Two recent developments make clear that Virginia needs to hit pause on our data center growth.
First, an electrical fault on a high-voltage line serving Northern Virginia data centers caused lights to flicker across much of the eastern United States. Days later, the commonwealth finally released a long-delayed groundwater study warning that eastern Virginia’s water supply is severely constrained and expected to keep declining.
Together, these are warnings that data center development is moving much faster than Virginia’s ability to supply the power and water these facilities demand. Before approving another project, the commonwealth must stop and take a hard look at where this is leading.
That is why I have called on Governor Abigail Spanberger to immediately issue an Executive Order establishing a moratorium on data center approvals throughout Virginia.
Virginia’s own Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) has found that data center growth is the primary reason electricity demand could double within ten years. Yet Virginia still has no credible, comprehensive plan to meet that demand reliably and affordably.
This lack of a plan raises a fundamental question of fairness: who benefits, and who pays?
A county that approves a data center may get substantial tax revenue. But the power plants, transmission lines and substations required by that continued growth end up getting paid for by families and small businesses across the state. Those ratepayers never got to vote on the project, and they receive none of the local tax revenue.
JLARC estimates a typical Dominion residential customer could pay an additional $14 to $37 every month in utility costs because of data center growth. Meanwhile, major data center campuses are rapidly expanding into areas served by Appalachian Power as well. Wherever these projects are built, families and small businesses should not be forced to subsidize the multi-billion-dollar infrastructure needs of some of the largest Big Tech and AI companies in the world.
To be sure, data centers can bring some investment, construction work and local tax revenue. But JLARC found that most of the industry’s economic benefits occur during construction. A typical 250,000-square-foot data center employs only about 50 full-time workers, roughly half of whom are contractors. Virginia must weigh the permanent, compounding costs to our grid as carefully as it counts the initial investment.
Part of the problem is structural. Our current system relies on isolated local zoning decisions to address consequences that are plainly statewide. Local officials can evaluate a proposed site and negotiate local impacts. But they cannot determine whether Virginia has enough electricity for the continued growth or protect ratepayers statewide from footing the bill.
Worse still, in some Virginia localities, data centers can proceed “by right,” without a public vote by elected officials. A facility requiring hundreds of megawatts of electricity, major transmission infrastructure, millions of gallons of water and scores of diesel backup generators should never be treated as an ordinary, by-right industrial use.
And electricity is only half the crisis. Water resources are under similar strain.
In western Virginia, the pressure is just as real. One data center campus originally reserved capacity for an estimated 2 million gallons of water per day, with possible expansion to 8 million gallons. As Cardinal News has reported, the Carvins Cove treatment facility currently produces only about 10 million to 12 million gallons each day.
Governor Spanberger points to Virginia’s new electricity consumption tax on data centers as proof the commonwealth is addressing the problem. But while that tax may generate state revenue, it does not produce a single megawatt of electricity or a single gallon of water. And it does not answer where these industrial facilities belong or whether continued expansion even makes sense.
Taxing data center growth simply assumes that growth should continue. Virginia must first decide whether more data centers are justified at all.
This General Assembly session, I introduced Senate Bill 552 to require comprehensive site assessments and meaningful environmental review before data centers could be approved. I also supported other proposals intended to protect residential neighborhoods, address grid costs and safeguard our natural resources. While some limited measures passed, the legislature failed to establish the comprehensive statewide framework Virginia needs.
Instead, the General Assembly directed the Joint Subcommittee on Tax Policy to study data center incentives and impacts and report back by December 15. But it makes little sense to study whether a pause is necessary while new projects continue advancing under the very system Virginia is supposedly reconsidering.
That’s backwards. And that is why I have asked Governor Spanberger to use every lawful executive authority available to establish an immediate statewide moratorium on data center approvals and development. A statewide moratorium would give Virginia the time needed to answer these questions before committing our communities to decades of irreversible costs.
For too long, state leaders have treated endless data center expansion as inevitable. It’s not. Before another project advances, the industry should be required to prove it can operate without forcing Virginia families to bear unacceptable costs to their utility bills, their grid reliability and their natural resources.
Until then, Virginia must pause the projects.
Glen Sturtevant, a Republican, represents Chesterfield County and Colonial Heights in the Virginia Senate.
