Dominion Energy, engaged in an increasingly bitter public relations battle over a proposed transmission line to power an Amazon data center expansion in Prince William County, says the need for the project hasn’t gone away.
A filing Wednesday with the State Corporation Commission came in response to petitions from opponents of the 230-kilovolt line, towers and other infrastructure between Gainesville and Haymarket asking the commission to reconsider the project.
Dominion says the opponents “offer no sound legal basis or reasoning for granting reconsideration” of the final order issued by the commission in June approving the line along the Carver Road route, which would run through a community founded by former slaves granted the right to own property after the Civil War.
The project is on hold while the commission weighs whether to rehear the case.
Dominion also rejected contentions by the Coalition to Preserve Prince William County and the Somerset Crossing Homeowners Association that Amazon lawyers admitted at a March meeting hosted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that Amazon may not actually build out the data center, thus negating the need for the transmission line.
“The company has confirmed with the customer that its development of the data centers is continuing and has not diminished or gone away,” the utility wrote, adding that opponents, who include state Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Prince William, rely “solely on misunderstandings of certain statements made by the customer’s outside counsel.”
In a statement, Marshall, who was at the meeting and submitted an affidavit about what happened there, said Dominion “should be ashamed of themselves for the omissions, misrepresentations and contrivances they have packed into their mendacious response.”
He recommended that Dominion and Amazon officials testify, be cross-examined and be required to produce documents on construction timetables and power usage.
“Five of us were not sitting there hallucinating,” he said of the corps meeting.
Dominion spokesman Chuck Penn has said the utility was forced into the Carver Road route when Prince William Board of County Supervisors Chairman Corey Stewart struck a “sweetheart” deal with the Somerset Crossing group to turn over a piece of property in the path of a route along an existing railroad, which both the SCC and the utility preferred. The supervisors then refused to grant Dominion permission to cross the parcel.
Stewart, the supervisors and other opponents say there’s only one acceptable route, if in fact it’s necessary. That’s along Interstate 66 with part of it buried, though Dominion says that will cost $167 million, three times as much as what is increasingly looking like the next preferred route, an I-66 overhead option that will cost $51 million.