Part 9
By Peter Cary, Contributing Writer
“Build, build, build.” Those were the orders from David Rosner, the Trump-appointed chairman of the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, delivered at his first public meeting Sept. 18. Signaling FERC’s new bullish stance on infrastructure, they were encouraging words for utilities that need to build more transmission lines for Northern Virginia's power-hungry data centers.
Rosner’s command followed an executive order signed by President Trump in February that declared a national energy emergency requiring all federal agencies, from the Army Corps of Engineers to the Environmental Protections Agency, to relax their rules that slow construction of transmission lines. He declared expansion of the power grid to be an “immediate and pressing priority”—mainly to serve data centers and the sudden boom of energy-intensive artificial intelligence.
But here’s the rub: As Virginia counties approve permits for data centers, mainly to get their lucrative tax revenue, more high-powered transmission lines will have to be built to serve them and residents are highly resistant. They don’t want more lines humming atop 100-foot-tall steel towers, through their fields, their back yards and their communities.
Utilities say it’s their legal duty to serve all clients. PJM Interconnection, which coordinates the Mid-Atlantic electric grid, has solicited bids for ways to deliver more electricity across its zone and is considering hundreds of proposals from transmission-line builders. Even though most of the proposals are never built, they scare residents.
Dominion Energy, which builds what PJM selects, is working on 226 projects costing $12.3 billion in the Virginia zone where it owns the transmission lines, and it has 70 more projects costing $2.9 billion in planning stages.
Some of those projects are small or routine, like replacing a transformer in a substation. But others are huge and potentially impactful. Seven 500-kilovolt lines are in the works in the Dominion Zone – one runs from Fauquier Country through Prince William County and into Loudoun County. Those are the lines on 100- to 120-foot towers, sort of the interstate highway system of electrical distribution.
Two 230-kilovolt lines are planned in Prince William. They, too, would be atop tall towers.
Two 765-kilovolt lines are coming from West Virginia on still bigger towers – that’s a $4.6 billion project to bring power into Virginia from coal plants to the west. And a 200-mile underground, high-voltage, direct-current line from North Carolina to Loudoun is under serious consideration.
As these projects are presented to the public, they typically run into resistance. Despite utilities’ assertions that the lines will enhance reliability for everyone, residents are coming to understand that the main reason they are being built is to power the data center industry.
“Dominion has talked about grid stability, grid reliability. But why is that? What is draining our power grid so much that we have to talk about putting transmission lines in people's back yards,” asked Prince William Supervisors chair Deshundra Jefferson at a recent power line protest. The crowd responded, “Data centers!”
“All of us are here tonight because our quality of life and our homes are under threat from yet another project by Dominion,” said Vida Carroll, one leader of the Nov. 5 protest. “Our properties, our yards, our back yards, our green space is being used as an extension cord for big data, and it's unacceptable.”
Rising bills hurt, too. “I think that transmission costs are extraordinarily and unnecessarily high. It’s the transmission costs that are the big driver of consumer costs,” said Mark Christie, former chairman of FERC, in an interview after he stepped down in June.
A study last year by a joint legislative commission took note that “new transmission lines can fragment forest habitats, create water quality risks at stream and wetland crossings, and reduce scenic quality of nearby historic and recreational resources.” It said residents oppose them because of their effect on properties and property values, and for health concerns.
Those complaints were all on display during the Nov. 5 protest of a 6.5-mile, 230-kilovolt line Dominion wants to build from Nokesville to Bristow in Prince William County. The company showed residents three alternate routes at a project open house, but residents said all affected their properties or their environment.
Jeanne Jabara, an environmental scientist who lives on Kettle Run Road in Prince William County, was one of almost 200 residents protesting planned transmission lines Nov. 5. Photo by Peter Cary
One Nokesville resident said the route proposed would lop 25 feet off his side yard. “These lines are an eyesore and they devalue my property,” he said.
Another said an alternative route past his Braemar house would “mow down the entire forest our community is built around.”
That route also runs within 500 feet of Patriot High School and its football stadium, then along the Broad Run Greenway, a planned 17-mile trail connecting several parks.
“All three routes are devastating to three communities and rural pockets,” said Carroll, a founder of the Civic Association of Brentsville and Surrounding Areas. Particularly affected will be Bristow’s Braemar Community of 2,800 homes, which is sandwiched between Linton Hall and Vint Hill roads.
In a worst-case scenario, residents say, the new Nokesville-Bristow line would cut through Braemar’s middle or its eastern end, and another planned line, a 36-mile set of 500- and 230-kilovolt lines, would run along the community’s western end.
That line, known as the Morrisville-to-Wishing Star line, has run into resistance in Fauquier, which has only a handful of data centers of its own. The line would start in Morrisville and run north through Vint Hill to a substation called Wishing Star west of Dulles International Airport – all to feed Loudoun’s Data Center Alley.
In Fauquier, this project would add a 500-kilovolt line and a 230-kilovolt line to an existing 500-kilovolt line, and those require widening the right-of-way. In some places the widening would be difficult, so Dominion proposed running one or both of the power lines outside the right-of-way in those spots. Some of those lines cut through people’s properties.
It’s hard to know how much effect community resistance will have on the new projects. Certainly there are some small wins. Gainesville residents held up a line Dominion wanted to build to an Amazon data center near Haymarket for four years, and eventually the line was partly buried. More often, community pressure is able to modify a route but the line ends up being built.
The Fauquier Board of Supervisors, for instance, passed a resolution on Sept. 11 opposing any Morrisville-Wishing Star routes outside the existing power line right-of way. On Oct. 15 state Del. Michael Webert released a letter from Dominion Energy pledging that the company would not use any routes “not within or adjacent to existing rights-of-way.”
As part of that project, Dominion wants to expand its Morrisville substation. But the county planning commission on Oct. 16 voted 4-1 to recommend that the improvements be denied by the Board of Supervisors, partly due to concerns that even more lines might be routed there. Dominion has postponed taking its case to the full board.
Also in the works for Fauquier are a 156-mile-long, 765-kilovolt line from near Lynchburg to a proposed “super substation” northeast of Morrisville. That would be the first 765-kilovolt line – they require huge towers and wide rights-of-way – in Fauquier. And on Nov. 10 Dominion hosted an open house to unveil its proposed Kraken Loop, a 70-mile, 500-kilovolt line that would start at Lake Anna, run east through Caroline and Stafford counties, then come back west to terminate at the new supersubstation in Fauquier. More than 30 residents attended.
Transmission lines cross the Manassas National Battlefield Park. A joint legislative commission has complained that power lines “reduce scenic quality of nearby historic and recreational resources.” Photo by Doug Stroud.
Meanwhile, PJM is mulling an underground 545-kilovolt, direct-current line from the North Carolina border to a substation near Dulles. Direct-current transmission is gaining interest, as its lines do not require as much space or depth for burial as typical alternating current lines, which generate much more heat.
In Loudoun, a plan to build a loop of 500-kilovolt lines around Data Center Alley keeps hitting speed bumps. One segment along U.S. 7 has been appealed to the state Supreme Court by county officials who want part of it to be placed underground. Another segment, a $342 million project, is opposed by at least three state legislators because it runs through back yards of several hundred homes and townhouses in Ashburn. A third part, costing $842 million, was slated for completion this December, but likely will take longer.
Those lines are part of a huge cluster of projects launched when Dominion discovered in 2022 that its transmission infrastructure in Loudoun could not serve the demands of all the data centers being built there. The catchup projects were intended to be finished in 2027, but the joint legislative commission was skeptical.
Noting that $3.5 billion worth of these projects was proposed in December 2023, the commission said completion by 2027 was unlikely. “This 3.5-year timeline is possibly unrealistic considering that major new transmission projects often take five to seven years to complete,” the commission wrote.
Now, compounding its problems, Dominion expects data center demand to grow by nearly 15 gigawatts in the zone where it owns the transmission lines by 2030-–a load that will require even more transmission.
Starting in 2022, Dominion began telling its new Data Center Alley customers that it could give them only partial power at first, with a three- or four-year ramp-up, as it tried to beef up power lines. Then last year it told prospective data center customers that it may take seven years to hook them up because Dominion wanted to transmit power to clusters instead of individual centers, and it would take time to identify the clusters, then build the transmission.
Neither Dominion nor PJM and its other utilities have seen anything like this skyrocketing data center load. They are trying to keep their train on the rails while it is being hit by an avalanche, with more to come. One year ago, when JLARC issued its warnings, PJM’s utilities were predicting 32 new gigawatts of data center demand in the Mid-Atlantic by 2030 – now they predict nearly double that amount.
You can reach Peter Cary at pcary@fauquier.com.
