Rep. John McGuire, the Republican congressman who represents the 5th District, recently sent a letter to the governor to seek her help in stopping the proposed Valley Link transmission line that would run from Campbell County to Culpeper County.
This will no doubt be popular with his constituents. Nobody wants to live near a power line. This one, in particular, stirs a special strain of rural resentment: Its purpose is to help move power from the Midwest to Northern Virginia, which means rural landowners from Campbell to Culpeper must give up some of their land, or their views, to help power data centers.
That’s one of the worst things you can say in rural Virginia these days because here’s how it comes across: Northern Virginia wants you to sacrifice your land so it can make millions.
We’ve seen this before, with the rural pushback to solar development: Why should we turn our countryside into an industrial hellscape just so that Northern Virginia can have data centers?
Solar is a bit more complicated than that: Even if no data centers existed, Virginia’s biggest utilities are still under a mandate from the Virginia Clean Economy Act to convert to a carbon-free grid, and that’s driving solar development, too — although there’s still the regional imbalance that rural areas can host vast fields of solar arrays in a way that metro areas can’t. Nonetheless, bashing Northern Virginia is always good politics in rural Virginia. There’s still a big “Don’t Fairfax Me” sign hanging on a barn alongside Interstate 81 in Rockingham County, left over from this spring’s voided special election on redistricting.
The transmission line issue is more straightforward — this really is about moving power across rural land to Northern Virginia for data centers. (More broadly, it’s about moving power from the Midwest into the Appalachian Power system, and then from Appalachian’s Joshua Falls substation in Campbell County to a planned substation in Culpeper County that would connect with Dominion Energy, from where that energy could then flow to Northern Virginia. (I should also point out that Dominion is one of our donors. Donors have no say in news decisions, though; see our policy. You can become a donor and have no say, too.)
This column isn’t about the pros and cons of the Valley Link project, though. It’s about the political tensions that the opposition to this project helps expose. Many of those tensions are present with other energy projects; this one is just bigger than most, so therefore more interesting.
Trump voters are opposing the ramifications of a key Trump priority: artificial intelligence
The latest proposal for the Valley Link line would have it run through eight counties: Campbell, Appomattox, Buckingham, Fluvanna, Goochland, Louisa, Orange and, finally, Culpeper. All those counties voted for Donald Trump in 2024, many by wide margins. (He took 73.62% of the vote in Campbell County, 74.79% in Appomattox County.)
This is relevant because the Trump administration has enthusiastically promoted artificial intelligence, which requires data centers — and AI-driven data centers use more power than your garden-variety data center. “America is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence,” declares the AI policy page on the White House website. That will require more data centers, and more data centers will require more power, and more power will require more transmission lines — which will largely cut through rural, Trump-voting localities.
The board of supervisors in at least four of these Trump-voting counties (Appomattox, Buckingham, Culpeper and Louisa) have voted to oppose Valley Link. Three others (Fluvanna, Goochland and Orange) joined in a protest letter to federal regulators. The board in Culpeper (where Trump took 61.67%) also voted against the proposed substation that would be at the northern end of the line.
I’m not saying these counties are wrong; I’m just pointing out that these are Republican localities that are now on record against a key Trump policy. The public doesn’t associate AI with Trump the way we do other policies, such as immigration and tariffs, but that doesn’t change the underlying facts. This seems little different from the voters in a county backing Trump’s immigration policies but then not wanting a detention facility in their midst. It’s hard to have one without the other somewhere.
Trump voters are opposing another key Trump priority: Getting more power onto the grid, especially carbon-based power
The Trump administration is also pushing not just for more power, but for more transmission lines to get that power to where it should be. The Washington Post recently reported that the administration has largely failed to get more power onto the grid, because its policies “have done more to subtract more renewables from the grid than add coal, nuclear or gas to it.” That’s a subject for another day, though. This is about transmission lines, which are needed regardless of what kind of power is moving on them.
The Trump administration has canceled $4.9 billion in funding for transmission lines that would deliver wind and solar power, while instead directing funding to transmission lines that would carry more conventional power. Earlier this month, the administration approved a $3.26 billion loan to American Electric Power (the parent company of Appalachian Power) for building or rebuilding transmission lines in Texas that will carry power from oil and natural gas wells in the Permian Basin. The U.S. Department of Energy says this will involve building 2,800 miles of new transmission lines.
The federal government isn’t involved with the Valley Link project, but it still fits under the same goals — getting more power onto the grid, and in this case it’s from places that burn a lot of natural gas and coal, something the Trump administration would like. If these conservative localities are upset about a power line carrying power from fossil fuels, just imagine how upset they’d be if those lines were being built to transfer renewable energy that’s less popular on the right.
Another potential contradiction: Permitting reform
Members of both parties have talked about “permitting reform” to make it easier to build energy projects. For the left, that generally means building more renewable energy projects. For the Trump administration, that has meant making it easier to get more conventional power to market. One of Trump’s first executive orders was titled “Unleashing American Energy.” Conservatives like that phrase; it sounds robust, active. Here’s what it means in practice: Trump directed his administration to “eliminate all delays within their respective permitting processes” and to “facilitate the permitting and construction of interstate energy transportation.” If necessary, Trump authorized the use of emergency powers to “expedite” energy projects.
None of that has come up yet with the Valley Link project — it’s still too early — but the point is there may be less strict federal review than there once was. In this case, that might benefit the data centers that many Virginians are coming to hate and will work against the property owners in these rural counties whose land and viewsheds would be taken by the power line. The ultimate “permitting reform” may have been when then-Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia got the Mountain Valley Pipeline inserted into a much larger bill as the price for his vote; that basically swept away all regulatory impediments to the natural gas pipeline being built across Virginia and West Virginia.
Now, here’s the twist:
A Democratic administration would push for more power lines, too
Conservative localities from Campbell to Culpeper are feeling the pinch from the fallout of Republican policies, but here’s the thing: Even if these localities experienced some political conversion and started voting Democratic, and we had a Democratic administration in Washington, they’d still be in the same position.
The Biden-Harris administration also backed AI; maybe not in the same way or with the same language that the Trump administration has, but during the 2024 campaign Kamala Harris specifically advocated a tax credit to “maintain and extend America’s strategic edge in industries of the future,” including “building new data centers for AI.” That sounds much like the tax incentives that have recently proven so controversial in Virginia. In her convention speech, Harris declared “I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence.”
If she was serious about that, that would have inevitably led to more data centers, and since those data centers need power, that would have even more inevitably led to exactly where we are now: a need to build power lines to get that power to where the data centers are. A Harris administration would have just shown more interest in making sure the power moving from those transmission lines was green and not carbon-based.
Indeed, the Joe Biden administration pushed for more transmission lines with just as much fervor as the Trump administration has shown. In Biden’s case, it was to get more renewable energy onto the grid. “Biden’s ambitious plan to move the nation toward more renewable energy requires thousands of miles of new transmission lines to get power from the vacant lands where solar, wind or geothermal energy can be harnessed to cities where it is used,” the Associated Press reported in 2023. As vice president, Harris went to Arizona to mark the opening of a new transmission line that now carries solar power from Arizona to California.
Wherever the electrons come from, be they carbon-based or non-carbon forms of power, the result is the same: an administration pushing more power lines. The demand for power is nonpartisan; the only real difference is where the power that these new lines would carry comes from. Had Harris won, these would have been Trump voters along the Valley Link route opposing a Democratic administration’s priorities. She didn’t, so now they’re opposing a Republican administration’s priorities — which creates certain ironies but doesn’t really change the underlying facts. Here’s a big one:
Energy production and transport are always going to fall heaviest on rural areas
Here’s my inconvenient point: Energy production and transport, no matter what type of energy, is always going to fall heaviest on rural areas, whether they like it or not. That’s where most energy is produced, and there has to be some way to move that energy to the metro areas that need that power. That inevitably means more power lines. (I hear some of you saying “Hey, what about rooftop solar?” or “Hey, what about parking lot solar?” I hope to deal with that in a future column. I hate to be a killjoy, but spoiler alert: While rooftop solar could be a lot bigger than it is, rooftop solar is unlikely to do much to reduce the pressure on rural areas, given the voracious demands of data centers. It takes a lot of houses, and a lot of individual decisions, to equal a single solar facility in a rural area that takes up hundreds of acres. I’ll get into all those details then.)
There’s one theoretical alternative to building big power lines to move power from the Midwest to Northern Virginia: We could build more power generation next to the data centers that need power. That idea is starting to take hold — power generation appears to be part of the planned data center complex at the Southern Virginia Megasite in Pittsylvania County as well as in Wise County — but good luck with trying to do that retroactively in more populous areas where data centers have proliferated. Just as nobody wants to live next to a power line, nobody wants to live next to a power plant, either. Rural residents know that quite well: Just look at the opposition to solar projects across rural Virginia.
The challenges to energy development override political ideology
The point of this exercise today is not to call out these localities opposing the Valley Link transmission line (who can fault them?) but to show that the challenges of adding energy to the grid (and getting it to market) are universal. Liberals are often portrayed as environmental busybodies who are thwarting energy development. However, here are conservative counties that don’t want to do what is presumed to be “their part” in producing (or transporting) energy. Is there really a difference?
Nobody wants a transmission line through their neighborhood — not liberals, not conservatives, not anybody. In Northern Virginia, which has become one of the most reliably Democratic parts of the state, there’s opposition to a proposed transmission line in Loudoun County, the Golden to Mars line, which has a lovely name but not so lovely politics surrounding it. Would that opposition be any less passionate if every electron flowing over those lines came from the sun? I doubt it.
These localities opposing the Valley Link line are simply showing the truth behind Tip O’Neill’s famous line that “all politics are local.” It’s one thing to support a broad, general policy — “unleashing America’s energy” — and quite another to deal with the realities involved, especially when those realities hit close to home.
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