When voters in Wise County head to the polls in November, they’ll be asked to vote on an issue unique among Virginia localities this year.
“Shall Wise County, Virginia, participate as a member of an electric authority created by the County to operate within the County?”
If voters approve its creation, the electric authority would not replace residents getting their electricity from Appalachian Power or Old Dominion Power, both of which serve Wise County.
Rather, it would work directly with large industries that want to come to the county and build their own power plants because they require lots of electricity, Wise County Administrator Mike Hatfield said.
“It’s important for future economic development in the county,” Hatfield said.
The authority would ensure that these hypothetical industries pay for any new power plants that they need so county residents wouldn’t be on the hook, he said.
Members would be appointed by the board of supervisors, but details such as how many members would sit on the authority and how long their terms would be have yet to be determined, Hatfield said.
Hatfield said conversations about potentially creating an electric authority have been in the works for about a year.
The idea grew out of concerns that Old Dominion Power would not be able to supply enough electricity for a large industrial user, he said.
“This is really more preemptive than it is anything, but people we have talked to, their biggest concern is the lack of available power,” Hatfield said. “And so if they can generate their own power, if we can help them with that by having an electric utility, then that puts us in a better spot to bring in industry that would have zero impact on the electrical grid for the people in the county.”
Old Dominion Power serves about 28,000 Southwest Virginia customers in Dickenson, Lee, Russell, Scott and Wise counties. It’s the Virginia arm of Kentucky Utilities, which has a larger footprint with more than 500,000 additional electricity customers in Kentucky.
In an email to Cardinal News, company spokesperson Liz Pratt did not directly comment on the Wise County proposal but noted that Old Dominion Power draws electricity from a 7,200-megawatt power generation portfolio in Kentucky that is slated for expansion.
Along with Louisville Gas & Electric, Kentucky Utilities is a subsidiary of Allentown, Pennsylvania-based PPL Corp. The utilities have “several major capacity and enhancement projects currently underway to support overall load growth across our service areas,” Pratt said.
Those projects, which are in various stages of development, include three new 645-megawatt natural gas plants and two 120-megawatt solar facilities.
“We welcome opportunities to partner with the communities we serve to ensure we’re meeting their needs, now and for decades to come,” Pratt said. “The growth of new and expanding energy-intensive industries, including major manufacturing and data centers, and customers’ overall energy needs are analyzed as part of our long-term planning processes.”
Hatfield declined to specify whether Wise County officials have a particular industry in mind with regards to the proposed electric authority.
Nonetheless, recent conversations in Virginia about potentially building new power plants specifically to serve large industrial electricity users have often focused on data centers.
Data centers are, generally speaking, large buildings full of computer servers that run a variety of online services from Amazon to ChatGPT to Google to Zelle. They used about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, according to a U.S. Department of Energy report.
Virginia is the biggest data center market in the United States. Largely because of this, the commonwealth is forecast to see significant increases in electricity consumption in the coming years. It already imports more electricity than any other state.
Wise County is no stranger to data centers. It’s home to DP Facilities’ 65,000-square-foot Mineral Gap Data Center in the county’s Lonesome Pine Regional Business and Technology Park.
Mineral Gap has access to up to 45 megawatts of power from Old Dominion Power and also is supported by a 3.5-megawatt solar installation built on land previously mined for coal.
Wise County is also where the nonprofit Energy DELTA Lab is establishing a “Data Center Ridge” on 450 acres for future data center development.
Wise County officials have expressed openness to small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. Such reactors are designed to be smaller than traditional nuclear reactors, but none have yet been deployed commercially in the United States.
Hatfield said the county doesn’t have SMRs in mind with the proposed electric authority. The county would be more interested in a natural gas power plant, he said.
One example of the model of co-locating a data center with natural gas power generation is in Ashland, where energy infrastructure developer LS Power hopes to sell up to 300 megawatts of power to a potential data center client next to its power plant, according to the industry publication Utility Dive.
Another example could have been developed in Pittsylvania County, where Herndon-based Balico initially proposed building a campus of dozens of data center buildings alongside a 3,500-megawatt gas plant. That proposal was scaled back and then withdrawn in April.
The Wise County Board of Supervisors voted at its June 12 meeting to petition the circuit court to add the electric authority referendum to the November ballot.
Election Day is Nov. 4. Voters in Wise County and elsewhere in Virginia will be asked to choose the commonwealth’s next governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. All 100 seats in the House of Delegates are up for grabs. Some localities have local offices on the ballot.
Wise County’s referendum is one of six on Virginia ballots. The others ask voters whether to issue bonds for capital projects in Loudoun County, whether to change Northumberland County’s elected school board to an appointed board, and whether to change how city councilors in Virginia Beach are elected.
See who’s on the Wise County ballot on the Wise County page in our Voter Guide. To see who’s on the ballot elsewhere, and where those candidates stand, see the main page of our Voter Guide.