From Staff Reports
Local residents should brace themselves for much higher electric bills in the future, warns Elena Schlossberg of Haymarket, executive director of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County.
In a recent letter to county officials, Schlossberg asserts that all users of Dominion Energy electricity in Prince William County will be required to pay for the new and expensive transmission lines that would be needed to carry the electricity to power new data centers if Prince William County Supervisors approve the Digital Gateway.
“Our intention in submitting this response to the Digital Gateway application is to have the record clearly reflect not only that this Board of County Supervisors has been warned that there will be billions of dollars of infrastructure required for the Digital Gateway, but that this infrastructure will have regional and statewide implications,” said Schlossberg.
The Coalition also warned county officials, “There will be transmission line infrastructure that will impact the east end of Prince William County. …Because of the data centers that you have already approved, these new transmission corridors will be the highways cutting through the Eastern districts (Potomac, Occoquan, Woodbridge and Neabsco) to bring power to the Gainesville district in the Western end of the county.”
Also of concern, Schlossberg mentioned that PJM and Dominion at about the same time would have to deal with power demands caused by AI, which is “predicted to increase load demand by as much as eight times the power needs of current data centers.”
“We do know diesel generators are the current strategy to protect the power grid. The fact that there is no accounting for this “micro power grid” is unconscionable and dangerous,” Schlossberg added.