https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/dominion-agrees-to-bury-power-lines-in-prince-william-ending-legal-standoff/2018/03/23/4d1e73ee-2e97-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html
The Dominion Energy utility company has agreed to bury most of a proposed power-line route in Prince William County beneath Interstate 66, ending more than three years of controversy surrounding the project, which will help power a new data center complex outside Haymarket.
Under a settlement reached this week with local community groups, Dominion will seek state permission to place most of a five-mile power-line route connecting Haymarket to Gainesville beneath the highway — a $167 million effort whose cost will be absorbed by Dominion customers over time in the form of higher rates.
In exchange, the community groups agreed to end their legal challenge to the power lines. The standoff began in 2014, when Dominion first pursued the new route, in part to accommodate plans by a subsidiary of Amazon Inc. to build two warehouse-size data center buildings. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos also owns The Washington Post.) Dominion says it also wants to better serve a growing section of western Prince William that includes several recently built housing developments and shopping plazas.
“This community should feel enormous pride in what our unity and unwavering resolve have achieved,” said Elena Schlossberg, director of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, which joined the Somerset Crossing Homeowners Association in entering into the settlement with Dominion.
“This is truly what compromise looks like,” Schlossberg said. “Everybody feels like they won, and everybody probably feels like they lost a little.”
Effie Alfredius Grayson was the daughter of Livinia Blackburn Johnson, the former slaves whose descendents still live in an area targeted by Dominion utility company for high-voltage power lines. The company has agreed to bury the power lines near Interstate 66. (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)
Dominion is seeking an expedited decision on the plan from the State Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities. “We are pleased with this development and look forward to the Commission’s final review in these proceedings,” the company said in a statement.
The “hybrid” route beneath I-66 was the most expensive of several options that Dominion proposed for the new power lines, which will carry 230,000 volts of power on 100-foot-high towers. The project also includes a substation in Haymarket.
Because of the cost, the commission initially approved a cheaper route that would have cut through a predominantly African American community made up of descendants of a former slave who have lived there for generations.
Prince William County blocked that option by refusing to allow Dominion access to county-owned land in that area, moving the utility company to pursue another aboveground route along I-66.
When community groups also opposed that plan, the two sides were locked in a stalemate with bitter political overtones, awaiting a ruling by the commission on a legal motion arguing that the power-line route wasn’t needed because the data center project is still under review by federal and state authorities.
Both sides credited state Del. Tim Hugo (R-Fairfax County) for setting the stage for a compromise.
As part of a sweeping overhaul in how the state regulates utilities that was approved in the legislature earlier this month, Hugo inserted language creating a pilot program in the Haymarket area for underground transmission routes that utility companies can apply for if their projects are approved.
In the settlement, Dominion agreed to pursue that option if the community groups dropped their legal opposition to its plans, making it more likely that the commission will approve the project.
“This was pre-eminently important to the folks in western Prince William, and it was the number-one priority on legislation that I had this year,” Hugo said.
Schlossberg said the likelihood of Dominion raising rates to fund the project shows the need to further regulate the rapid growth of data centers in Northern Virginia, particularly in areas that lack the infrastructure to support them.
“Like any utility project, it gets passed along to the rate payers,” she said. “These bulk-load customers are not going away.”
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