, with sprawling industrial buildings powering the growing appetite for cloud computing and artificial intelligence. There are more than 640 data centers in the state, concentrated in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and the Richmond area, according to the Data Center Map.
Welcomed at first as gifts to economic development that few other states could claim, today’s supercharged tech industry capital projects are increasingly contested in communities where new data centers are being proposed, in Virginia and in states across the country.
Bob Holsworth, a longtime Virginia official and political observer, said data centers are a “bonanza” for local governments because they bring tax revenue without large numbers of new people who require public services.
But some northern Virginians — Democratic and Republican voters — are questioning how much of it is actually a pernicious suck on state resources and responsible for some of their rising cost-of-living.
Power bills are up 6.7 percent in Virginia and other southeastern states over the 12-month period through last August. Residential customers could see monthly cost increases of close to $40 by 2040, according to a December study from the Legislature’s oversight agency.
‘These fights are tearing apart towns’
Disquiet over data centers prompted a flurry of bills in the General Assembly this year.
Lawmakers brought forward at least 29 bills that in one way or another would have restricted where data centers can be built, whether noise or environmental impact studies need to be conducted and whether the high energy users need to provide their own power generation or use more carbon-free electricity.
Nearly all of them failed; the most prominent to pass — which would have required noise assessments for new data centers — was vetoed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who wrote that the legislation would have created “unnecessary red tape.”
“We should not enact legislation to allow other states to pass us by nor to restrict local governments from developing data centers based on their community’s specific circumstances,” Youngkin wrote in his veto letter.
Virginia’s major utility, Dominion Energy — for years a powerful force in state politics — has been on the receiving end of criticism during legislative races.
In an interview, John McAuliff, a Democratic candidate for the District 30 seat in the House of Delegates from Loudoun County, said energy’s a critical issue. “That is the reason I’m running.”
“Folks are spending significantly more on their energy than in other places around the country,” said McAuliff, whose district would represent part of Loudoun County, where most of the largest data centers are located. “Part of that is because Dominion does not allow the data centers to pay for their own infrastructure. That’s being spread out amongst all Virginians, but particularly the folks in proximity to them.”
“These fights are tearing apart towns,” he said.
In a case open before the utility regulator, the Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC), Dominion has proposed raising rates for average residential customers by $21 per month over the next two years, while also creating a new rate class for high-power users like data centers to shift future costs for their infrastructure away from residents.
A Dominion spokesperson, Aaron Ruby, referred to the General Assembly’s oversight report. “Data centers are currently paying the full cost of their power, and residential customers are not subsidizing data center costs,” Ruby wrote in an email.
The agency, called the Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission, recommended additional protections for consumers to stave off data-center-related cost increases, which Ruby said Dominion has incorporated into its current rate case proposal. The company says its base utility rates have trailed general inflation figures and that the cost increases are because of inflationary pressures on the economy, not data centers.
Data centers are a flash point in the race for District 30. McAuliff’s campaign ran an ad accusing his Republican opponent, Del. Geary Higgins, of profiting off data centers and selling out to their lobbyists.
Higgins, a former member of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, says he has never pushed for data centers, never supported them “where they do not belong” and never profited from them. He pointed out that Dominion has given money to the state’s House Democratic Caucus, which has in turn given money to McAuliff.
While he supports some regulation of data centers, Higgins is wary of legislative mandates and said he prefers local control.
Officials from other parts of the state “don’t have any skin in the game and they don’t care,” he said in an interview. He said the state lacks a “coherent” energy policy, and that a push to take fossil fuels offline and replace them with renewables is pushing electricity rates higher.
Trump’s economy
McAuliff has the endorsement of Clean Virginia, an advocacy group founded by the wealthy Charlottesville, Virginia-based asset manager Michael Bills. Its stated aim is to “offset the undue and harmful influence” that Dominion and other utilities have on Virginia politics, and its endorsed candidates have pledged to not accept money from utilities. While it mostly endorses Democrats — including Spanberger — it has endorsed a few Republicans in House of Delegates races.
Bills, his wife, S. Sonjia Smith, and the Clean Virginia Fund have all together donated more than $13 million to races across Virginia so far this cycle, according to data from the Virginia Public Access Project. Dominion has spent more than $14.5 million.
Ruby, the Dominion spokesperson, said the company makes campaign donations “on behalf of our millions of customers and thousands of employees.”
“We contribute to candidates from both parties in support of bipartisan, common sense energy policy,” he said.
The governor’s race has focused on the economy under President Donald Trump. Big-ticket issues — like food assistance during a government shutdown, abortion and congressional redistricting — have come up lately. Data centers are lumped in with the issue of affordable living.
While neither candidate opposes additional data centers, Spanberger advocates for continued growth of renewables to help meet new power needs, while Earle-Sears has taken the Trump administration’s tack of emphasizing fossil fuels.
In interviews with 10 voters at an Oct. 21 rally for Spanberger in Charlottesville, people largely listed opposition to Trump, support for abortion access or public education as their biggest motivation for supporting Spanberger; two voters said they were not clear on what her energy policy was.
Data centers were still a concern.
“People that have no control over those big giant data centers are being affected by them most,” said Natalie Brennan, a 24-year-old who lives in Charlottesville but is from Loudoun County.
Growing energy demand has some voters worried.
“We have to stop exponentially growing our energy usage,” said Meg Phillips, a 37-year-old from Charlottesville.
During her speech that evening, Spanberger ticked off energy costs as one of several contributing factors that are making life in Virginia less affordable for residents, along with health care and child care.
Her platform, dubbed an “Affordable Virginia Plan,” calls for policies to encourage data centers to develop “clean on-site and off-site generation and storage.” Spanberger has said she would push for Virginia to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cooperative effort among states to reduce carbon emissions that Youngkin exited.
At their lone debate earlier this month, the two candidates fielded one question about data centers.
Spanberger repeated a line she’s said before — that utilities should “pay their fair share.” She also mentioned Dominion’s ongoing rate case. Depending on how that case goes, Spanberger said, “it may require action within the General Assembly to ensure that large utility users like data centers are paying their fair share for the energy that they consume.”
Earle-Sears responded by attacking the state’s clean energy law, which mandates fully-renewable power from the state’s two largest utilities, Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power, by 2050.
She said the state needs an “all-of-the-above” energy policy that includes fossil fuels and renewables to keep down energy prices.
“My opponent’s only plan is solar and wind,” Earle-Sears said. “Well, what happens when the sun goes down?”
For her part, Spanberger has voiced support for continued use of existing natural gas plants.
Neither campaign responded to questions seeking further clarity on their data center positions.
‘Is it possible for us to do this’
Dominion’s proposed new electricity charges, which would begin in January, await a decision from state regulators.
On the first day of hearings on Dominion’s request, in September, the SCC panel heard from Crystal Franklin, a U.S. Navy hospital corpsman from Dumfries, Virginia.
“Being a single mother and a grandmother is hard,” she said. “I earn just enough to provide a stable life for my family, but not a dollar more. … The cost of helping feed five grandkids and myself has recently skyrocketed to $2,000 a month.
“These days, I hold my breath when I’m filling gas on the way to the office, worrying about what the gas price display will show.” She said her energy bill has gone from $150 a month to $210 in the last year. “This rate hike will bring my bill up to $240.”
Roughly three in four U.S. consumers are worried about utility bills rising this year, according to a survey by PowerLines, a nonpartisan consumer education group. A majority say utility bills are adding to their financial stress.
Natural gas prices are going up. Gas fuels about 40 percent of Dominion’s electricity. Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports impact generation, transmission and substation construction. Set against all that are billions of dollars in utility investment and increased carbon emissions from generation.
Silicon Valley is urged on by the White House to continue to build big to ensure U.S. dominance of AI technology.
Projected growth is gargantuan.
While energy sales have been close to flat since 2000, a forecast from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia predicts sales could more than double by 2040. William Shobe, an emeritus public policy professor who conducted the forecast, said meeting the demands would require a “world war-level of industrial commitment.”
“Is it possible for us to do this?” Shobe said. “I don’t really know.”
In the short term, Shobe noted, data center growth will drive up rates for consumers. He also pointed out that the only detailed model for future power generation needs is Dominion’s model.
“It’s rather shocking that we have this multibillion-dollar activity going on that might at least in the short run raise the rates,” Shobe said, “and we don’t have independent modeling capacity to figure out how we deal with it.”
Dominion has asked for approval to spend more than $1.5 billion through 2027 for grid upgrades. Simply, the expectation of much larger power demand is leveraging current electricity prices higher, according to Joseph Bowring, independent market monitor for the PJM Interconnection, grid operator for 13 states, including Virginia.
Data center expansion will add an estimated $22 billion to Dominion’s spending over the next 15 years if developers’ current plans are realized, a witness told regulators in the September hearings.
“A key unanswered question:” said energy consultant Scott Norwood, “the extent to which there will be any net benefit to Dominion’s 2.7 million existing customers, or to Virginia’s economy as a whole, as a result of the growth in data centers.”
