By Jeff St. John | Canary Media
In January, Virginia lawmakers unveiled a raft of legislation aimed at putting some guardrails on a data center industry whose insatiable hunger for electricity threatens to overwhelm the grid.
As the home of the world’s densest data center hub, Virginia is on the vanguard of dealing with these challenges. But the state is far from alone in a country where data center investments may exceed $1 trillion by mid-2029, driven in large part by “hyperscalers” with aggressive AI goals, like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
“If we fail to act, the unchecked growth of the data center industry will leave Virginia’s families, will leave their businesses, footing the bill for infrastructure costs, enduring environmental degradation, and facing escalating energy rates,” state Sen. Russet Perry, a Democrat representing Loudoun County, the heart of Virginia’s “Data Center Alley,” told reporters at the state capitol in Richmond last month. “The status quo is not sustainable.”
Perry’s position is backed by data. A December report commissioned by Virginia’s legislature found that a buildout of data centers to meet “unconstrained demand” would double the state’s electricity consumption by 2033 and nearly triple it by 2040.
To meet the report’s unconstrained scenario, Virginia would need to erect twice as many solar farms per year by 2040 as it did in 2024, build more wind farms than all the state’s current offshore wind plans combined, and install three times more battery storage than Dominion Energy, the state’s biggest utility, now intends to build.
Even then, Virginia would need to double current power imports from other states. And it would still need to build new fossil-gas power plants, which would undermine a state clean energy mandate. Meeting just half the unconstrained demand would require building seven new 1.5-gigawatt gas plants by 2040. That’s nearly twice the 5.9 gigawatts’ worth of gas plants Dominion now plans to build by 2039, a proposal that is already under attack by environmental and consumer groups.
