Picture a strip of cleared land 200 feet wide, wider than a football field is wide, running 31 miles across Buckingham County. Nothing tall grows in it again. Steel towers stand in it, 150 to 175 feet by the company’s current description, against the 110 to 135 feet of the existing 500 kV lattice towers it uses for comparison. It is held by easement, so the land stays in the owner’s name and the owner no longer decides what happens on it. And the electricity moving through those wires is not for Buckingham.
That is the Joshua Falls to Yeat project, and Buckingham carries more of it than anybody. I measured every route Valley Link currently has on the table against county boundaries. Buckingham gets 31.4 miles, 27% of the Virginia route, on the shortest version. On the other two it is 28.4% and 28.8%. More than Louisa. More than Orange. More than Culpeper, which gets the substation. Whichever route the company picks, Buckingham hosts the most of it.
Buckingham has no data center. It has none proposed. It does not appear in the statewide inventory of these facilities on either count, in any status.
The cleared strip works out to 763 acres, more than a square mile of the county, and it crosses 91 privately owned parcels. Ninety-one families will sit down with a company that can take the easement by condemnation if the negotiation fails. The company prefers a different number, that fewer than 75 homes along the whole 115-mile route sit within 500 feet of a line. Both are true. A house at 600 feet is not counted, and a farm crossed corner to corner may have no house on it at all and still lose the use of the ground.
Now the part people find hard to believe, which is that nobody in Virginia can undo this.
Who pays for this line was settled at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, under a formula that splits the bill among transmission zones across thirteen states. Half goes by how much electricity each zone’s customers use. Half goes by an engineering estimate of where the power actually flows. Dominion ends up with about 45%. Twenty-two zones pay some share. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy).
Nothing in that formula asks where the towers stand. Not one step of it.
It does not ask who sells you your electricity either. Most of Buckingham is served by Central Virginia Electric Cooperative, which was not in the room when the bill was divided up and does not appear in the record at all. Neither do the other cooperatives along this route.
Virginia did just act on the general problem. An SCC order will require Dominion to charge data centers directly for the substations and lines that connect them to the grid, and the company has 90 days to file the policy. That is a real change and it was overdue. It reaches what Virginia regulates, which is the wire from the grid to the customer’s fence. This line is not that. It is a regional backbone that connects to no data center at all, and the State Corporation Commission cannot go back and re-divide a federal allocation. Neither can the General Assembly.
I should say where I was wrong, because the obvious version of this story is not the true one. I assumed the route had been bent away from the counties getting the data centers. So I tested it, laying the published route against county lines and comparing it to 2,000 randomly drawn corridors of the same length inside Virginia. The real route runs through more data center counties than a random line would. Nobody aimed this at Buckingham. Nobody aimed it anywhere. The two ends were fixed by engineering and the path between them by terrain, existing rights of way and what could not be crossed.
That is worse than being singled out, not better. If somebody had chosen this, somebody could be argued out of it. Nobody chose it. Where the line lands is simply not a question the system asks, and Buckingham is what happens when nothing asks.
Which brings up the part that ought to bother people most. Culpeper and Campbell are getting substations, and a substation needs local zoning approval, so those counties have something to say. Buckingham is getting 31 miles of wire and no substation, so it has nothing to withhold. Its supervisors have set aside up to $250,000 for lawyers. That money buys a seat in a hearing that can argue about where the line goes and cannot touch who pays for it.
Two filings are coming, the line this fall and the Joshua Falls substation by year’s end. Both decide where. Neither decides who pays.
Buckingham has been down a version of this road before and won, when the Fourth Circuit threw out the air permit for the pipeline compressor station at Union Hill in 2020. That was a Virginia permit, and a Virginia permit can be beaten. A federal cost allocation settled two years ago cannot. The county is not short of fight. It is short of a place to put it.
Tommy N. Turner is an independent researcher who documents the local government and energy side of data center expansion in Virginia. He serves on the advisory board of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation study at Emory University on data centers and the Southern energy buildout, which did not fund or review this piece.
