Power crunch keeps data centers in the dark | Localnews | princewilliamtimes.com
By: Peter Cary July 15, 2026
In Virginia, more than 300 data centers are waiting for power that would equal the output of 70 Lake Anna nuclear plants. It could take decades.
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• Dominion has approved 111 new data center projects to be connected by the end of 2031 and has 220 more waiting in a queue. The total power load of all of them surpasses 70 gigawatts, Dominion said, equal to the output of 70 North Anna nuclear plants. Google lawyer Will Cleveland called it “an almost incomprehensible amount of load.”
• For the 220 applicants still waiting in the queue — requesting 50 gigawatts of power — the company says it can study and approve only about 10 of them a year. Meanwhile, the list of applications is growing by 10 a month. Amazon estimated the wait time for new applications could be up to 24 years.
…The entire 13-state Mid-Atlantic grid may not have enough generation to power the 111 new data centers with a load of 27 gigawatts that Dominion has approved so far.
Despite a mad scramble to add solar and gas turbine power, the grid operator’s CEO, David Mills, told members in a May 6 letter that “new generation simply cannot be built fast enough to offset the combined effect of retiring supply and surging demand.“
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Impact on ratepayers?
Berry said the inefficiencies in the system play to Dominion’s “well-documented capital bias.” She and others noted that the projects were not put into batches based on their geographic closeness, but on their application dates — so they are spread all over the state.
She argued that Dominion is inclined toward inefficiency and overspending because it gets a guaranteed return for whatever it spends on infrastructure.
“The more they spend, the more their shareholders earn,” she said. She added that a poorly managed queue could “justify Dominion’s investment in unnecessary infrastructure which — while great for shareholders — is bad for ratepayers,” who pay infrastructure costs in their electric bills.
She said just the 233 substations dictated by the waiting projects could cost ratepayers between $5.8 billion and $11.6 billion. Dominion did not respond to emails or calls….
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