Virginia environmental group challenges unchecked data center boom

The Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) announces its expanding campaign to expose and reform the impacts of large-scale data center growth and associated energy infrastructure in Virginia.

• Campaign & policy push: PEC has co-founded the Data Center Reform Coalition (50+ groups), launched the Virginians for a Smarter Digital Future awareness campaign, manually maps existing/approved/proposed data centers, transmission lines, substations and generator air permits, and is pressing the State Corporation Commission (SCC) and Virginia General Assembly for transparency, state oversight/mitigation, financial protection for ratepayers, and pollution-linked tax exemptions; SCC has now created a new energy rate class for data centers and ordered Dominion to propose better cost allocation.
• Scale, costs & impacts: Virginia hosts ~660 data centers, with campus loads rising from 15 MW to 300 MW each and Dominion forecasting >50 GW peak data center load by 2045 (comparable to the United Kingdom); PEC estimates $90–$270 billion in grid build-out costs (thousands of miles of transmission, hundreds of substations, massive new plants and hundreds of thousands of acres of solar) that would be socialized onto all Virginia ratepayers while Dominion earns ~10% return, amid land-use conflicts in Loudoun, Culpeper, Fauquier and other counties, encroachment on conserved and historic lands, and proposals to relax air pollution limits for diesel backup generators.