In Disney’s Fantasia, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice casts a spell he doesn’t fully understand and watches helplessly as enchanted brooms multiply and flood the room. Every frantic counterspell makes things worse. The water keeps rising. The apprentice keeps casting.
Gov. Spanberger just appointed one of the apprentices and called it a solution.
On March 25, Spanberger signed an executive order creating Virginia’s first Chief Energy Officer and appointed Josephus Allmond, a Charlottesville attorney formerly of the Southern Environmental Law Center, to fill it. The announcement was framed as decisive action on rising energy costs. It was anything but.
I have sat on the Labor and Commerce Energy Subcommittee for three years. I have watched Josephus Allmond appear before that committee and advocate for virtually every mandate now driving Virginia’s electricity bills upward. The VCEA. RGGI. Battery storage mandates. Expanded renewable portfolio standards. He was not a neutral expert. He was an aggressive, effective advocate for the exact policies now costing Virginia families hundreds of dollars a year — and climbing. Now he has been appointed to fix the crisis that those policies helped produce.
The numbers tell the story his appointment ignores. When the Virginia Clean Economy Act passed in 2020, a typical Dominion Energy residential bill was $116 per month. Today it is $165 — a 42% increase in five years. Under Dominion’s own Integrated Resource Plan, full VCEA compliance projects that bill at $308 per month by 2035. On the pre-VCEA trajectory, that same bill would be roughly $133. The law is the difference. That gap is approximately $2,100 per year, per household.
Now consider who is actually paying that gap. The median household income in Patrick County is $53,000 a year. In Loudoun County — home to the vast majority of Virginia’s data centers — it is $178,000. Patrick County families earn less than thirty cents on the dollar compared to Loudoun households, yet pay nearly the same real estate tax rate. And here is the part that should make every Virginian outside Northern Virginia furious: Loudoun’s tax rate has dropped 38% since 2010 — from $1.30 to $0.805 per $100 — because data center tax revenues flooded the county’s coffers and allowed them to cut rates while property values soared. Meanwhile, Southwest Virginia families on fixed incomes are being asked to subsidize the transmission lines serving those same data centers through their monthly electric bills.
President Trump has already recognized the core problem. His Ratepayer Protection Pledge required Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI to build, bring or buy their own generation and cover the full cost of power delivery infrastructure for their data centers. The principle is simple: the entity creating the demand should pay for the infrastructure. Virginia’s energy policy moves in the opposite direction.
And the brooms keep multiplying. This session alone, the General Assembly added three new cost mandates on top of existing ones. Virginia has rejoined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, imposing an estimated $550 million per year in carbon costs passed directly to ratepayers. A battery storage mandate was enacted that analysts project will cost ratepayers tens of billions over the coming decades. A new charge was authorized for Dominion to build retail EV charging stations — billed to every customer, including the millions of Virginians who will never own an electric vehicle.
Then, having cast three new spells into the flooding room, the Governor announced she was creating a position to address the flooding — and filled it with a man who spent years in the committee room cheering the spells along.
Let me be direct. An honest Chief Energy Officer would have to say what this administration is not positioned to say: the VCEA’s mandatory retirement of reliable generation on a fixed statutory timetable, against a backdrop of exploding data center demand, is structurally incompatible with affordable electricity. Until that mandate is honestly recalibrated against market reality, no title and no executive order will bend the cost curve down.
Families in Patrick County are not asking for another cabinet position. They are asking why their bill has gone up $50 a month since 2020 — and why Loudoun County’s tax rate went down while theirs went up.
The water is still rising.
Del. Wren Williams is a Republican who represents Virginia’s 47th District and serves on the House Labor and Commerce Committee. He can be reached at (804) 698-1047 or DelWWilliams@house.virginia.gov.